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MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS.

SOCIAL MORALITY.

SUCKLING AND BEN JONSON.

Curious instance of variability in moral opinion.-Pope's tradition of Sir John Suckling and the cards.-New edition of Ben Jonson, and samples of the genius and arrogance of that writer, with a summary of his poetical character.

It is curious to see the opinion entertained in every successive age respecting the unimproveability or unalterableness of its prevailing theory of morals, compared with their actual fluctuation. The " philosopher owns with a sigh" (as Gibbon would have phrased it, for we believe there is an ultimate preferment for mankind in this tendency to follow a fashion), that a court, a king, the example of a single ruling individual, can affect the virtues of an age far beyond the whole mass of their ordinary practisers, -at least, so as to give the moral colour to the period, and throw the bias in favour of this or that

VOL. II.

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tendency. The staid habits of George III., in certain respects, produced a corresponding profession of them throughout the country; but the case was different in the reigns of the Georges before him, who, dull individuals as they were, kept mistresses like their sprightlier predecessors. Even William III. had a mistress. In Cromwell's time, the prevailing moral strength, or virtus, consisted in a sense of religion. It may be answered, that these fashions, as far as they were such, did not influence either the practice or opinions of conscientious men; but our self-love would be mistaken in that conclusion. Our remote ancestors were not the less cannibals because we shudder at the idea of dining upon Jones; neither would some very near ones fail to startle us with their opinions upon matters, which we take it for granted, they regarded in the same light as ourselves. No longer than a hundred years back, and in the mouth of no less a moralist than Pope, we find the following puzzling bit of information respecting Sir John Suckling:

"Suckling was an immoral man, as well as debauched."

Now, where is the distinction, in our present moral system, between immorality and debauchery? All immorality is not debauchery, but all debauchery we hold to be immoral. What could Pope mean?

Why, he meant that Sir John cheated at cards. Neither his drinking nor his gallantry were to be understood as affecting his moral character. It

was the use of cards with marks upon them that was to deprive debauchery of its good name! "The story of the French cards," continues Pope, in explanation of his above remark, " was told me by the late Duke of Buckingham; and he had it from old Lady Dorset herself.”

We are by no means convinced, by the way, that Suckling gave into such a disgraceful practice, merely because the Duke of Buckingham was told so by "old Lady Dorset."

“That lady,” resumes the poet (he is talking to Spence, and these stories are from "Spence's Anecdotes”), “took a very odd pride in boasting of her familiarities with Sir John Suckling. She is the mistress and goddess in his poems; and several of those pieces were given by herself to the printer. This the Duke of Buckingham used to give as one instance of the fondness she had to let the world know how well they were acquainted."

“To be taken, to be seen,

These have crimes accounted been."

The age was not scrupulous about the fact, but it was held very wrong to mention it; and hence Lady Dorset was accounted a loose speaker, and doubtless not to be quite trusted. The dishonest cards themselves did not affect the pride she took in the cardplayer. Query, how far such a woman was to be believed in anything? But the most curious part of the business remains what it was-to-wit, Pope's

own discrepation of immorality from debauchery. And as the Reverend Mr. Spence expresses no amazement at the passage, it will be hardly unfair to conclude that he saw nothing in it to surprise him. We believe we have already observed somewhere, that Swift, who was a dignitary of the church, was intimate with the reputed mistresses of two kings, the Countess of Suffolk, George the Second's favourite, and the Countess of Orkney, King William's. The latter he pronounced to be the "wisest woman he ever knew," as the former was declared by all her friends to be one of the most amiable. But we may see how little gallantry was thought ill of, in the epistolary correspondences of those times, Pope's included, and in the encouraging banter, for instance, which he gives on the subject to his friend Gay, whose whole life appears to have been passed in a good-humoured sensualism. See also how Pope, and Swift, and others, trumped up Lord Bolingbroke for a philosopher!—a man who, besides being profound in nothing but what may be called the elegant extracts of common-place, was one of the most debauched of men of the world.

As we have touched upon Spence's Anecdotes, we might as well look farther into the book, since it is a very fit one to notice in these articles, and occasions many a pleasant chat at a fireside. The late republication of the works of Ben Jonson has given a fresh interest to such remarks as the following:

"It was a general opinion (says Pope) that Ben

Jonson and Shakspeare lived in enmity against one another. Betterton has assured me often, that there was nothing in it, and that such a supposition was founded only on the two parties, which in their lifetime listed under one, and endeavoured to lessen the character of the other mutually. Dryden used to think, that the verses Jonson made on Shakspeare's death had something of satire at the bottom; for my part I can't discover anything like it in them."

We are now reading Ben Jonson through in Mr. Moxon's beautiful edition, and having finished nearly all his dramas, and not long since read his miscellaneous poems, and our memory serving us pretty well for what remains to be re-perused, our impression of him is, at all events, fresh upon us.

A critic in the Times,* whose pen is otherwise so good as to make us regret its party bias, appears to us to have treated Jonson's new editor, Mr. Barry Cornwall, with a very unjustifiable air of scorn and indignation, both as if he had no right to speak of Ben Jonson at all, and as if he possessed no merit as a writer himself. It is not necessary to the reputation of Mr. Cornwall that we should undertake to defend what such critics as Lamb and Hazlitt have admired. The writer of the beautiful "Dramatic Sketches" (which were the first to restore the quick impulsive dialogue of the old poets), and a greater number of excellent songs than have been written by any man living except Mr. Moore, has surely every

* 1839.

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