First available in 1886, the present volume is an attempt to lessen the obscurity of that tract of international literature in which Barclay's Ship of Fools, Marlowe's Faustus, and Decker's Gul’s Horn-booke are luminous but ‘isolated points’. To these isolated points the author has endeavoured to supply in some degree both the intervening detail and the continuous background; in other words, to give a connected and intelligible account of the phases of German literary influence upon England in the sixteenth century.
