every age, but since the invention and filing
of newspapers their individuality has been not a little merged. The
anonymous journalist of our days is simply to the historian such and such
a paper, volume so-and-so, page so much, column this or that. The good John
Davies, living in another age, still stands as _nominis umbra_, but with a
not inconsiderable body of work to throw the shadow.

One of the most remarkable, and certainly one of not the least interesting
developments of the Elizabethan pamphlet remains to be noticed. This is the
celebrated series of "Martin Marprelate" tracts, with the replies which
they called forth. Indeed the popularity of this series may be said to have
given a great impulse to the whole pamphleteering system. It is somewhat
unfortunate that this interesting subject has never been taken up in full
by a dispassionate historian of literature, sufficiently versed in politics
and in theology. In mid-nineteenth century most, but by no means all of the
more notable tracts were reprinted by John Petheram, a London bookseller,
whose productions have since been issued under the well-known imprint of
John Russell Smith, the publisher of the _Library of Old Authors_. This
gave occasion to a review in _The Christian Remembrancer_, afterwards
enlarged and printed as a book by Mr. Maskell, a High Churchman who
subsequently seceded to the Church of Rome. This latter accident has rather
unfavourably and unfairly affected later judgments of his work, which,
however, is certainly not free from party bias. It has scarcely been less
unlucky that the chief recent dealers with the matter, Professor Arber (who
projected a valuable reprint of the whole series in his _English Scholars'
Library_, and who prefaced it with a quite invaluable introductory sketch),
and Dr. Grosart, who also included divers Anti-Martinist tracts in his
privately printed _Works of Nashe_, are very strongly prejudiced on the
Puritan side.[40] Between these authorities the dispassionate inquirer who
attacks the texts for himself is likely to feel somewhat in the position of
a man who exposes himself to a cross fire. The Martin Marprelate
controversy, looked at without prejudice but with sufficient information,
shows itself as a very early example of the reckless violence of private
crotcheteers on the one hand, and of the rather considerable unwisdom of
the official defenders of order on the other. "Martin's" method was to a
certain extent a