deal with a later but a too similar phase of prison discipline and tradition:
The thing that complained was a man:—'Thy days have gone over thee like the dreams of a fool, thy nights like the watchings of a madman.—Oh sacred liberty! with how little devotion do men come into thy temples, when they cannot bestow upon thee too much honour! Thy embracements are more delicate than those of a young bride with her lover, and to be divorced from thee is half to be damned! For what else is a prison but the very next door to hell? It is a man's grave, wherein he walks alive: it is a sea wherein he is always shipwrackt: it is a lodging built out of the world: it is a wilderness where all that wander up and down grow wild, and all that come into it are devoured.'
In Dekker's next pamphlet, his 'Dream,' there are perhaps half a dozen tolerably smooth and vigorous couplets immersed among many more vacuous and vehement in the intensity of their impotence than any reader and admirer of his more happily inspired verse could be expected to believe without evidence adduced. Of imagination, faith, or fancy, the ugly futility of this infernal vision has not—unless I have sought more than once for it in vain—a single saving trace or compensating shadow.
Two years after he had tried his hand at an imitation of Nash, Dekker issued the first of the pamphlets in which he attempted to take up
