CURRENT LITERATURE
FOURE BIRDS OF NOAH'S ARKE. By Thomas Dekker. (Blackwell. 7s. 6d.)
Tins little book, which represents Dekker's sole contribution tb devotional literature, was originally published in 1609) when the plague was at its height in London and the theatres Were closed. Dekker, like other dramatists of the day, had been forced into pamphleteering for a livelihood, and this small volume of prayers was one of four very different prose works written by him within the year. The " foure birds of Noah's arke " which here take their " foure several flights " are the dove, the eagle, the pelican, and the phoenix, symbolizing respectively innocence, courage, health, and life. The prayers arranged under these headings cover, for the period in which they were written, an amazingly wide field. Kings and magistrates are remembered, but the galley-slave the schoolboy, the prisoner, and " those that work in dangerous works, as mines and coal-pits," are not forgotten. The needs of each are visualized with the idealistic imagination of the dramatist and the poet, but at the same time with the practical understanding of one well experienced in the hard school of life, and they are expressed in language which, full of colour and rich in synonym, show that the diction and cadences of the sixteenth-century versions of the Bible were as familiar to Dekker as the racy colloquialisms of his time. In so far as his prayers are theological, they represent an outworn emphasis upon the Old Testament. But whenever Dekker speaks from his own heart—extolling, above all, the virtues of humility, simplicity, tenderness, and patience—the very spirit of the Gospels inspires his utterance. The present
volume, which is a line for line reprint of the original edition, has been charmingly produced by the Shakespeare Head Press, and the introduction by Mr. F. P. Wilson is a model of what such an introduction should be.
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