The vices of an
enriched
bourgeoisie are pitted against
the old-fashioned virtues of modesty and contentment.
the old-fashioned virtues of modesty and contentment.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v04
IX.
$ Vide S. H. Reynolds, ibid.
* J. Boudoin, in translating the Essays in 1640, entitled them L'Artisan de la
Fortune.
## p. 348 (#370) ############################################
348 London and Popular Literature
diplomacy, where, to penetrate the problems of statecraft, he
dispels the illusions of greatness. He fathoms the 'inscrutable
hearts of kings' and pictures their pitiable isolation and toilsome
existence. His book is destined for the commons of the realm ; so
the advice which he professes to give their rulers is really an
exposure (perhaps not intentional) of the machinery of government.
We have glimpses of the monarch seated at the council-board, pre-
paring his public utterances or choosing his favourites. The same
interest leads him to raise questions of public policy. In the essay
'On Superstition,' he marshals the chief accusations against the
Roman Catholic church; and, in treating of the greatness of
kingdoms, he does not ignore the bitter quarrel between the
peasantry and the gentry, Through every discussion, whether on
death and religion, or on gardens and masques, there runs that
sub-conscious ideal of versatile liberal culture out of which the
essay sprang.
Bacon proved the possibilities of this type of literature
as a repository of miscellaneous and desultory meditations. His
influence is seen in such men as Owen Felltham, who, endowed
with an interest in moral problems, and a certain mastery over
reflective prose, published essays from time to time. These, appar-
ently, were intended as exercises for confirming and strengthening
the writer in his own opinions, and show only occasional efforts at
an imitation of Bacon's gnomic style. And yet, Feltham's respect-
able, though commonplace, moralisations established the essay's
right to embrace even sacred topics ; especially are the virtuous
deeds of the ancients selected with no little intuition to illustrate
Christian ideals. Meanwhile, this art of extemporising modern
ideas out of antiquity had reached its highest pitch in the
desultory notes and reflections which Ben Jonson was making
out of his vast reading. In 1641, these were published posthu-
mously as Timber or Discoveries made upon men and matter.
Practically, all the ideas contained in this miscellany, from aphor-
istic jottings to continuous discourses, have their origin in some
other book. The influence of Velleius Paterculus, Euripides, Aulus
Gellius, Quintilian and Seneca are particularly noticeable? But
Timber is not a mere work of paraphrase and transcription.
Sometimes, several borrowed sentences are fused into one; some-
times, thoughts from different treatises are brought together or
sentences of the same treatise are arranged in a different order.
1 Vide bibl. for authorities who have investigated sources of the Discoveries, and
also cf. Wits Commonwealth
## p. 349 (#371) ############################################
Ben Jonson. Tobacco-pamphlets 349
The passages on Shakespeare and Bacon were taken from what
Seneca wrote of Haterius and Cassius Severus ; in another place,
Jonson condenses several pages of the Advancement of Learning
into one short essay. A sense of manly integrity, and a keen eye
to practical virtue and intelligence, guided this selection of the
world's wisdom, and the style has an almost colloquial simplicity
and directness far in advance of Bacon.
We have seen how social literature, under the influence of
classicism, grew into Juvenalian satire, character writing and
essays, without losing sight of contemporary interests. But city
life was too varied to find expression within the limits of any
literary canon, and Londoners continued to welcome any type of
tract which reflected their many-sided interests. No sooner had
the fashion of tobacco-smoking become prominent, than it divided
pamphleteers into two camps. Its supporters either founded their
adhesion on its alleged medical properties), or indulged their
literary gift in burlesque encomia Among others, an anony-
mous author, imitating Ovid, composed The Metamorphosis of
Tobacco, in heroic couplets of pleasing and harmonious rhythm.
He sings of the elements gathering in council to create a herb
of almost Promethean virtue, which Jupiter, fearing for his
sovereignty, banishes to an unknown land. But the graces dis-
cover the plant and remain so constant to its charms that mortals,
who would win their favour, must follow their example. On the
other hand, the growing insistence on good manners inspired
scathing criticisms on smoking as it was then practised. 'Tobac-
conists' were freely ridiculed by dramatists, character writers and
puritans. King James issued in 1604 A Counterblaste to Tobacco,
in which a sound if pedantic refutation of its alleged virtues is
followed by quaint but vigorous descriptions of the smoker's dis-
gusting habits. Among the many subsequent writers? who used
this theme as a whetstone for their wits, the most noteworthy is,
undoubtedly, Richard Brathwaite. Following the method of The
Metamorphosis, he works up the contention that smokers waste
their time into an allegorical romance, in which tobacco is traced
back to its origin as a son of Pluto, god of the nether world.
This phantasy is entitled, The Smoking Age, or, the Man in the
Mist (1617).
These ephemeral pamphlets are worth quoting, in order to
1 H. Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner, 1599; E. Gardiner, Triall of Tobacco, 1610.
2 Vide bibl.
## p. 350 (#372) ############################################
350 London and Popular Literature
illustrate how varied, as well as elaborate, popular literature was
becoming. Even rogue-books began to multiply the artifices of
narration. E. S. produced, in 1597, the Discoverie of the Knights
of the Poste. These gentry were professional bailees, utilising the
name of some respectable citizen to stand surety for any criminal
who would make it worth their while. As the average law-breaker
was almost certain to be committed for another offence before the
year was out, this form of livelihood could be made safe by ordinary
precautions. Thus, the booklet is of very moderate interest. But
the style is significant. The Discoverie is a connected story re-
counting a journey undertaken by the author on foot from London
to Plymouth. He falls in with two fellow-travellers, and the trio
beguile the tedium of the way with anecdotes and personal remi-
niscences of the knights of the post. The narrative has all the
bye-play of a realistic novelette. Each of the author's companions
has his own individuality. Goodcoll is almost destitute, but trusts
to his witty tongue for escaping the dilemmas of impecuniosity.
Freeman has store of gold, and is so fond of good fellowship that
he not only claims the right to finance the party, but deviates from
his own course in order to enjoy their society. We visit the inns
at which they lodged, are told of what they drank at night, how
they slept and how they breakfasted. Freeman requests both
Goodcoll and the author to disburse small sums, since his own
wealth is in gold coin which he cannot realise till they come to
Exeter. But, when that city is reached, Freeman finds that his
store has vanished, and offers an explanation, which, apparently,
satisfies the two travellers, but leaves the reader dubious.
Authors who had been through prison now began to clothe
their experiences in varied forms. Luke Hutton's The Blacke
Dogge of Newgate (c. 1600) recounts the customs of that institu-
tion in a versified description of a vision, followed by a prose
dialogue which tells of the amateur thieves to be found amongst the
attendants of the prison. The Compter's Commonwealth (1617),
by William Fennor, introduces the humours and tricks of the jest-
books into the usual exposures of roguery. Geffray Mynshul, who
had left the debtor's prison with a lively recollection of its jangling
keys, fawning yet tyrannical warders, and embittered or reckless
inmates, actually endeavoured to give his friends an idea of these
miseries by describing them in essays and character sketches. But
1 Supposed by G. C. Moore Smith to be Edward Sharpham; N. & Q. no. 257,
11 July 1908.
2 For a fuller list see bibl.
## p. 351 (#373) ############################################
Dekker
351
the most important pamphleteer of Jacobean London is, undoubt-
edly, Thomas Dekker.
Apart from his dramatic work', Dekker stands alone in this
period. He is remarkable not as a satirist but as the first great
literary artist of London street life. He discovered how to describe
the city populace as a whole in its pursuits and agitations ; but, as
literature had not yet evolved a special mediumfor this por-
traiture, his gift finds expression only in a number of erratic
and ephemeral tracts. For instance, like other free lances, he
seized the obvious opportunity of producing a celebration of
Elizabeth's death and James's accession. He entitled this tract
The Wonderfull Yeare (1603). But the writer's thoughts are
soon drawn from perfunctory adulation to the more suggestive
theme of the plague which raged that year in London. We have
a picture of Death encamped like an army in the sin-polluted
suburbs. Its tents are winding-sheets, its field-marshal the plague,
its officers burning fevers, boils, blains and carbuncles; the rank
and file consist of mourners, “merrie sextons,' hungry coffin-sellers
and ‘nasty grave-makers'; the two catchpoles are fear and
trembling. The invaders storm London, massacring men, women
and children, breaking open coffers, rifling houses and ransacking
streets. There are passages of almost unparalleled horror de-
scribing the rotten coffins filling the streets with stench, or the
muck-pits full of putrid corpses, among which the worms writhe
in swarms. There is originality in this conception of death,
but much more in Dekker's description of the narrow London
streets at night time, filled with the groans or raving of sick men,
with glimpses of figures stealing out to fetch the sexton or sweating
under the load of a corpse which they must hide before 'the fatall
hand writing of death should seale up their doores. ' Then, we watch
the stampede into the country, and note the touches of meanness
and heroism which a commotion always brings to the surface. The
tract ends with the humorous side of the plague, discovered in
some witty though rather grim anecdotes, one recounting how the
death of a Londoner at a country inn threw the whole village into
>
1 He had already written eight plays single-banded and seven in collaboration,
besides historical works in conjunction with Drayton.
2 As we have seen, character writers sometimes described scenes and institutions.
But, before Donald Lapton's London and Country Carbonadoed (1632), none, apparently,
are touched with the fascination of London streets.
3 Cf. Richard Johnson, Anglorum Lachrymae ; H. Chettle, Englande's Mourning
Garment; J. Hall, The King's Prophecie or Weeping Joy; Thomas Bing, Sorrowes Joy;
8. Rowlands, God save the King.
## p. 352 (#374) ############################################
352 London and Popular Literature
6
the most grotesque disorder, until a tinker consented, for a large
sum, to bury the corpse.
One of Dekker's next productions? was an attempt-very com-
mon in this age--at appealing to the people by a denunciation of
sin. He adopted one of their popular allegories and, at the same
time, gratified their love of pageantry, in The Seven Deadly Sinnes
of London (1606), representing the triumphal entry of these into
the capital, each drawn in a symbolic chariot and each welcomed
by its special adherents. But all moral or theological sentiment is
overshadowed by the fascination of city life. The sins are no
longer those of the Roman Catholic church, but such as would
strike an observer of street scenes. We have 'Politick bank-
ruptisme,' the practice of merchants who pass through the court
to avoid paying their debts; 'Lying,' which begets the minor
cruelties and backslidings of life, notably oaths, which are 'crutches
upon which lyes go'; 'Candle light,' by which London streets
are illuminated like a theatre, so that merchants and 'prentices
alike are tempted to dissipation and thieving;. Sloth’; 'Apish-
nesse' or dandyism ; 'Shaving,' or the exaction of undue profits,
and ‘Cruelty, which is rampant in extortionate prisons, among
exorbitant creditors, merchants who take trade from their own
'prentices, relatives who abandon their own kith and kin in
plague-time, and fathers who force their daughters to uncongenial
marriages. While there is nothing profound or new in this view
of London life, the booklet abounds in good humour and felicitous
conceits. Above all, we have graphic views of the city, both in
the hurry and rush of midday traffic, and glimmering with its
taverns and gloaming alleys in the night-time.
The Seven Deadly Sinnes was a brilliant development of the
theme revived by Nashe and the author of Tom Tel-Troths Message
and his pens Complaint (1600). In the same year, Dekker
borrowed another idea from Pierce Penilesse. Nashe, in his
second edition, had promised to describe the return of the knight
of the post from hell. The hint was taken by 'an intimate and near
companion,' who produced an eminently insipid pamphlet in 1606.
Dekker followed this, in the same year, with Newes from Hell,
brought by the Divells Carrier. Again we see the skilful adapta-
tion of an ancient form of thought. Visions of heaven, purgatory
1 See bibl. for a list of Dekker's works, with notes.
2 Ante, p. 321.
3 The Return of the Knight of the Post from Hell with the Divels answere to the
Supplication of Pierce Penilesse, with some relation of the last Treasons, printed by
Jubp Windet, 1606.
## p. 353 (#375) ############################################
>
Newes from Hell
353
and hell had originated in paganism, had flourished all through
the Middle Ages in a Christian form and still retained their popu-
larity. Caxton had printed an English version of Deguileville's
Pilgrimage of the Soul and Machlinia had revived the Monk of
Evesham. The Kalendrier des Bergers, which contained a de-
scription of the punishments of the seven sins as revealed to
Lazarus, was frequently translated during the sixteenth century.
Ford, the dramatist, in one of his plays, introduces a friar who
gives a gruesome account of the tortures of hell, and The
Dead Man's Song treats the same subject in a broadside. 'St
Patrick's Purgatory' was famous all through the sixteenth
century, thanks to the disseminating influence of printing;
and Calderon, in the seventeenth, made it the subject of one
of his dramas. Burlesque versions of visions had existed since
Old English times, and continued through popular literature from
the Norman fabliaux to Rabelais. After the reformation, these
legends, like the sins, lost their theological significance, but the
people were still medieval at heart, and literary free-lances were
only too glad to avail themselves of the spell which visions still
exercised over the popular imagination. Before 1590%, some name-
less writer represented the famous Tarlton giving his impressions
of purgatory, and, in this form, conveyed social satire as well as a
collection of good stories. Tom Tell-Trothe's New-yeares Gift
(1593) contains Robin Goodfellow's account of a visit to hell,
and reproduces an oration against jealousy which he heard in those
regions. In Dekker's Nerces from Hell, we have a booklet full of
brilliant descriptions. The messenger starts for the nether world
through France and Venice, stopping only in London, where dis-
sipated youths call wildly to him through tavern windows, and he
hears one spendthrift, in a fit of inebriated veracity, curse the
wealthy merchant, his father, who left him money to waste. In
hell, he finds the sessions in progress and dead souls being tried
by a jury of their own sing. Before leaving, he catches sight
of several familiar types of London street life; notably a hollow-
eyed, wizened, old usurer, who offers to accept ‘any base drudgery'
if he can create an opportunity for making money. The tract also
illustrates the intellectual exuberance of the age, which, even in
burlesque, assimilated the imagery and sentiment of different ages
i Vide T. Wright, St Patrick's Purgatory, an essay on the legends of Purgatory,
Hell and Paradise current during the Middle Ages, 1844.
2 Pantagruel, Bk. 11, chap. 30.
3 See bibl. under Jest-books and Miscellaneous Tracts on London,
E. L. IV. CH. XVI.
23
## p. 354 (#376) ############################################
354 London and Popular Literature
and civilisations. Lucian, in Menippus, had pictured a visit to
the nether world, which Dekker had certainly read in John
Rastell's translation and travestied in his own fashion! . But the
place of torment-hideous, inaccessible, pestilential with 'rotten
vapors,' crawling toads and sulphurous stench-is still medieval,
and the caricature of the devil reflects the ribaldry of the fifteenth
century. In the following year, Dekker added a view of Elysium
and the description of a thunderstorm, caused by the conjurations
performed to summon up the knight of the post. On the strength
of these additions, the pamphlet was issued as a new publication
entitled A Knight's Conjuring.
It is not surprising that a pamphleteer with Dekker's curiosity
about life and his gift of realistic description should publish some
tracts on roguery, and, in 1608, he produced The Belman of
London, using the same material as his predecessors. In some
respects, the pamphlet is disappointing; it lacks the type of
anecdote which is attractive in Greene's work, and the character
drawing which enlivens the Knights of the Post. But the
setting has all Dekker's charm. The title suggests a picture of
city life; but the scene opens in the country, where the author,
after wandering among the serene pleasures of nature, finds him-
self in a disreputable farm-house, concealed in a gallery, watching
a ragged gang of diseased and misshapen vagabonds devour like
savages a steaming feast and initiate new members to their
fraternity. The squalor and wretchedness of these outcasts being
thus heightened by contrast, Dekker proceeds to tell us, as Harman
had done, of their orders, classes and practices. But the account
must be made attractive: so it is given by a ‘nymble-tongd beldam,
who seemed to have command of the place,' under the influence of
a pot of ale. We then accompany the author back to London and,
entering the city at midnight, at last encounter the bellman, whose
bell and voice are heard echoing along the shadowy silent streets.
This picturesque figure introduces an account of card-sharping,
shop-lifting and pocket-picking. The exposure is straightforward
and commonplace, but the style is embroidered with quaint and
elaborate conceits. The pamphlet enjoyed immediate recognition
and, according to Dekker, was plagiarised by The Belman's Brother.
Probably to anticipate further imitation, Dekker produced in the
same year a sequel : Lanthorne and Candle-light or the Bell-
Mans second Nights-walke, in which, after a number of picturesque
episodes, the devil decides to make a visit to London. We
i See bibl. for visions in classical literature, including Lucian,
## p. 355 (#377) ############################################
6
:
a
Rogue-pamphlets. Grobianism
355
accompany him on his rounds and see how 'Gul-gropers' cozen
young heirs out of their acres by usury, cards and dice; how
'Fawlconers' extract gratuities from country knights in return for
a counterfeit dedication in a pamphlet ; how ‘Ranckriders,' posing
as gentlemen, take up residence at an inn and, when a fictitious
summons arrives from a nobleman, borrow one of the landlord's
horses and do not return: how a 'Jacke in a boxe' borrows silver
on a money-box full of gold, for which is afterwards cleverly sub-
stituted one of similar exterior but very different contents. But
these are no longer mysterious deceptions which only a specialist
can detect. Exposures of villany were becoming more and more
exposures of human nature; they appeal to a curiosity about life
rather than to the instinct of self-defence. The best passage in the
book reves not an elaborate fraud which only technical know-
ledge could unmask, but the picture of an ostler slinking half
clothed at dead of night into the stable to steal a horse's provender.
It has already been shown how young men of wealth or birth
were attracted to London by the hope of advancing their fortunes
or of gaining experience. This class formed a new order in society,
without traditions, recognised status or code of manners. No
aggregate of human beings, with the possible exception of rogues
and vagabonds, seems to have attracted so much attention. Sir
Humphrey Gilbert? had suggested the organisation of a gentleman's
university, devoted to the cultivation of refined manners and
courtly accomplishments; the essayists had given much attention
to the pursuits of monied youth ; Peacham wrote a whole
book? on the subject; and, by 1633, Milton had constructed a
complete scheme of education, which should combine the soldier's,
courtier's and scholar's training all in one. But, at present, the
playhouses, drinking taverns and ordinaries of London were filled
with inexperienced boys, who had been taught something of their
duty to their king and country, but no other rules of deportment
in these novel situations than resenting an insult and holding
their own with their equals. New conventionalities had not yet
been evolved to meet new conditions, and public opinion was
content to condemn them as gulls, roaring boys, coxcombs, wood-
cocks, cockneys and popinjays. Social pamphleteers had satirised
them again and again ; and Dekker, while engaged on a translation
of Dedekind's Grobianus, conceived the idea of turning the
German's old-fashioned 8 satire on the boorishness suggestive of an
? See bibl.
1 Queene Elizabethes Achademy.
3 Grobianus was printed 1549. See bibl.
23—2
## p. 356 (#378) ############################################
356 London and Popular Literature
Eulenspiegel into a pasquil on the modern English type. Follow-
ing his model, he produced an ironical book of manners, entitled
The Guls Hornebooke (1609), which begins by closely following
the original, but gradually develops into an independent work.
The booklet surpasses other attacks on the gallants and fops of
the age, because Dekker has penetrated beneath their conduct so as
to satirise their motives. We see that the Jacobean gull's irre-
sponsible actions are entirely dominated by the desire to assert his
personality, and these efforts rendered odious by lack of breeding
and vulgarity of surroundings. Dekker sarcastically explains to
the gull how this ambition can be realised by his making himself
offensively conspicuous at places of public resort. Incidentally,
we accompany the young man of leisure through a typical day's
occupations, from the business of dressing to the stroll in St Paul's;
thence to the ordinary' for the midday meal; then to the play-
house, followed by the tavern and the nocturnal prowl through the
city. The book had no great sale, because the scenes were too
familiar, and the invective too mild; but, for the modern student,
no better picture can be found of Jacobean London, with its
literary cliques, its publicity and the scope it gave to the free play
of personality.
The public's insatiable demand for novelty reduced professional
free-lances to the most amazing shifts to win popularity. In this
respect, Dekker's A strange Horse Race (1613) is an almost unique
production. He begins with an account of Roman ‘pageants '(that
is, gladiatorial displays), dwelling particularly on the quips and
jeers with which the populace greeted the hero of a triumph.
These anecdotes introduce a popular encyclopaedia, in which the
knowledge of the day is vulgarised under the attractive conceit of
a race. Astronomy is taught under the guise of races of the
heavenly bodies, and physiology as the races in a man's body,
earth, water, air and fire all competing. Then there are races
of minerals ; lead striving to overtake tin, tin silver and silver
gold, which is the victorious metal, 'the eldest child of the sun. '
From the physical, he turns to the moral, world. Once more, we
have a pageant of the vices and virtues, but still in the form
of a race.
The vices of an enriched bourgeoisie are pitted against
the old-fashioned virtues of modesty and contentment. Among
others, Blasphemous Insolency challenges Innocent Humility; the
temperate Spaniard races the English drunkard; epicures run
from a 'cry of sergeants'; the lawyer from his own conscience;
the vicar for four benefices, which he wants to enjoy at the
## p. 357 (#379) ############################################
Rowlands. Tis Merrie when Gossips meete 357
same time; and the tailor vainly strives to keep up with Pride. As
practically all the vices are beaten, the devil, out of chagrin, falls
so sick that he makes a will after the manner of the sixteenth
century mock Testaments!
Other writers were hardly less versatile than Dekker. Samuel
Rowlands attempted every type of popular literature except essays
and character sketches, which were no occupation for bread-
winners. As Drayton? , Nashes and Lodge* had attracted attention
by religious compositions, Rowlands began his career with The Be-
traying of Christ (1598). In this trifle, he produces fully-developed
that polished flow of verse which is one of his contributions to the
literature of his age. The other contribution, the witty portrayal
of the 'humours' of eccentricity and class spirit, is found in his
next production, The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-
Vaine, which appeared in 1600. Latinised verse was now the
fashion; so Rowlands gibbets the bad manners of Londoners under
personalities: first, in classical epigrams, which give admirable
glimpses of conduct, and then in satire of the school of Hall, in
which we have more detailed portraits. Among others, we see
the countryman filled with contempt for the citizen and led by
his arrogance to commit absurd blunders; the censorious spirit,
slovenly, poor and quarrelsome, pulling everyone's reputation to
pieces; and the two drunkards who strengthen each other in their
vice by enumerating the benefits of wine after the manner of
burlesque encomiums.
In 1602, Rowlands reverted to an older type in Tis Merrie
when Gossips meete. The gay gossip of the alehouse had been for
centuries a commonplace of popular literatures, and Sir John
Davies had brought something of that spirit into his 'a wife widow
and maid'in A Poetical Rapsody (1602). Rowlands's poem shows
us a middle-aged widow who has gathered from life a store of
worldly wisdom and a connoisseur's appreciation of burnt sack.
She meets two acquaintances, a wife and a maiden, who are re-
luctantly induced to join her in the private room of a tavern.
Claret is ordered, and the usual feminine conference on men
begins. The value of the poem, however, does not consist in the
egoistic views of these women, but in the dramatic development of
their characters. The widow, a judge of ales and wine, is inclined
to flaunt her independence; the wife is at first indifferent and
Ante, vol. II, chap. v, pp. 85–87 and bibl. , pp. 482-4.
? Harmonie oj the Church, 1591.
3 Clirists Teares, 1593.
• Prosopopeia, 1596.
o Ante, vol. II, p. 387; vol. II, p. 88, and bibl. , pp. 185—9.
>
## p. 358 (#380) ############################################
358 London and Popular Literature
a
preoccupied with domestic cares; the maid is timid and inclined
to be shocked. But, as the wine percolates through their veins,
they discuss old times and their present fortunes with the utmost
freedom. When the conversation turns from dances to husbands,
they talk faster and interrupt each other more frequently. Anon,
sausages and sack are called for; even the maid begins to put in
her say, while the widow talks so loudly that the eavesdropping
attendant bursts out laughing. The incensed lady delivers a
voluble and incoherent reprimand, and they stagger down the
stairs after a friendly competition as to who should pay the bill.
This brilliant sketch met with immediate popularity. Seven
editions were called for during the century, and Rowlands now
definitely abandoned standard literature. He turned his hand to
coney-catching pamphlets and, trading on Greene's reputation,
entitled his tract Greenes Ghost haunting Coniecatchers, in which
he contributes a few new facts to the subject, but, for the most part,
fills his pages with picaresque anecdotes of farcical encounters and
triumphs of mother wit. Then he combined the old idea of the
dance of death with the new taste for type satire in Looke to it
for Ile Stabbe ye (1604). Death is represented as threatening
a number of typical wrongdoers, each of whom has his malpractices
briefly characterised in two six-lined stanzas. Rowlands still writes
the same clear smooth verse; but most of the characters had been
the veriest commonplaces for a century. Yet there are a few
interesting figures grouped under the heading of death’s vengeance,
including the king who spills his subjects' blood to enhance his own
glory'; the miser, now distinguished from the usurer; the husband-
man who keeps almanacs to calculate the rainy weather and is
never happy unless the price of grain is highề; and the spendthrift,
blinded to the dangers of the future, who neglects his family but is
always 'a good fellow to his friend. ' In this poem, Death was
employed merely as a figure-head; but, two years later, he pro-
duced a poem directly on that subject. For centuries, death, in
popular imagination, had played a double part; on the one
hand, as a gruesome monarch, on the other, as an antic or jester.
Rowlands incorporates both these conceptions in the moral
dialogue A terrible Battell betweene the two consumers of the
whole world: Time and Death. Time and Death hold conference
on the worldly-minded victims whom they have struck down in their
sins, and review the brevity and temptations of life. The beginning
1 This idea is found in Erasmus: Bellum Erasmi, T. Berthelet, 1533.
2 Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour : the character of Sordido.
## p. 359 (#381) ############################################
Burlesques
359
of the poem has an almost Miltonic? grandeur. Then, suddenly,
the tone changes. Time comically complains that he is credited
with many of Death's escapades, and a dispute follows. Each
claims to be the greater. Death scornfully insists that no man
fears Time, while Time accuses Death of stabbing like a coward, and
then compares his head to an oil-jar, his arms to a gardener's rake,
his legs to a pair of crane stilts and his voice to the hissing of
a snake. After an interchange of even more outrageous insults,
a reconciliation is effected? .
The literary resourcefulness of the age is also illustrated by a
number of pamphlets - which ridicule romantic ballads. The
Heroical adventures of the Knight of the Sea (1600) was followed
by Beaumont and Fletcher's comedy The Knight of the Burning
Pestle in 1611 and by Moriomachia in 1613. In this clever prose
burlesque, interspersed with rimes, Robert Anton tells how the
queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and apathetic cow into
a knight errant to do her business in the world. The knight's adven-
tures are as futile as those of Sir Thopas, but they serve the further
purpose of satirising society. The hero blunders into encounters
which set off the bluff kindness of the common folk beside
the arrogance and vanity of the wealthy with their bought titles
and pampered menials. At Moropolis (London), the adventurer
visits the frivolous shows and sham prodigies of the city, and
he catches some glimpses of city vice which much amaze his
ingenuous soul. The burlesque ends in a mock-heroic contest.
The Knight of the Sun enters the lists against the Knight of the
Moon, but is worsted, and the earth is plunged in darkness. Amid
the disorder which ensues, 'fogging solliciters,' 'extorting brokers,'
‘peaking pandars,' tapsters and others appear in their true
characters. The tract has something in it suggestive of Candide
as well as of Hudibras. In 1615, Rowlands brought out The
Melancholic Knight, a verse monologue proceeding from a
character disgusted with the commercialism of his own age and
ravished by the enchanted world of medieval romance. He is
a studious reader of fly-sheets and broadsides which tell of dragons
and other monstrosities, and has himself composed the rhyme of
Sir Eglamour. ' But this poem is really a burlesque imitated from
The Knight of the Sea and its author proves to be a poltroon who
despises money because he is in debt, refuses charity to beggars
(the mark of the upstart nobleman of that age), grinds his tenants
to clothe his wife bravely and smokes and spits all day long while
1 Vide E. Gosse, intro. to works of Rowlands, 1880 (Hunterian Club).
3 See bibl. for list of Rowlands's works.
## p. 360 (#382) ############################################
360 London and Popular Literature
1
nursing his melancholy. Don Quixote had been published in 1605,
and its popularity may have stimulated this type of literature. But
the real impulse came from the reaction of the ‘nineties' against
Elizabethan idealism. The love of mythical and heroic literature
was not, indeed, dead but was relegated to the uneducated and
the old-fashioned. Verse satirists had already inveighed against
the Spenserian school and the versified legends of old time. Now,
less academic writers, following the city love of cynicism and
ridicule, reproduced the same satire in a more humorous form.
The atmosphere of the capital made itself felt in many ways,
apart from experiments in style and the study of types. There are
constant allusions to noted and notorious characters of the city,
such as Lanum, Garret, Singer, Pope, Backstead, Field and Hobson.
Tarlton became so famous that Gabriel Harvey was proud to
have jested with him, and Fitzgeoffrey and Stradlingº honoured
him in Latin epigrams. Some of these characters became the
heroes of jest-books, in which old stories were told anew and
associated with their names. Yet, even in this field, the popular
interest in London gives a touch of freshness. The compiler of
the Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele has managed to
centre all his detached anecdotes round the attractive and novel
personality of literary bohemians“. Skoggan and Eulenspiegel
were traditional figure-heads, in which gipsy cunning blended with
bucolic ineptitude. In George Peele, however, we find a consistent
character devoted to pleasure and prodigality, who has discarded
the inane antics of earlier jest-books, and governs his vagaries by
the desire to escape a creditor or gain a dinner. But his frauds
are still perpetrated with the heartlessness of an earlier age, and
the book does not bear witness to the civilitie' of London so
convincingly as John Taylor's Wit and Mirth (1635), in which
the current witticisms of taverns, ordinaries and bowling-greens
are worked up into 'yêrks' and 'clinches. Here we find the
educated man's amusement at the clown's misuse of new Latinised
words such as Dogberry mutilated, and the Londoner's contempt for
provincial arrogance. The phantasy on a bowling-alley contains
conceits as elaborate as those of Overbury and Breton, and other
6
1 Affanide, 1601.
? Epigrammata, 1607.
Vide bibl. For origin of Jest-books vide ante vol. II, chap. v, pp. 91–95.
• The book was probably compiled after the dramatist's death. One episode, at
least, is taken from A C. Mery Talys, and the conception of the character is similar to
that of George Pyeboard in The Puritan (1607). As the earliest known edition of the
jests has the same date, the question of imitation cannot be settled.
6 Cf. Rowlands's Letting of Humours Blood, 1600.
6 E. g. Jest no. 100, 'A toy to mocke an Ape.
## p. 361 (#383) ############################################
Fest-books and Wagering Journeys 361
anecdotes have touches of epigrammatic wisdom such as the
essayists loved to record. The most noticeable feature is the pre-
dominance of the modern repartee—the flash of ridicule or humour
struck out of a word taken in two senses—which is often
associated with Sheridan.
So great was this interest in city personalities, that actors and
public humorists would perform wagers in order to gain money
by publishing accounts of them. Ferris's colourless report of
The Most dangerous and memorable Adventure (1590) in a
wherry boat was followed by Kemp's nine days wonder (1600),
in which the actor vivaciously describes the episodes of his
morris dance from London to Norwich. John Taylor, after an
adventurous career in the navy and a few years' struggle to earn a
living in the decaying profession of waterman, devoted himself to
literary hackwork and undertook wagering journeys, which were
afterwards turned into rollicking pamphlets. It was, perhaps, this
fashion which induced Richard Brathwaite, after trying his hand at
essays and characters, to devote his learning and Goliardic humour
to the narration of a voyage. Adopting the name of a proverbial
drunkard, he described a pilgrimage through the towns and
villages of England in Barnabae Itinerarium or Barnabee's
Journal. Occasionally, he notes local peculiarities; but the story,
mostly, is a record of the vagabond's escapades, which sometimes
meet a vagabond's condign punishment. The booklet is a triumph
of easy rhythmic verse.
The sentiments and ideas of former ages now began to reappear
in connection with localities in and around London. Brainford,
Hogsden (Hoxton), Southwarke, Eyebright and Queen-hive fre-
quently figure in catch-pennies. One publicist, under the name
of 'Kinde-Kit of Kingstone,' borrowed tales from such sources as
the Decameron and the Romance of the Seven Sages, and put
them in the mouths of seven fishwives who take boat for the
western suburbs after a good day's business in London. Each
prose story is introduced by a verse description of the narrator,
after the manner of Skelton, and is followed by the outspoken
comments of the listeners. Another story book, composed in the
same style and manner, represents a journey from Billingsgate
E. g. no. 127.
2 Vide Ben Jonson, The Gipsies, and also the introduction of Barnaby as a
bibacious coachman in The New Inn, or the light Heart. See, also, A Brown Dozen of
Drunkards (ali-ass Drinkhards) whipt and shipt to the Isle of Gulls (1648), and memoir
by J. Haslewood prefixed to ninth ed. of Barnabee's Journal, 1820.
3 Westward for Smelts. Steevens believes in an edition of 1603, but Collier thinks
that of 1620 to be the first.
## p. 362 (#384) ############################################
362 London and Popular Literature
ܪܐ
to Gravesend? . But the most remarkable pamphlet of this class is
Pimlyco? or, Runne Red Cap (1609). The poet describes himself
lying in the grass amid the delights of spring, and watching lovers
sport together, while, in the background, the towers and steeples of
London
Lifted their proud heads bove the skies,
gleaming like gold in the morning sunlight. By chance, he finds
Skelton's Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng; and, while reading the
satire, looks up and beholds a motley crowd of men and women
surging towards Hogsden to consume its ale. The contagious
enthusiasm carries him along, and, with Skelton's poem in his
hand, with those mad times to weigh our times,' he first breaks
out into a burlesque eulogy on Pimlyco ale, and then wittily
describes the insane rush for the pleasures of the resort. Payment
for alehouse fare was vulgarly known as 'shot'; so he represents
the place as a fort which an impetuous army is attacking with this
artillery. In the ranks are all types of society who scramble for
tankards, calling 'Fill, Fill, Fill. ' Poets seek inspiration ; ballad
singers exercise their 'villanous yelping throats. ' Lawyers,
'
usurers, courtiers, soldiers, ‘lads and greasie lownes,' women of
every age and figure, jostle one another in their eagerness to
squander money on tippling. Such a production is far more than
a topical effusion. Pimlyco is a satirical rhapsody on the age's
animal spirits and headlong folly, a burlesque review in which
the genius and method of Cocke Lorell's botes are adapted to the
interests of Jacobean London.
All this while, the exuberant national life continued to find yet
another form of expression in the broadsides and street ballads
which had grown out of the people's love of singing in early Tudor
times. Songs were sung and sold at every street corner and
crossway, or outside the theatre doors, and so popular did some
airs become that Guilpin reckoned the chanting of Kemp's Jigge
and The Burgonians Tragedy among the nuisances of London.
Cornwallis describes a crowd gathered round a city minstrel. He
tells us how thoroughly the standers by are affected,. . . what shift
they make to stand to heare. Ballad-mongers, who were some-
times men of education', represented the public opinion of the
i The Cobler of Canterburie, 1608 (largely reprinted in The Tincker oj Turney, 1630).
2 Discussion on the origin of the word has been reopened in 1. & Q. no. 256,
21 Nov. 1908.
3 Ante, vol. in, chap. v, pp. 83–85.
Ante, vol. III, chap. v, p. 96, and bibl. ,
5 One of them, Thomas Spickernell, was first a ballad-monger and then a minister;
and another, Richard Corbet, M. A. , was first a doctor of divinity and then an
itinerant musician. See A. Clark, Shirburn Ballads, 1907.
P. 490.
## p. 363 (#385) ############################################
Local Tracts, Prophecies and Broadsides 363
lower classes. News of foreign and political events was circulated
this way; accounts of monstrosities, portents, prodigies and disasters
were graphically reported. Prophecies were composed or revived.
R. Waldegrave even published, in 1603, a whole volume of medieval
oracles from Merlin, Eltraine, Beid, Thomas the Rimer and others
Murders and executions were described with appropriate apologues
or, as in the case of Ravaillac's tortures, with harrowing and
imaginary details. Tales of love-making and domestic scenes are
found, some in dialogue or a kind of rude four-act drama. There
were other ditties, especially drinking songs, which were merely
coarse, and ‘Nownow,' in Kinde Hart's Dreame, complains that
crowds gather to hear children sing immoral lays. The old heroic
ballads were still favourites? , as, also, were naïve tales which bore
mark of medieval origin. A large number were nothing else than
church hymns, which a householder could buy on Saturday evening
a
for Sunday use. A pronounced liking for repentances and con-
fessions can also be traced. Many broadsides represent a doomed
man on the scaffold, addressing a farewell homily to the world, in
which he confesses his crimes and warns others to shun his be-
setting sin. Some contain tragedies of love or jealousy; others
touch on social and political grievances.
It will be noticed that these doggerel fragmentary verses
deal with the very subjects which supplied material for the
great pamphleteers and satirists of the age. Nor can the work
of Greene, Nashe, Dekker, Rowlands, Hall, Marston, Guilpin and
their peers be really understood unless this vast background of
varied plebeian sentiment be kept in view. And yet the golden
age of popular literature was past. The sixteenth century had
seen the rise of thoughtful humorists and investigators, whose
first care had been to probe the errors and expose the frauds of
the common people among whom they lived.
$ Vide S. H. Reynolds, ibid.
* J. Boudoin, in translating the Essays in 1640, entitled them L'Artisan de la
Fortune.
## p. 348 (#370) ############################################
348 London and Popular Literature
diplomacy, where, to penetrate the problems of statecraft, he
dispels the illusions of greatness. He fathoms the 'inscrutable
hearts of kings' and pictures their pitiable isolation and toilsome
existence. His book is destined for the commons of the realm ; so
the advice which he professes to give their rulers is really an
exposure (perhaps not intentional) of the machinery of government.
We have glimpses of the monarch seated at the council-board, pre-
paring his public utterances or choosing his favourites. The same
interest leads him to raise questions of public policy. In the essay
'On Superstition,' he marshals the chief accusations against the
Roman Catholic church; and, in treating of the greatness of
kingdoms, he does not ignore the bitter quarrel between the
peasantry and the gentry, Through every discussion, whether on
death and religion, or on gardens and masques, there runs that
sub-conscious ideal of versatile liberal culture out of which the
essay sprang.
Bacon proved the possibilities of this type of literature
as a repository of miscellaneous and desultory meditations. His
influence is seen in such men as Owen Felltham, who, endowed
with an interest in moral problems, and a certain mastery over
reflective prose, published essays from time to time. These, appar-
ently, were intended as exercises for confirming and strengthening
the writer in his own opinions, and show only occasional efforts at
an imitation of Bacon's gnomic style. And yet, Feltham's respect-
able, though commonplace, moralisations established the essay's
right to embrace even sacred topics ; especially are the virtuous
deeds of the ancients selected with no little intuition to illustrate
Christian ideals. Meanwhile, this art of extemporising modern
ideas out of antiquity had reached its highest pitch in the
desultory notes and reflections which Ben Jonson was making
out of his vast reading. In 1641, these were published posthu-
mously as Timber or Discoveries made upon men and matter.
Practically, all the ideas contained in this miscellany, from aphor-
istic jottings to continuous discourses, have their origin in some
other book. The influence of Velleius Paterculus, Euripides, Aulus
Gellius, Quintilian and Seneca are particularly noticeable? But
Timber is not a mere work of paraphrase and transcription.
Sometimes, several borrowed sentences are fused into one; some-
times, thoughts from different treatises are brought together or
sentences of the same treatise are arranged in a different order.
1 Vide bibl. for authorities who have investigated sources of the Discoveries, and
also cf. Wits Commonwealth
## p. 349 (#371) ############################################
Ben Jonson. Tobacco-pamphlets 349
The passages on Shakespeare and Bacon were taken from what
Seneca wrote of Haterius and Cassius Severus ; in another place,
Jonson condenses several pages of the Advancement of Learning
into one short essay. A sense of manly integrity, and a keen eye
to practical virtue and intelligence, guided this selection of the
world's wisdom, and the style has an almost colloquial simplicity
and directness far in advance of Bacon.
We have seen how social literature, under the influence of
classicism, grew into Juvenalian satire, character writing and
essays, without losing sight of contemporary interests. But city
life was too varied to find expression within the limits of any
literary canon, and Londoners continued to welcome any type of
tract which reflected their many-sided interests. No sooner had
the fashion of tobacco-smoking become prominent, than it divided
pamphleteers into two camps. Its supporters either founded their
adhesion on its alleged medical properties), or indulged their
literary gift in burlesque encomia Among others, an anony-
mous author, imitating Ovid, composed The Metamorphosis of
Tobacco, in heroic couplets of pleasing and harmonious rhythm.
He sings of the elements gathering in council to create a herb
of almost Promethean virtue, which Jupiter, fearing for his
sovereignty, banishes to an unknown land. But the graces dis-
cover the plant and remain so constant to its charms that mortals,
who would win their favour, must follow their example. On the
other hand, the growing insistence on good manners inspired
scathing criticisms on smoking as it was then practised. 'Tobac-
conists' were freely ridiculed by dramatists, character writers and
puritans. King James issued in 1604 A Counterblaste to Tobacco,
in which a sound if pedantic refutation of its alleged virtues is
followed by quaint but vigorous descriptions of the smoker's dis-
gusting habits. Among the many subsequent writers? who used
this theme as a whetstone for their wits, the most noteworthy is,
undoubtedly, Richard Brathwaite. Following the method of The
Metamorphosis, he works up the contention that smokers waste
their time into an allegorical romance, in which tobacco is traced
back to its origin as a son of Pluto, god of the nether world.
This phantasy is entitled, The Smoking Age, or, the Man in the
Mist (1617).
These ephemeral pamphlets are worth quoting, in order to
1 H. Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner, 1599; E. Gardiner, Triall of Tobacco, 1610.
2 Vide bibl.
## p. 350 (#372) ############################################
350 London and Popular Literature
illustrate how varied, as well as elaborate, popular literature was
becoming. Even rogue-books began to multiply the artifices of
narration. E. S. produced, in 1597, the Discoverie of the Knights
of the Poste. These gentry were professional bailees, utilising the
name of some respectable citizen to stand surety for any criminal
who would make it worth their while. As the average law-breaker
was almost certain to be committed for another offence before the
year was out, this form of livelihood could be made safe by ordinary
precautions. Thus, the booklet is of very moderate interest. But
the style is significant. The Discoverie is a connected story re-
counting a journey undertaken by the author on foot from London
to Plymouth. He falls in with two fellow-travellers, and the trio
beguile the tedium of the way with anecdotes and personal remi-
niscences of the knights of the post. The narrative has all the
bye-play of a realistic novelette. Each of the author's companions
has his own individuality. Goodcoll is almost destitute, but trusts
to his witty tongue for escaping the dilemmas of impecuniosity.
Freeman has store of gold, and is so fond of good fellowship that
he not only claims the right to finance the party, but deviates from
his own course in order to enjoy their society. We visit the inns
at which they lodged, are told of what they drank at night, how
they slept and how they breakfasted. Freeman requests both
Goodcoll and the author to disburse small sums, since his own
wealth is in gold coin which he cannot realise till they come to
Exeter. But, when that city is reached, Freeman finds that his
store has vanished, and offers an explanation, which, apparently,
satisfies the two travellers, but leaves the reader dubious.
Authors who had been through prison now began to clothe
their experiences in varied forms. Luke Hutton's The Blacke
Dogge of Newgate (c. 1600) recounts the customs of that institu-
tion in a versified description of a vision, followed by a prose
dialogue which tells of the amateur thieves to be found amongst the
attendants of the prison. The Compter's Commonwealth (1617),
by William Fennor, introduces the humours and tricks of the jest-
books into the usual exposures of roguery. Geffray Mynshul, who
had left the debtor's prison with a lively recollection of its jangling
keys, fawning yet tyrannical warders, and embittered or reckless
inmates, actually endeavoured to give his friends an idea of these
miseries by describing them in essays and character sketches. But
1 Supposed by G. C. Moore Smith to be Edward Sharpham; N. & Q. no. 257,
11 July 1908.
2 For a fuller list see bibl.
## p. 351 (#373) ############################################
Dekker
351
the most important pamphleteer of Jacobean London is, undoubt-
edly, Thomas Dekker.
Apart from his dramatic work', Dekker stands alone in this
period. He is remarkable not as a satirist but as the first great
literary artist of London street life. He discovered how to describe
the city populace as a whole in its pursuits and agitations ; but, as
literature had not yet evolved a special mediumfor this por-
traiture, his gift finds expression only in a number of erratic
and ephemeral tracts. For instance, like other free lances, he
seized the obvious opportunity of producing a celebration of
Elizabeth's death and James's accession. He entitled this tract
The Wonderfull Yeare (1603). But the writer's thoughts are
soon drawn from perfunctory adulation to the more suggestive
theme of the plague which raged that year in London. We have
a picture of Death encamped like an army in the sin-polluted
suburbs. Its tents are winding-sheets, its field-marshal the plague,
its officers burning fevers, boils, blains and carbuncles; the rank
and file consist of mourners, “merrie sextons,' hungry coffin-sellers
and ‘nasty grave-makers'; the two catchpoles are fear and
trembling. The invaders storm London, massacring men, women
and children, breaking open coffers, rifling houses and ransacking
streets. There are passages of almost unparalleled horror de-
scribing the rotten coffins filling the streets with stench, or the
muck-pits full of putrid corpses, among which the worms writhe
in swarms. There is originality in this conception of death,
but much more in Dekker's description of the narrow London
streets at night time, filled with the groans or raving of sick men,
with glimpses of figures stealing out to fetch the sexton or sweating
under the load of a corpse which they must hide before 'the fatall
hand writing of death should seale up their doores. ' Then, we watch
the stampede into the country, and note the touches of meanness
and heroism which a commotion always brings to the surface. The
tract ends with the humorous side of the plague, discovered in
some witty though rather grim anecdotes, one recounting how the
death of a Londoner at a country inn threw the whole village into
>
1 He had already written eight plays single-banded and seven in collaboration,
besides historical works in conjunction with Drayton.
2 As we have seen, character writers sometimes described scenes and institutions.
But, before Donald Lapton's London and Country Carbonadoed (1632), none, apparently,
are touched with the fascination of London streets.
3 Cf. Richard Johnson, Anglorum Lachrymae ; H. Chettle, Englande's Mourning
Garment; J. Hall, The King's Prophecie or Weeping Joy; Thomas Bing, Sorrowes Joy;
8. Rowlands, God save the King.
## p. 352 (#374) ############################################
352 London and Popular Literature
6
the most grotesque disorder, until a tinker consented, for a large
sum, to bury the corpse.
One of Dekker's next productions? was an attempt-very com-
mon in this age--at appealing to the people by a denunciation of
sin. He adopted one of their popular allegories and, at the same
time, gratified their love of pageantry, in The Seven Deadly Sinnes
of London (1606), representing the triumphal entry of these into
the capital, each drawn in a symbolic chariot and each welcomed
by its special adherents. But all moral or theological sentiment is
overshadowed by the fascination of city life. The sins are no
longer those of the Roman Catholic church, but such as would
strike an observer of street scenes. We have 'Politick bank-
ruptisme,' the practice of merchants who pass through the court
to avoid paying their debts; 'Lying,' which begets the minor
cruelties and backslidings of life, notably oaths, which are 'crutches
upon which lyes go'; 'Candle light,' by which London streets
are illuminated like a theatre, so that merchants and 'prentices
alike are tempted to dissipation and thieving;. Sloth’; 'Apish-
nesse' or dandyism ; 'Shaving,' or the exaction of undue profits,
and ‘Cruelty, which is rampant in extortionate prisons, among
exorbitant creditors, merchants who take trade from their own
'prentices, relatives who abandon their own kith and kin in
plague-time, and fathers who force their daughters to uncongenial
marriages. While there is nothing profound or new in this view
of London life, the booklet abounds in good humour and felicitous
conceits. Above all, we have graphic views of the city, both in
the hurry and rush of midday traffic, and glimmering with its
taverns and gloaming alleys in the night-time.
The Seven Deadly Sinnes was a brilliant development of the
theme revived by Nashe and the author of Tom Tel-Troths Message
and his pens Complaint (1600). In the same year, Dekker
borrowed another idea from Pierce Penilesse. Nashe, in his
second edition, had promised to describe the return of the knight
of the post from hell. The hint was taken by 'an intimate and near
companion,' who produced an eminently insipid pamphlet in 1606.
Dekker followed this, in the same year, with Newes from Hell,
brought by the Divells Carrier. Again we see the skilful adapta-
tion of an ancient form of thought. Visions of heaven, purgatory
1 See bibl. for a list of Dekker's works, with notes.
2 Ante, p. 321.
3 The Return of the Knight of the Post from Hell with the Divels answere to the
Supplication of Pierce Penilesse, with some relation of the last Treasons, printed by
Jubp Windet, 1606.
## p. 353 (#375) ############################################
>
Newes from Hell
353
and hell had originated in paganism, had flourished all through
the Middle Ages in a Christian form and still retained their popu-
larity. Caxton had printed an English version of Deguileville's
Pilgrimage of the Soul and Machlinia had revived the Monk of
Evesham. The Kalendrier des Bergers, which contained a de-
scription of the punishments of the seven sins as revealed to
Lazarus, was frequently translated during the sixteenth century.
Ford, the dramatist, in one of his plays, introduces a friar who
gives a gruesome account of the tortures of hell, and The
Dead Man's Song treats the same subject in a broadside. 'St
Patrick's Purgatory' was famous all through the sixteenth
century, thanks to the disseminating influence of printing;
and Calderon, in the seventeenth, made it the subject of one
of his dramas. Burlesque versions of visions had existed since
Old English times, and continued through popular literature from
the Norman fabliaux to Rabelais. After the reformation, these
legends, like the sins, lost their theological significance, but the
people were still medieval at heart, and literary free-lances were
only too glad to avail themselves of the spell which visions still
exercised over the popular imagination. Before 1590%, some name-
less writer represented the famous Tarlton giving his impressions
of purgatory, and, in this form, conveyed social satire as well as a
collection of good stories. Tom Tell-Trothe's New-yeares Gift
(1593) contains Robin Goodfellow's account of a visit to hell,
and reproduces an oration against jealousy which he heard in those
regions. In Dekker's Nerces from Hell, we have a booklet full of
brilliant descriptions. The messenger starts for the nether world
through France and Venice, stopping only in London, where dis-
sipated youths call wildly to him through tavern windows, and he
hears one spendthrift, in a fit of inebriated veracity, curse the
wealthy merchant, his father, who left him money to waste. In
hell, he finds the sessions in progress and dead souls being tried
by a jury of their own sing. Before leaving, he catches sight
of several familiar types of London street life; notably a hollow-
eyed, wizened, old usurer, who offers to accept ‘any base drudgery'
if he can create an opportunity for making money. The tract also
illustrates the intellectual exuberance of the age, which, even in
burlesque, assimilated the imagery and sentiment of different ages
i Vide T. Wright, St Patrick's Purgatory, an essay on the legends of Purgatory,
Hell and Paradise current during the Middle Ages, 1844.
2 Pantagruel, Bk. 11, chap. 30.
3 See bibl. under Jest-books and Miscellaneous Tracts on London,
E. L. IV. CH. XVI.
23
## p. 354 (#376) ############################################
354 London and Popular Literature
and civilisations. Lucian, in Menippus, had pictured a visit to
the nether world, which Dekker had certainly read in John
Rastell's translation and travestied in his own fashion! . But the
place of torment-hideous, inaccessible, pestilential with 'rotten
vapors,' crawling toads and sulphurous stench-is still medieval,
and the caricature of the devil reflects the ribaldry of the fifteenth
century. In the following year, Dekker added a view of Elysium
and the description of a thunderstorm, caused by the conjurations
performed to summon up the knight of the post. On the strength
of these additions, the pamphlet was issued as a new publication
entitled A Knight's Conjuring.
It is not surprising that a pamphleteer with Dekker's curiosity
about life and his gift of realistic description should publish some
tracts on roguery, and, in 1608, he produced The Belman of
London, using the same material as his predecessors. In some
respects, the pamphlet is disappointing; it lacks the type of
anecdote which is attractive in Greene's work, and the character
drawing which enlivens the Knights of the Post. But the
setting has all Dekker's charm. The title suggests a picture of
city life; but the scene opens in the country, where the author,
after wandering among the serene pleasures of nature, finds him-
self in a disreputable farm-house, concealed in a gallery, watching
a ragged gang of diseased and misshapen vagabonds devour like
savages a steaming feast and initiate new members to their
fraternity. The squalor and wretchedness of these outcasts being
thus heightened by contrast, Dekker proceeds to tell us, as Harman
had done, of their orders, classes and practices. But the account
must be made attractive: so it is given by a ‘nymble-tongd beldam,
who seemed to have command of the place,' under the influence of
a pot of ale. We then accompany the author back to London and,
entering the city at midnight, at last encounter the bellman, whose
bell and voice are heard echoing along the shadowy silent streets.
This picturesque figure introduces an account of card-sharping,
shop-lifting and pocket-picking. The exposure is straightforward
and commonplace, but the style is embroidered with quaint and
elaborate conceits. The pamphlet enjoyed immediate recognition
and, according to Dekker, was plagiarised by The Belman's Brother.
Probably to anticipate further imitation, Dekker produced in the
same year a sequel : Lanthorne and Candle-light or the Bell-
Mans second Nights-walke, in which, after a number of picturesque
episodes, the devil decides to make a visit to London. We
i See bibl. for visions in classical literature, including Lucian,
## p. 355 (#377) ############################################
6
:
a
Rogue-pamphlets. Grobianism
355
accompany him on his rounds and see how 'Gul-gropers' cozen
young heirs out of their acres by usury, cards and dice; how
'Fawlconers' extract gratuities from country knights in return for
a counterfeit dedication in a pamphlet ; how ‘Ranckriders,' posing
as gentlemen, take up residence at an inn and, when a fictitious
summons arrives from a nobleman, borrow one of the landlord's
horses and do not return: how a 'Jacke in a boxe' borrows silver
on a money-box full of gold, for which is afterwards cleverly sub-
stituted one of similar exterior but very different contents. But
these are no longer mysterious deceptions which only a specialist
can detect. Exposures of villany were becoming more and more
exposures of human nature; they appeal to a curiosity about life
rather than to the instinct of self-defence. The best passage in the
book reves not an elaborate fraud which only technical know-
ledge could unmask, but the picture of an ostler slinking half
clothed at dead of night into the stable to steal a horse's provender.
It has already been shown how young men of wealth or birth
were attracted to London by the hope of advancing their fortunes
or of gaining experience. This class formed a new order in society,
without traditions, recognised status or code of manners. No
aggregate of human beings, with the possible exception of rogues
and vagabonds, seems to have attracted so much attention. Sir
Humphrey Gilbert? had suggested the organisation of a gentleman's
university, devoted to the cultivation of refined manners and
courtly accomplishments; the essayists had given much attention
to the pursuits of monied youth ; Peacham wrote a whole
book? on the subject; and, by 1633, Milton had constructed a
complete scheme of education, which should combine the soldier's,
courtier's and scholar's training all in one. But, at present, the
playhouses, drinking taverns and ordinaries of London were filled
with inexperienced boys, who had been taught something of their
duty to their king and country, but no other rules of deportment
in these novel situations than resenting an insult and holding
their own with their equals. New conventionalities had not yet
been evolved to meet new conditions, and public opinion was
content to condemn them as gulls, roaring boys, coxcombs, wood-
cocks, cockneys and popinjays. Social pamphleteers had satirised
them again and again ; and Dekker, while engaged on a translation
of Dedekind's Grobianus, conceived the idea of turning the
German's old-fashioned 8 satire on the boorishness suggestive of an
? See bibl.
1 Queene Elizabethes Achademy.
3 Grobianus was printed 1549. See bibl.
23—2
## p. 356 (#378) ############################################
356 London and Popular Literature
Eulenspiegel into a pasquil on the modern English type. Follow-
ing his model, he produced an ironical book of manners, entitled
The Guls Hornebooke (1609), which begins by closely following
the original, but gradually develops into an independent work.
The booklet surpasses other attacks on the gallants and fops of
the age, because Dekker has penetrated beneath their conduct so as
to satirise their motives. We see that the Jacobean gull's irre-
sponsible actions are entirely dominated by the desire to assert his
personality, and these efforts rendered odious by lack of breeding
and vulgarity of surroundings. Dekker sarcastically explains to
the gull how this ambition can be realised by his making himself
offensively conspicuous at places of public resort. Incidentally,
we accompany the young man of leisure through a typical day's
occupations, from the business of dressing to the stroll in St Paul's;
thence to the ordinary' for the midday meal; then to the play-
house, followed by the tavern and the nocturnal prowl through the
city. The book had no great sale, because the scenes were too
familiar, and the invective too mild; but, for the modern student,
no better picture can be found of Jacobean London, with its
literary cliques, its publicity and the scope it gave to the free play
of personality.
The public's insatiable demand for novelty reduced professional
free-lances to the most amazing shifts to win popularity. In this
respect, Dekker's A strange Horse Race (1613) is an almost unique
production. He begins with an account of Roman ‘pageants '(that
is, gladiatorial displays), dwelling particularly on the quips and
jeers with which the populace greeted the hero of a triumph.
These anecdotes introduce a popular encyclopaedia, in which the
knowledge of the day is vulgarised under the attractive conceit of
a race. Astronomy is taught under the guise of races of the
heavenly bodies, and physiology as the races in a man's body,
earth, water, air and fire all competing. Then there are races
of minerals ; lead striving to overtake tin, tin silver and silver
gold, which is the victorious metal, 'the eldest child of the sun. '
From the physical, he turns to the moral, world. Once more, we
have a pageant of the vices and virtues, but still in the form
of a race.
The vices of an enriched bourgeoisie are pitted against
the old-fashioned virtues of modesty and contentment. Among
others, Blasphemous Insolency challenges Innocent Humility; the
temperate Spaniard races the English drunkard; epicures run
from a 'cry of sergeants'; the lawyer from his own conscience;
the vicar for four benefices, which he wants to enjoy at the
## p. 357 (#379) ############################################
Rowlands. Tis Merrie when Gossips meete 357
same time; and the tailor vainly strives to keep up with Pride. As
practically all the vices are beaten, the devil, out of chagrin, falls
so sick that he makes a will after the manner of the sixteenth
century mock Testaments!
Other writers were hardly less versatile than Dekker. Samuel
Rowlands attempted every type of popular literature except essays
and character sketches, which were no occupation for bread-
winners. As Drayton? , Nashes and Lodge* had attracted attention
by religious compositions, Rowlands began his career with The Be-
traying of Christ (1598). In this trifle, he produces fully-developed
that polished flow of verse which is one of his contributions to the
literature of his age. The other contribution, the witty portrayal
of the 'humours' of eccentricity and class spirit, is found in his
next production, The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-
Vaine, which appeared in 1600. Latinised verse was now the
fashion; so Rowlands gibbets the bad manners of Londoners under
personalities: first, in classical epigrams, which give admirable
glimpses of conduct, and then in satire of the school of Hall, in
which we have more detailed portraits. Among others, we see
the countryman filled with contempt for the citizen and led by
his arrogance to commit absurd blunders; the censorious spirit,
slovenly, poor and quarrelsome, pulling everyone's reputation to
pieces; and the two drunkards who strengthen each other in their
vice by enumerating the benefits of wine after the manner of
burlesque encomiums.
In 1602, Rowlands reverted to an older type in Tis Merrie
when Gossips meete. The gay gossip of the alehouse had been for
centuries a commonplace of popular literatures, and Sir John
Davies had brought something of that spirit into his 'a wife widow
and maid'in A Poetical Rapsody (1602). Rowlands's poem shows
us a middle-aged widow who has gathered from life a store of
worldly wisdom and a connoisseur's appreciation of burnt sack.
She meets two acquaintances, a wife and a maiden, who are re-
luctantly induced to join her in the private room of a tavern.
Claret is ordered, and the usual feminine conference on men
begins. The value of the poem, however, does not consist in the
egoistic views of these women, but in the dramatic development of
their characters. The widow, a judge of ales and wine, is inclined
to flaunt her independence; the wife is at first indifferent and
Ante, vol. II, chap. v, pp. 85–87 and bibl. , pp. 482-4.
? Harmonie oj the Church, 1591.
3 Clirists Teares, 1593.
• Prosopopeia, 1596.
o Ante, vol. II, p. 387; vol. II, p. 88, and bibl. , pp. 185—9.
>
## p. 358 (#380) ############################################
358 London and Popular Literature
a
preoccupied with domestic cares; the maid is timid and inclined
to be shocked. But, as the wine percolates through their veins,
they discuss old times and their present fortunes with the utmost
freedom. When the conversation turns from dances to husbands,
they talk faster and interrupt each other more frequently. Anon,
sausages and sack are called for; even the maid begins to put in
her say, while the widow talks so loudly that the eavesdropping
attendant bursts out laughing. The incensed lady delivers a
voluble and incoherent reprimand, and they stagger down the
stairs after a friendly competition as to who should pay the bill.
This brilliant sketch met with immediate popularity. Seven
editions were called for during the century, and Rowlands now
definitely abandoned standard literature. He turned his hand to
coney-catching pamphlets and, trading on Greene's reputation,
entitled his tract Greenes Ghost haunting Coniecatchers, in which
he contributes a few new facts to the subject, but, for the most part,
fills his pages with picaresque anecdotes of farcical encounters and
triumphs of mother wit. Then he combined the old idea of the
dance of death with the new taste for type satire in Looke to it
for Ile Stabbe ye (1604). Death is represented as threatening
a number of typical wrongdoers, each of whom has his malpractices
briefly characterised in two six-lined stanzas. Rowlands still writes
the same clear smooth verse; but most of the characters had been
the veriest commonplaces for a century. Yet there are a few
interesting figures grouped under the heading of death’s vengeance,
including the king who spills his subjects' blood to enhance his own
glory'; the miser, now distinguished from the usurer; the husband-
man who keeps almanacs to calculate the rainy weather and is
never happy unless the price of grain is highề; and the spendthrift,
blinded to the dangers of the future, who neglects his family but is
always 'a good fellow to his friend. ' In this poem, Death was
employed merely as a figure-head; but, two years later, he pro-
duced a poem directly on that subject. For centuries, death, in
popular imagination, had played a double part; on the one
hand, as a gruesome monarch, on the other, as an antic or jester.
Rowlands incorporates both these conceptions in the moral
dialogue A terrible Battell betweene the two consumers of the
whole world: Time and Death. Time and Death hold conference
on the worldly-minded victims whom they have struck down in their
sins, and review the brevity and temptations of life. The beginning
1 This idea is found in Erasmus: Bellum Erasmi, T. Berthelet, 1533.
2 Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour : the character of Sordido.
## p. 359 (#381) ############################################
Burlesques
359
of the poem has an almost Miltonic? grandeur. Then, suddenly,
the tone changes. Time comically complains that he is credited
with many of Death's escapades, and a dispute follows. Each
claims to be the greater. Death scornfully insists that no man
fears Time, while Time accuses Death of stabbing like a coward, and
then compares his head to an oil-jar, his arms to a gardener's rake,
his legs to a pair of crane stilts and his voice to the hissing of
a snake. After an interchange of even more outrageous insults,
a reconciliation is effected? .
The literary resourcefulness of the age is also illustrated by a
number of pamphlets - which ridicule romantic ballads. The
Heroical adventures of the Knight of the Sea (1600) was followed
by Beaumont and Fletcher's comedy The Knight of the Burning
Pestle in 1611 and by Moriomachia in 1613. In this clever prose
burlesque, interspersed with rimes, Robert Anton tells how the
queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and apathetic cow into
a knight errant to do her business in the world. The knight's adven-
tures are as futile as those of Sir Thopas, but they serve the further
purpose of satirising society. The hero blunders into encounters
which set off the bluff kindness of the common folk beside
the arrogance and vanity of the wealthy with their bought titles
and pampered menials. At Moropolis (London), the adventurer
visits the frivolous shows and sham prodigies of the city, and
he catches some glimpses of city vice which much amaze his
ingenuous soul. The burlesque ends in a mock-heroic contest.
The Knight of the Sun enters the lists against the Knight of the
Moon, but is worsted, and the earth is plunged in darkness. Amid
the disorder which ensues, 'fogging solliciters,' 'extorting brokers,'
‘peaking pandars,' tapsters and others appear in their true
characters. The tract has something in it suggestive of Candide
as well as of Hudibras. In 1615, Rowlands brought out The
Melancholic Knight, a verse monologue proceeding from a
character disgusted with the commercialism of his own age and
ravished by the enchanted world of medieval romance. He is
a studious reader of fly-sheets and broadsides which tell of dragons
and other monstrosities, and has himself composed the rhyme of
Sir Eglamour. ' But this poem is really a burlesque imitated from
The Knight of the Sea and its author proves to be a poltroon who
despises money because he is in debt, refuses charity to beggars
(the mark of the upstart nobleman of that age), grinds his tenants
to clothe his wife bravely and smokes and spits all day long while
1 Vide E. Gosse, intro. to works of Rowlands, 1880 (Hunterian Club).
3 See bibl. for list of Rowlands's works.
## p. 360 (#382) ############################################
360 London and Popular Literature
1
nursing his melancholy. Don Quixote had been published in 1605,
and its popularity may have stimulated this type of literature. But
the real impulse came from the reaction of the ‘nineties' against
Elizabethan idealism. The love of mythical and heroic literature
was not, indeed, dead but was relegated to the uneducated and
the old-fashioned. Verse satirists had already inveighed against
the Spenserian school and the versified legends of old time. Now,
less academic writers, following the city love of cynicism and
ridicule, reproduced the same satire in a more humorous form.
The atmosphere of the capital made itself felt in many ways,
apart from experiments in style and the study of types. There are
constant allusions to noted and notorious characters of the city,
such as Lanum, Garret, Singer, Pope, Backstead, Field and Hobson.
Tarlton became so famous that Gabriel Harvey was proud to
have jested with him, and Fitzgeoffrey and Stradlingº honoured
him in Latin epigrams. Some of these characters became the
heroes of jest-books, in which old stories were told anew and
associated with their names. Yet, even in this field, the popular
interest in London gives a touch of freshness. The compiler of
the Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele has managed to
centre all his detached anecdotes round the attractive and novel
personality of literary bohemians“. Skoggan and Eulenspiegel
were traditional figure-heads, in which gipsy cunning blended with
bucolic ineptitude. In George Peele, however, we find a consistent
character devoted to pleasure and prodigality, who has discarded
the inane antics of earlier jest-books, and governs his vagaries by
the desire to escape a creditor or gain a dinner. But his frauds
are still perpetrated with the heartlessness of an earlier age, and
the book does not bear witness to the civilitie' of London so
convincingly as John Taylor's Wit and Mirth (1635), in which
the current witticisms of taverns, ordinaries and bowling-greens
are worked up into 'yêrks' and 'clinches. Here we find the
educated man's amusement at the clown's misuse of new Latinised
words such as Dogberry mutilated, and the Londoner's contempt for
provincial arrogance. The phantasy on a bowling-alley contains
conceits as elaborate as those of Overbury and Breton, and other
6
1 Affanide, 1601.
? Epigrammata, 1607.
Vide bibl. For origin of Jest-books vide ante vol. II, chap. v, pp. 91–95.
• The book was probably compiled after the dramatist's death. One episode, at
least, is taken from A C. Mery Talys, and the conception of the character is similar to
that of George Pyeboard in The Puritan (1607). As the earliest known edition of the
jests has the same date, the question of imitation cannot be settled.
6 Cf. Rowlands's Letting of Humours Blood, 1600.
6 E. g. Jest no. 100, 'A toy to mocke an Ape.
## p. 361 (#383) ############################################
Fest-books and Wagering Journeys 361
anecdotes have touches of epigrammatic wisdom such as the
essayists loved to record. The most noticeable feature is the pre-
dominance of the modern repartee—the flash of ridicule or humour
struck out of a word taken in two senses—which is often
associated with Sheridan.
So great was this interest in city personalities, that actors and
public humorists would perform wagers in order to gain money
by publishing accounts of them. Ferris's colourless report of
The Most dangerous and memorable Adventure (1590) in a
wherry boat was followed by Kemp's nine days wonder (1600),
in which the actor vivaciously describes the episodes of his
morris dance from London to Norwich. John Taylor, after an
adventurous career in the navy and a few years' struggle to earn a
living in the decaying profession of waterman, devoted himself to
literary hackwork and undertook wagering journeys, which were
afterwards turned into rollicking pamphlets. It was, perhaps, this
fashion which induced Richard Brathwaite, after trying his hand at
essays and characters, to devote his learning and Goliardic humour
to the narration of a voyage. Adopting the name of a proverbial
drunkard, he described a pilgrimage through the towns and
villages of England in Barnabae Itinerarium or Barnabee's
Journal. Occasionally, he notes local peculiarities; but the story,
mostly, is a record of the vagabond's escapades, which sometimes
meet a vagabond's condign punishment. The booklet is a triumph
of easy rhythmic verse.
The sentiments and ideas of former ages now began to reappear
in connection with localities in and around London. Brainford,
Hogsden (Hoxton), Southwarke, Eyebright and Queen-hive fre-
quently figure in catch-pennies. One publicist, under the name
of 'Kinde-Kit of Kingstone,' borrowed tales from such sources as
the Decameron and the Romance of the Seven Sages, and put
them in the mouths of seven fishwives who take boat for the
western suburbs after a good day's business in London. Each
prose story is introduced by a verse description of the narrator,
after the manner of Skelton, and is followed by the outspoken
comments of the listeners. Another story book, composed in the
same style and manner, represents a journey from Billingsgate
E. g. no. 127.
2 Vide Ben Jonson, The Gipsies, and also the introduction of Barnaby as a
bibacious coachman in The New Inn, or the light Heart. See, also, A Brown Dozen of
Drunkards (ali-ass Drinkhards) whipt and shipt to the Isle of Gulls (1648), and memoir
by J. Haslewood prefixed to ninth ed. of Barnabee's Journal, 1820.
3 Westward for Smelts. Steevens believes in an edition of 1603, but Collier thinks
that of 1620 to be the first.
## p. 362 (#384) ############################################
362 London and Popular Literature
ܪܐ
to Gravesend? . But the most remarkable pamphlet of this class is
Pimlyco? or, Runne Red Cap (1609). The poet describes himself
lying in the grass amid the delights of spring, and watching lovers
sport together, while, in the background, the towers and steeples of
London
Lifted their proud heads bove the skies,
gleaming like gold in the morning sunlight. By chance, he finds
Skelton's Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng; and, while reading the
satire, looks up and beholds a motley crowd of men and women
surging towards Hogsden to consume its ale. The contagious
enthusiasm carries him along, and, with Skelton's poem in his
hand, with those mad times to weigh our times,' he first breaks
out into a burlesque eulogy on Pimlyco ale, and then wittily
describes the insane rush for the pleasures of the resort. Payment
for alehouse fare was vulgarly known as 'shot'; so he represents
the place as a fort which an impetuous army is attacking with this
artillery. In the ranks are all types of society who scramble for
tankards, calling 'Fill, Fill, Fill. ' Poets seek inspiration ; ballad
singers exercise their 'villanous yelping throats. ' Lawyers,
'
usurers, courtiers, soldiers, ‘lads and greasie lownes,' women of
every age and figure, jostle one another in their eagerness to
squander money on tippling. Such a production is far more than
a topical effusion. Pimlyco is a satirical rhapsody on the age's
animal spirits and headlong folly, a burlesque review in which
the genius and method of Cocke Lorell's botes are adapted to the
interests of Jacobean London.
All this while, the exuberant national life continued to find yet
another form of expression in the broadsides and street ballads
which had grown out of the people's love of singing in early Tudor
times. Songs were sung and sold at every street corner and
crossway, or outside the theatre doors, and so popular did some
airs become that Guilpin reckoned the chanting of Kemp's Jigge
and The Burgonians Tragedy among the nuisances of London.
Cornwallis describes a crowd gathered round a city minstrel. He
tells us how thoroughly the standers by are affected,. . . what shift
they make to stand to heare. Ballad-mongers, who were some-
times men of education', represented the public opinion of the
i The Cobler of Canterburie, 1608 (largely reprinted in The Tincker oj Turney, 1630).
2 Discussion on the origin of the word has been reopened in 1. & Q. no. 256,
21 Nov. 1908.
3 Ante, vol. in, chap. v, pp. 83–85.
Ante, vol. III, chap. v, p. 96, and bibl. ,
5 One of them, Thomas Spickernell, was first a ballad-monger and then a minister;
and another, Richard Corbet, M. A. , was first a doctor of divinity and then an
itinerant musician. See A. Clark, Shirburn Ballads, 1907.
P. 490.
## p. 363 (#385) ############################################
Local Tracts, Prophecies and Broadsides 363
lower classes. News of foreign and political events was circulated
this way; accounts of monstrosities, portents, prodigies and disasters
were graphically reported. Prophecies were composed or revived.
R. Waldegrave even published, in 1603, a whole volume of medieval
oracles from Merlin, Eltraine, Beid, Thomas the Rimer and others
Murders and executions were described with appropriate apologues
or, as in the case of Ravaillac's tortures, with harrowing and
imaginary details. Tales of love-making and domestic scenes are
found, some in dialogue or a kind of rude four-act drama. There
were other ditties, especially drinking songs, which were merely
coarse, and ‘Nownow,' in Kinde Hart's Dreame, complains that
crowds gather to hear children sing immoral lays. The old heroic
ballads were still favourites? , as, also, were naïve tales which bore
mark of medieval origin. A large number were nothing else than
church hymns, which a householder could buy on Saturday evening
a
for Sunday use. A pronounced liking for repentances and con-
fessions can also be traced. Many broadsides represent a doomed
man on the scaffold, addressing a farewell homily to the world, in
which he confesses his crimes and warns others to shun his be-
setting sin. Some contain tragedies of love or jealousy; others
touch on social and political grievances.
It will be noticed that these doggerel fragmentary verses
deal with the very subjects which supplied material for the
great pamphleteers and satirists of the age. Nor can the work
of Greene, Nashe, Dekker, Rowlands, Hall, Marston, Guilpin and
their peers be really understood unless this vast background of
varied plebeian sentiment be kept in view. And yet the golden
age of popular literature was past. The sixteenth century had
seen the rise of thoughtful humorists and investigators, whose
first care had been to probe the errors and expose the frauds of
the common people among whom they lived.
