"A Strange
Horse-race" between various virtues and vices gives occasion for the
display of some allegoric ingenuity and much indefatigable but fatiguing
pertinacity in the exposure of the more exalted swindlers of the
age--the crafty bankrupts who anticipated the era of the Merdles
described by Dickens, but who can hardly have done much immediate injury
to a capitalist of the rank of Dekker. Here too there are glimpses of
inventive spirit and humorous ingenuity; but the insufferable iteration
of jocose demonology and infernal burlesque might tempt the most patient
and the most curious of readers to devote the author, with imprecations
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.
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