effective. Diffuseness and
want of keeping to the point too frequently mar Nash's work; but when he
shakes himself free from them, and goes straight for his enemy or his
subject, he is a singularly forcible writer. In his case more than in any
of the others, the journalist born out of due time is perceptible. He had
perhaps not much original message for the world. But he had eminently the
trick both of damaging controversial argument made light to catch the
popular taste, and of easy discussion or narrative. The chief defects of
his work would probably have disappeared of themselves if he had had to
write not pamphlets, but articles. He did, however, what he could; and he
is worthy of a place in the history of literature if only for the sake of
_Have with you to Saffron Walden_--the best example of its own kind to be
found before the end of the seventeenth century, if not the beginning of
the eighteenth.

Thomas Dekker was much less of a born prose writer than his half-namesake,
Nash. His best work, unlike Nash's, was done in verse, and, while he was
far Nash's superior, not merely in poetical expression but in creative
grasp of character, he was entirely destitute of Nash's incisive and direct
faculty of invective. Nevertheless his work, too, is memorable among the
prose work of the time, and for special reasons. His first pamphlet
(according to the peculiarity already noted in Rowlands's case) is not
prose at all, but verse--yet not the verse of which Dekker had real
mastery, being a very lamentable ballad of the destruction of Jerusalem,
entitled _Canaan's Calamity_ (1598). The next, _The Wonderful Year_, is the
account of London in plague time, and has at least the interest of being
comparable with, and perhaps that of having to some extent inspired,
Defoe's famous performance. Then, and of the same date, follows a very
curious piece, the foreign origin of which has not been so generally
noticed as that of Dekker's most famous prose production. _The Bachelor's
Banquet_ is in effect only a free rendering of the immortal fifteenth
century satire, assigned on no very solid evidence to Antoine de la Salle,
the _Quinze Joyes de Mariage_, the resemblance being kept down to the
recurrence at the end of each section of the same phrase, "in Lob's
pound," which reproduces the less grotesque "dans la nasse" of the
original. But here, as later, the skill with which Dekker adapts and brings
in telling circumstances appropriate to