right in the world, dramatic and lyrical, to speak of Ben Jonson, unless you were to except that sympathy with his coarseness and his love of the caustic, which, saving a poor verbal tact, and a worship of authority, was the only qualification for a critical sense of him possessed by the petulant and presumptuous Gifford. But the Times' critic has been led perhaps to this depreciation of the new editor, by thinking he has greatly undervalued a favourite author: while, on the other hand, we ourselves cannot but think that Mr. Cornwall, with all his admiration of him, has yet somewhat depreciated Ben Jonson in consequence of his over-valuement by others. It appears to us, that he does not do justice to the serious part of him,—to the grandeur, for example, which is often to be found in his graver writing, both as to thought and style, sometimes, we think, amounting even to the "sublime," which is a quality our poet totally denies him. We would instance that answer of Cethegus to Catiline, when the latter says— "Who would not fall, with all the world about him? CETHEGUS.-Not I, that would stand on it, when it falls." Also the passage where it is said of Catiline, advancing with his army, "The day grew black with him, And Fate descended nearer to the earth;" and the other in which he is described as coming on "Not with the face Of any man, but of a public ruin ;" (though we think we have read that in some Latin author, and indeed it is at all times difficult to say where Jonson has not been borrowing). The vindictive quietness of Cicero's direction to the lictors to put Statilius and Gabinius to death, is very like a sublimation above the highest ordinary excitability of human resentment. Marlowe might have written it "Take them To your cold hands, and let them feel death from you." And the rising of the ghost of Sylla, by way of prologue to this play, uttering, as he rises, "Dost thou not feel me, ROME?" appears to us decidedly sublime,-making thus the evil spirit of one man equal to the great city, and to all the horrors that are about to darken it. Nor is the opening of the speech of Envy, as prologue to the "Poetaster," far from something of a like elevation. The accumulated passion, in her shape, thinks herself warranted to insult the light, and her insult is very grand : “Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves, Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness." Milton has been here, and in numerous other places, imitating his learned and lofty-tongued predecessor. On the other hand, besides acknowledging the greatness of his powers in general, and ranking him as second only in his age to Shakspeare (which might surely propitiate the fondest partizan), Mr. Cornwall has done ample and eloquent justice to Jonson's powers as a satirist, to his elegant learning, and his profuse and graceful fancy; and if he objects to his tediousness, coarseness, and boasting, and to the praise emphatically bestowed on him for "judgment," we are compelled to say, in spite of our admiration and even love of the old poet (for it is difficult to help loving those to whom we are indebted for great pleasures) that we think he might have spoken more strongly on all those points, and not been either unjust or immodest. If Jonson, in spite of his airs of independence, had not been a Tory poet and a court flatterer, the Tory critics (we do not say the present one, but the race in general,) would have trampled upon him for his arrogance, quite as much as they have exalted him. Even Gifford would have insulted him, though he evidently liked him out of a vanity of self-love, as well as from the sympathies above mentioned. The right equilibrium in Jonson's mind was so far overborne by his leaning to power in preference to the beautiful (which is an inconsistency, and, so to speak, unnaturalness in the poetical condition), that while he was ever huffing and lecturing the very audiences that came to hear him, he could not help consulting the worst taste of their majorities, and writing whole plays, like "Bartholomew Fair," full of the absolutest, and sometimes loathsomest, trash, to show that he was as strong as their united vulgar knowledges; and, he might have added, as dull in his condescension to boot. And as to the long-disputed question, whether he was arrogant or not, and a "swaggerer" (which indeed, as Charles Lamb has intimated, might be shown, after a certain sublimated fashion, in the very characters in which he chiefly excelled-Sir Epicure Mammon, Bobadil, &c., and, it may be added, Catiline and Sejanus too), how anybody, who ever read his plays, could have doubted, or affected to doubt it, is a puzzle that can only be accounted for, upon what accounts for any critical phenomenon,-party or personal feeling. "That Ben Jonson," says the critic in the Times, "had not the most equable temper in the world— that he had a high opinion of his own capacity, and saw no reason to conceal it, we at once admit: but such defects are often the concomitants of generous and noble minds; and we should recollect that, if he was fierce when assailed, few men have had equal provocation during life, or baser injustice done to their memory. Jonson's enemies, to whom Mr. Barry Cornwall has a hankering wish to lean, seem to have been a mere set of obscure authors dependent on the theatre, to whose reputation Jonson's success was perhaps injurious, and whose minds, at least, seem to have been embittered by it. Horace, Ovid, Aristophanes, and twenty other poets, have praised themselves more highly than he did. Milton, who seems to have had Ben Jonson's works much in his hands, his style, both in verse and prose, being evidently modelled on that of his predecessor, imitated him in this likewise." Now, what "provocation" Jonson had during his life, which his own assumptions did not originate, is yet, we believe, to be ascertained. The obscure authors, of whom his enemies are here made to consist, were, by his own showing (as well by allusion as by acknowledged characterization), some, perhaps all, of the most admired of our old English dramatists then writing, with the exception of Beaumont and Fletcher. Self-praise was a fashion in ancient poetry, but has never been understood as more allowable to modern imitation than the practice of self-murder, which was also an ancient fashion; and if Milton, amidst his glorious pedantries (of the better spirit of which, as well as a worse, Jonson must be allowed to have partaken) permitted himself to indulge in personal boasting, it was in a very different style indeed from that of his predecessor, as the reader may judge from the following specimens. Ben says of his muse, "The garland that she wears their hands must twine, Who can both censure, understand, define What merit is: then cast those piercing rays Round as a crown, instead of honour'd bays, Prologue to CYNTHIA'S REVELS. And "Cynthia's Revels" is, upon the whole, a very |