[Footnote 34: Leader of the Choir, Captain of the Company.]
‘The spirit of her owne mault walkt in her brain-pan, so that, what with the sweetnes of gaines which shee had gotten by her Marchant { xvi} Venturers, and what with the fumes of drinke, which set her tongue in going, I found her apt for talke; and, taking hold of this opportunity, after some intreaty to discouer to mee what these vpright men, rufflers and the rest were, with their seuerall qualities and manners of life, Thus shee began.’
And what she tells Dekker is taken, all of it, from Harman’s book.
Afterwards come accounts of the five ‘Laws’ and five jumps at leap-frog mentioned on the back of the title-page, and which is quoted above, p. xv.
Lastly ‘A short Discourse of Canting,’ which is, entirely, taken from Harman, pages 84–87, below.
As I have said before, Dekker was shown up for his pilferings from Harman by Samuel Rowlands, who must, says Mr Collier in his Bibliographical Catalogue, have published his _Martin Mark-all, Beadle of Bridewell_, in or before 1609,—though no edition is known to us before 1610,—because Dekker in an address ‘To my owne Nation’ in his _Lanthorne and Candle-light_, which was published in 1609, refers to Rowlands as a ‘Beadle of Bridewell.’ ‘You shall know him,’ (says Dekker, speaking of a rival author, [that is, Samuel Rowlands] whom he calls ‘a Usurper’) ‘by his Habiliments, for (by the furniture he weares) hee will bee taken for _a Beadle of Bridewell_.’ That this ‘Usurper’ was Rowlands, we know by the latter’s saying in _Martin Mark-all_, leaf E, i back, ‘although he (the Bel-man, that is, Dekker) is bold to call me an _vsurper_; for so he doth in his last round.’
Well, from this treatise of Rowlands’, Mr Wood has made the following extracts relating to Dekker and Harman, together with Rowlands’s own list of slang words not in Dekker or Harman, and ‘the errour in his [Dekker’s] words, and true englishing of the same:’
_Martin Mark-all, Beadle of Bridewell; his defence and Answere to the Belman of London, Discouering the long-concealed Originall and Regiment of Rogues, when they first began to take head, and how they haue succeeded one the other successiuely vnto the sixe and twentieth yeare of King Henry the eight, gathered out of the Chronicle of Crackeropes, and (as they terme it) the Legend of Lossels. By S[amuel] R[owlands]._ { xvii}