his plays, AND WAS STILL WRITING! The three preceding years are supposed to have produced "Macbeth," "Lear," and "Othello!" Marston, Decker, Chapman, Drayton, Middleton, Webster; in short, almost all those whom posterity admires or reverences under the title of the Old English Dramatists, were writing also; and it was but nine years before, that Spenser had published the second part of the "Fairie Queene," in which the "despised head of poetry" had been set up with the lustre of an everlasting sun, and such as surely had not let darkness in upon the land again, followed as it was by all those dramatic lights, and the double or triple sun of Shakspeare himself! The "master-spirits" whom Ben speaks of, must at once have laughed at the vanity, and been sorry for the genius, of the man who could so talk in such an age. Above all, what could Shakspeare have thought of his wayward, his learned, but in these respects certainly not very wise, nor very friendly, friend? We could quote similar evidences of the most preposterous self-love from the prologues or epilogues, or the body, of the greater part of his plays: but we tire of the task, especially when we think, not only of the genius which did itself as well as others such injustice, but of the good-nature that lay at the bottom of his very arrogance and envy; for, that he strongly felt the passion of envy, of which he is always accusing others, we have as little doubt, as that he struggled against and surmounted it at frequent and glorious intervals;

and, besides his saying more things in praise as well as blame of his contemporaries than any man living (partly perhaps in his assumed right of censor, but much also out of a joviality of good-will) his lines to the memory of Shakspeare do as much honour to the final goodness of his heart, as to the grace and dignity of his style and imagination.

But even his friends as well as enemies thought him immodest and arrogant, and publicly lamented it. See what Randolph and Carew, as well as Owen Feltham, say of him in their responses to his famous ode, beginning,

"Come, leave the loathed stage,

And the more loathsome age!"

an invective, which he wrote because one of his plays had been damned.

In short, Ben is an anomaly in the list of great poets; and we can only account for him, as for a greater (Dante,-who has contrived to make his muse more grandly disagreeable), by supposing that his nature included the contradictions of some illmatched progenitors, and that, while he had a grace for one parent or ancestor, he had a slut and fury for another.

Nor should we have taken these liberties with so great a name, but in our zeal for the greater names of truth and justice. Amicus, Ben Jonson; amicus every clever critic, whether in Whig paper or Tory; but magis amica, Proof.

If asked to give our opinion of Ben Jonson's powers in general, we should say that he was a poet of a high order, as far as learning, fancy, and an absolute rage of ambition, could conspire to make him one; but that he never touched at the highest, except by violent efforts, and during the greatest felicity of his sense of success. The material so predominated in him over the spiritual,—the sensual over the sentimental,—that he was more social than loving, and far more wilful and fanciful than imaginative. Desiring the strongest immediate effect, rather than the best effect, he subserved by wholesale in his comedies to the grossness and common-place of the very multitude whom he hectored; and in love with whatsoever he knew or uttered, he set learning above feeling in writing his tragedies, and never knew when to leave off, whether in tragedy or comedy. His style is more clear and correct than impassioned, and only rises above a certain level at remarkable intervals, when he is heated by a sense of luxury or domination. He betrays what was weak in himself, and even a secret misgiving, by incessant attacks upon the weakness and envy of others; and, in his highest moods, instead of the healthy, serene, and good-natured might of Shakspeare, has something of a puffed and uneasy pomp, a bigness instead of greatness, analogous to his gross habit of body: nor, when you think of him at any time, can you well separate the idea from that of the assuming scholar and the flustered

man of taverns. But the wonder after all is, that, having such a superfœtation of art in him, he had still so much nature; and that the divine bully of the old English Parnassus could be, whenever he chose it, one of the most elegant of men.

POPE, IN SOME LIGHTS IN WHICH HE IS NOT USUALLY REGARDED.

Unfaded interest of the subject of Pope and others.—Shakspeare not equally at home with modern life, though more so with general humanity.-Letters of Pope.-A wood-engraving a century ago.-Pope with a young lady in a stage-coach.— Dining with maids of honour.-Riding to Oxford by moonlight.-Lovability not dependent on shape.-Insincerity not always what it is taken for.-Whigs, Tories, and Catholics. —Masterly exposition of the reason why people live uncomfortably together.-"Rondeaulx," and a Rondeau.

THOSE Who have been conversant in early life with Pope and the other wits of Queen Anne, together with the Bellendens, Herveys, Lady Suffolks, and other feminities, are never tired of hearing of them afterwards, let their subsequent studies be as lofty as they may in the comparison. We can no more acquire a dislike to them, than we can give up a regard for the goods and chattels to which we

VOL. II.

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