Head takes no trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such thing is required of him.

Very few of the characters of _The English Rogue_ have so much as a name to their backs: they are "a prentice," "a master," "a mistress," "a servant," "a daughter," "a tapster," etc.

They are invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is a scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere thread which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion.

These beads themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of "coney-catching," over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand _fabliaux, novelle_, "jests," and so forth: and which are now flung together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their own experience.

When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of foreign countries, taken from "voyage-and-travel" books; of the tricks of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything and everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted in.