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
capable of many an interpretation far less deplorable than this. But in
this professedly comic pamphlet there are passages as tragic, if not as
powerful, as any in the immortal pages of _Pickwick_ and _Little
Dorrit_ which 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 honor! 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