Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/118

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THOMAS DEKKER
101

or, the Peace is Broken.—God help the Poor, the rich can shift'—were presumably designed to attract the casual reader, by what would now be called a sensational device, to consideration of the social question between rich and poor—or, as he puts it, between the rival queens, Poverty and Money. The forces on either side are drawn out and arrayed with pathetic ingenuity, and the result is indicated with a quaint and grim effect of humorous if indignant resignation. 'The Raven's Almanack' of the same year, though portentous in its menace of plague, famine, and civil war, is less noticeable for its moral and religious declamation than for its rather amusing than edifying anecdotes; which, it must again be admitted, in their mixture of jocular sensuality with somewhat ferocious humour, rather remind us of King Louis XI. than of that royal novelist's Italian models or precursors. 'A Rod for Runaways' is the title of a tract which must have somewhat perplexed the readers who came to it for practical counsel or suggestion, seeing that the very title-page calls their attention to the fact that, 'if they look back, they may behold many fearful judgments of God, sundry ways pronounced upon this city, and on several persons, both flying from it and staying in it.' What the medical gentleman to whom this tract was dedicated may have