poor production, with scarcely a beautiful passage in it, except the famous lyric, "Queen and Huntress." Yet in the epilogue to this play (as if conscious that his "will" must serve for the deed), the actor who delivers it is instructed to talk thus:

"To crave your favour with a begging knee,
Were to distrust the writer's faculty.

To promise better, when the next we bring,
Prorogues disgrace, commends not anything.
Stiffly to stand on this, and proudly approve
The play, might tax the maker of self-love.
I'll only speak what I have heard him say,

'By God! 't is good, and if you like 't, you may?"

The critics, naturally enough, thought this not over modest; so in the prologue to his next play, the "Poetaster" (which was written to ridicule pretension in his adversaries), he makes a prologue "in armour" tread Envy under foot, and requests the audience that, if he should once more swear his play is good, they would not charge him with "arrogance," for he "loathes" it; only he knows "the strength of his own muse," and they who object to such phrases in him are the "common spawn of ignorance," "base detractors," and "illiterate apes." In this play of the "Poetaster," the scene of which is laid in the court of Augustus, Jonson himself is "Horace," and such men as Decker and Marston the fops and dunces whom Horace satirizes; and in the epilogue, after saying that he will leave "the monsters" to their fate, he

informs his hearers, that he means to write a tragedy next time, in which he shall essay

"To strike the ear of time in those fresh strains,
As shall, beside the cunning of their ground,
Give cause to some of wonder, some despite,

And some despair, to imitate the sound."

The tragedy, accordingly, of "Sejanus" made its appearance: in an address concerning which to the reader, while noticing some old classical rules which he has not attended to, he says, " In the mean time, if, in truth of argument, dignity of persons, gravity and height of elevation, fulness and frequency of sentence, I have discharged the other offices of a tragic writer, let not the absence of those forms be imputed to me, wherein I shall give you occasion hereafter, and without my boast, to think I could better prescribe, than omit the due sense of, for want of a convenient knowledge."

In the dedication of "The Fox" to the two Universities, the writer's language, speaking of some "worthier fruits," which he hopes to put forth, is this:-"Wherein, if my hearers be true to me, I shall raise the despised head of poetry again, and stripping her out of those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form, restore her to her primitive habit, feature, and majesty, and render her worthy to be embraced and kissed of all the great and master-spirits of our world." And beautifully is this said. But Shakspeare had then nearly written all

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