or invocations as elaborate as his own, to the spiritual potentate whose
"last will and testament" is transcribed into the text of this pamphlet.

In "The Dead Term" such a reader will find himself more or less relieved
by the return of his author to a more terrene and realistic sort of
allegory. This recriminatory dialogue between the London and the
Westminster of 1608 is now and then rather flatulent in its reciprocity
of rhetoric, but is enlivened by an occasional breath of genuine
eloquence, and redeemed by touches of historic or social interest. The
title and motto of the next year's pamphlet--"Work for Armourers; 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 humor, 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 thought of the author's logic and theology, we can only