cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner,
to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper;
but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out
your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in
one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer
itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire it: but,
without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of
counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it
be none of your own, swear you made it.

This coupling of injunction and prohibition is worthy of Shakespeare or
of Sterne:

Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of
another man's, that is somewhat better, I would counsel you
then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say: "'Faith,
a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend." And this seeming to
lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or
a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, _or else that you
dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it carries
with it_.

The modern poetaster by profession knows a trick worth any two of these:
but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the
comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once
connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and the
earlier animalcule.

The "Jests to make you merry," which in Dr. Grosart's edition are placed
after "The Gull's Horn-book," though dated two years earlier, will
hardly give so much entertainment to any probable reader in our own time
as "The Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner," will give him pain to read
of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, when he remembers how
long--at the lowest computation--its author had endured the loathsome
and hideous misery which he has described with such bitter and pathetic
intensity and persistency in detail. Well may Dr. Grosart say that "it
shocks us to-day, though so far off, to think of 1598 to 1616 onwards
covering so sorrowful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a
spirit as was Dekker's"; but I think as well as hope that there is no
sort of evidence to that surely rather improbable as well as deplorable
effect. It may be "possible," but it is barely possible, that some
"seven years' continuous imprisonment" is the explanation of an
ambiguous phrase which is now incapable of any certain solution, and
c