# A Study of Ben Jonson/Miscellaneous Works

II
MISCELLANEOUS WORKS
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II
MISCELLANEOUS WORKS
Among the great dramatic poets of the Shakespearean age there are several who would still have a claim to enduring remembrance as poets, even had they never written a line for the theatre: there are two only who would hold a high rank among the masters of English prose. For Nash was not a poet or a dramatist who wandered occasionally into prose by way of change or diversion: he was a master of prose who strayed now and then into lyric or dramatic verse. Heywood, Middleton, and Ford have left us more or less curious and valuable works in prose; essays and pamphlets or chronicles and compilations: but these are works of historic interest rather than literary merit; or, if this be too strong and sweeping an expression, they are works of less intrinsic than empirical value. But if all his plays were lost to us, the author of Ben Jonson's ​Explorata, or Discoveries, would yet retain a seat among English prose-writers beside the author of Bacon's Essays: the author of The Gull's Hornbook and The Bachelors Banquet would still stand high in the foremost rank of English humourists.
The book of epigrams published by Jonson in the collected edition of his select works Epigrams.up to the date of the year 1616 is by no means an attractive introduction or an alluring prelude to the voluminous collection of miscellanies which in all modern editions it precedes. 'It is to be lamented', in Gifford's opinion, 'on many accounts,' that the author has not left us 'a further selection.' It is in my opinion to be deplored that he should have left us so large a selection—if that be the proper term—as he has seen fit to bequeath to a naturally and happily limited set of readers. 'Sunt bona, sunt quædam mediocria, sunt mala plura': and the worst are so bad, so foul if not so dull, so stupid if not so filthy, that the student stands aghast with astonishment at the self-deceiving capacity of a writer who could prefix to such a collection the vaunt that his book was 'not covetous of least self-fame'—'much less' prone to indulgence in 'beastly phrase' No man can ever have been less ​amenable than Sir Walter Scott to the infamous charge of Puritanism or prudery; and it is he who has left on record his opinion that 'surely that coarseness of taste which tainted Ben Jonson's powerful mind is proved from his writings. Many authors of that age are indecent, but Jonson is filthy and gross in his pleasantry, and indulges himself in using the language of scavengers and nightmen,' I will only add that the evidence of this is flagrant in certain pages which I never forced myself to read through till I had undertaken to give a full and fair account—to the best of my ability—of Ben Jonson's complete works. How far poetry may be permitted to go in the line of sensual pleasure or sexual emotion may be debatable between the disciples of Ariosto and the disciples of Milton; but all English readers, I trust, will agree with me that coprology should be left to Frenchmen. Among them—that is, of course, among the baser sort of them—that unsavoury science will seemingly never lack disciples of the most nauseous, the most abject, the most deliberate bestiality. It is nothing less than lamentable that so great an English writer as Ben Jonson should ever have taken the plunge of a Parisian diver into the cesspool: but it is as ​necessary to register as it is natural to deplore the detestable fact that he did so. The collection of his epigrams which bears only too noisome witness to this fact is nevertheless by no means devoid of valuable and admirable components. The sixty-fifth, a palinode or recantation of some previous panegyric, is very spirited and vigorous; and the verses of panegyric which precede and follow it are wanting neither in force nor in point. The poem 'on Lucy Countess of Bedford,' for which Gifford seems hardly able to find words adequate to his admiration, would be worthy of very high praise if the texture of its expression and versification were unstiffened and undisfigured by the clumsy license of awkward inversions. The New Cry, a brief and brilliant satire on political gossips of the gobemouche order, has one couplet worthy of Dryden himself, descriptive of such pretenders to statecraft as
talk reserved, locked up, and full of fear, Nay, ask you how the day goes, in your ear; Keep a Star-chamber sentence close twelve days, And whisper what a Proclamation says.
The epitaph on little Salathiel Pavy, who had acted under his own name in the induction to Cynthia's Revels, is as deservedly famous as any ​minor work of Jonson's; for sweetness and simplicity it has few if any equals among his lyrical attempts.
Of the fifteen lyric or elegiac poems which compose The Forest, there is none that is not worthy of all but the highest praise; The Forest.there is none that is worthy of the highest. To come so near so often and never to touch the goal of lyric triumph has never been the fortune and the misfortune of any other poet. Vigour of thought, purity of phrase, condensed and polished rhetoric, refined and appropriate eloquence, studious and serious felicity of expression, finished and fortunate elaboration of verse, might have been considered as qualities sufficient to secure a triumph for the poet in whose work all these excellent attributes are united and displayed; and we cannot wonder that younger men who had come within the circle of his personal influence should have thought that the combination of them all must ensure to their possessor a place above all his possible compeers. But among the humblest and most devout of these prostrate enthusiasts was one who had but to lay an idle and reckless hand on the instrument which hardly would answer the touch of his master's at all, and the very note of ​lyric poetry as it should be—as it was in the beginning, as it is, and as it will be for ever—responded on the instant to the instinctive intelligence of his touch. As we turn from Gray to Collins, as we turn from Wordsworth to Coleridge, as we turn from Byron to Shelley, so do we turn from Jonson to Herrick; and so do we recognize the lyric poet as distinguished from the writer who may or may not have every gift but one in higher development of excellence and in fuller perfection of power, but who is utterly and absolutely transcended and shone down by his probably unconscious competitor on the proper and peculiar ground of pure and simple poetry.
But the special peculiarity of the case now before us is that it was so much the greater man who was distanced and eclipsed; and this not merely by a minor poet, but by a humble admirer and a studious disciple of his own. Herrick, as a writer of elegies, epithalamiums, panegyrical or complimentary verses, is as plainly and as openly an imitator of his model as ever was the merest parasite of any leading poet, from the days of Chaucer and his satellites to the days of Tennyson and his. No Lydgate or Lytton was ever more obsequious in his discipleship; but for all his ​loving and loyal protestations of passionate humility and of ardent reverence, we see at every turn, at every step, at every change of note, that what the master could not do the pupil can. When Chapman set sail after Marlowe, he went floundering and lurching in the wake of a vessel that went straight and smooth before the fullest and the fairest wind of song; but when Herrick follows Jonson the manner of movement or the method of progression is reversed. Macaulay, in a well-known passage, has spoken of Ben Jonson's 'rugged rhymes'; but rugged is not exactly the most appropriate epithet. Donne is rugged: Jonson is stiff. And if ruggedness of verse is a damaging blemish, stiffness of verse is a destructive infirmity. Underwoods.Ruggedness is curable; witness Donne's Anniversaries: stiffness is incurable; witness Jonson's Underwoods. In these, as in the preceding series called The Forest, there is so lavish a display of such various powers as cannot but excite the admiration they demand and deserve. They have every quality, their author would undoubtedly have maintained, that a student of poetry ought to expect and to applaud. What they want is that magic without which the very best verse is as far beneath the very best prose as the verse ​which has it is above all prose that ever was or ever can be written. And there never was a generation of Englishmen in which this magic was a gift so common as it was in Jonson's. We have but to open either of the priceless volumes which we owe to the exquisite taste and the untiring devotion of Mr. Bullen, and we shall come upon scores after scores of 'lyrics from Elizabethan songbooks' as far beyond comparison with the very best of Jonson's as Shakespeare is beyond comparison with Shirley, as Milton is beyond comparison with Glover, or as Coleridge is beyond comparison with Southey. There is exceptional ease of movement, exceptional grace of expression, in the lyric which evoked from Gifford the 'free' avowal, 'if it be not the most beautiful song in the language, I know not, for my part, where it is to be found.' Who on earth, then or now, would ever have supposed that the worthy Gifford did? But any one who does know anything more of the matter than the satirist and reviewer whose own amatory verses were 'lazy as Scheldt and cold as Don' will acknowledge that it would be difficult to enumerate the names of poets contemporary with Jonson, from Frank Davison to Robin Herrick, who have left us songs at least as beautiful as that beginning—'Oh do not wanton with those eyes, Lest I be sick ​with seeing.' And in 'the admirable Epode,' as Gifford calls it, which concludes Ben Jonson's contributions to Love's Martyr, though there is remarkable energy of expression, the irregularity and inequality of style are at least as conspicuous as the occasional vigour and the casual felicity of phrase. But if all were as good as the best passages this early poem of Jonson's would undoubtedly be very good indeed. Take for instance the description or definition of true love:
That is an essence far more gentle, fine, Pure, perfect, nay divine;
It is a golden chain let down from heaven, Whose links are bright and even,
That falls like sleep on lovers.
Again:
O, who is he that in this peace enjoys
The elixir of all joys, (A form more fresh than are the Eden bowers And lasting as her flowers; Richer than time, and as time's virtue rare,
Sober as saddest care, A fixed thought, an eye untaught to glance;)
Who, blest with such high chance, Would at suggestion of a steep desire
Cast himself from the spire Of all his happiness?
​And few of Jonson's many moral or gnomic passages are finer than the following;
He that for love of goodness hateth ill
Is more crown-worthy still Than he which for sin's penalty forbears
His heart sins, though he fears.
This metre, though very liable to the danger of monotony, is to my ear very pleasant; but that of the much admired and doubtless admirable address to Sir Robert Wroth is much less so. This poem is as good and sufficient an example of the author's ability and inability as could be found in the whole range of his elegiac or lyric works. It has excellent and evident qualities of style; energy and purity, clearness and sufficiency, simplicity and polish; but it is wanting in charm. Grace, attraction, fascination, the typical and essential properties of verse, it has not. Were Jonson to be placed among the gods of song, we should have to say of him what Æschylus says of Death—
μόνου δἐ Πειθὼ δαιμόνων ἀποστατεῐ.
The spirit of persuasive enchantment, the goddess of entrancing inspiration, kept aloof from him alone of all his peers or rivals. To men far weaker, to poets not worthy to be named with him ​on the score of creative power, she gave the gift which from him was all but utterly withheld. And therefore it is that his place is not beside Shakespeare, Milton, or Shelley, but merely above Dryden, Byron, and Crabbe. The verses on Penshurst are among his best, wanting neither in grace of form nor stateliness of sound, if too surely wanting in the indefinable quality of distinction or inspiration: and the farewell to the world has a savour of George Herbert's style about it which suggests that the sacred poet must have been a sometime student of the secular. Beaumont, again, must have taken as a model of his lighter lyric style the bright and ringing verses on the proposition 'that women are but men's shadows.' The opening couplet of the striking address 'to Heaven' has been, it seems to me, misunderstood by Gifford; the meaning is not—'Can I not think of God without its making me melancholy?' but 'Can I not think of God without its being imputed or set down by others to a fit of dejection?' The few sacred poems which open the posthumous collection of his miscellaneous verse are far inferior to the best of Herrick's Noble Numbers; although the second of the three must probably have served the minor poet as an occasional model.
​The Celebration of Charis in ten lyric pieces would be a graceful example of Jonson's lighter and brighter inspiration if the ten were reduced to eight. His anapæsts are actually worse than Shelley's: which hope would fain have assumed and charity would fain have believed to be impossible. 'We will take our plan from the new world of man, and our work shall be called the Pro-me-the-an'—even the hideous and excruciating cacophony of that horrible sentence is not so utterly inconceivable as verse, is not so fearfully and wonderfully immetrical as this: 'And from her arched brows such a grace sheds itself through the face.' The wheeziest of barrel-organs, the most broken-winded of bagpipes, grinds or snorts out sweeter melody than that. But the heptasyllabic verses among which this monstrous abortion rears its amorphous head are better than might have been expected; not, as Gifford says of one example, 'above all praise,' but creditable at their best and tolerable at their worst.
The miscellaneous verses collected under the pretty and appropriate name of Underwoods comprise more than a few of Ben Jonson's happiest and most finished examples of lyric, elegiac, and gnomic or didactic poetry; and likewise not a ​little of such rigid and frigid work as makes us regret the too strenuous and habitual application of so devoted a literary craftsman to his professional round of labour. The fifth of these poems, A Nymph's Passion, is not only pretty and ingenious, but in the structure of its peculiar stanza may remind a modern reader of some among the many metrical experiments or inventions of a more exquisite and spontaneous lyric poet, Miss Christina Rossetti. The verses 'on a lover's dust, made sand for an hour-glass,' just come short of excellence in their fantastic way; those on his picture are something more than smooth and neat; those against jealousy are exceptionally sweet and spontaneous, again recalling the manner of the poetess just mentioned; with a touch of something like Shelley's—
I wish the sun should shine On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as mine—
and also of something like George Herbert's at his best. The Dream is one of Jonson's most happily inspired and most happily expressed fancies; the close of it is for once not less than charming.
Of the various elegies and epistles included in ​this collection it need only be said that there is much thoughtful and powerful writing in most if not in all of them, with occasional phrases or couplets of rare felicity, and here and there a noble note of enthusiasm or a masterly touch of satire. In the epistle to Sir Edward Sackvile the sketch of the 'infants of the sword' who 'give thanks by stealth' and in whispers for benefits which they are ready to disown with imprecations in public is worthy of the hand which drew Bobadil and Tucca. The sonnet to Lady Mary Wroth, good in itself, is characteristic in its preference of the orthodox Italian structure to the English or Shakespearean form. The four very powerful and remarkable elegies on a lover's quarrel and separation I should be inclined to attribute rather to Donne than to Jonson; their earnest passion, their quaint frankness, their verbal violence, their eccentric ardour of expression, at once unabashed and vehement, spontaneous and ingenious, are all of them typical characteristics of the future dean in the secular and irregular days of his hot poetic youth. The fourth and final poem of the little series is especially impressive and attractive. The turn of the sentences and the cadence of the verse are no less significant ​of the authorship than is a noble couplet in the poem immediately preceding them—which would at once be recognized by a competent reader as Jonson's:
So may the fruitful vine my temples steep,
And fame wake for me when I yield to sleep!
The 'epistle answering to one that asked to be sealed of the tribe of Ben' is better in spirit than in execution; manful, straightforward, and upright. The 'epigram' or rather satire 'on the Court Pucelle' goes beyond even the license assumed by Pope in the virulent ferocity of its personal attack on a woman. This may be explained, or at least illustrated, by the fact that Ben Jonson's views regarding womanhood in general were radically cynical though externally chivalrous: a charge which can be brought against no other poet or dramatist of his age. He could pay more splendid compliments than any of them to this or that particular woman; the deathless epitaph on 'Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother,' is but the crowning flower of a garland, the central jewel of a set; but no man has said coarser (I had well-nigh written, viler) things against the sex to which these exceptionally honoured patronesses belonged. This characteristic is not more significant than the ​corresponding evidence given by comparison of his readiness to congratulate and commend other poets and poeticules for work not always worthy of his notice, and at the same time to indulge in such sweeping denunciation of all contemporary poetry as would not have misbecome the utterance of incarnate envy—in other words, as might have fallen from the lips of Byron. See, for one most flagrant and glaring example of what might seem the very lunacy of malignity, a passage in what Coleridge has justly called 'his splendid dedication of The Fox' Here he talks of raising 'the despised head of poetry again, and stripping her out of those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form.' It is difficult to resist a temptation to emulate Ben Jonson's own utmost vehemence of language when we remember that this sentence is dated the 11th of February, 1607. Nine years before the death of Shakespeare the greatest writer of all time, the most wonderful human creature of all ages, was in the very zenith of his powers and his glory. And this was a contemporary poet's view of the condition of contemporary poetry. He was not more unlucky as a courtier and a prophet when he proclaimed the triumphant security of the English government ​as twice ensured by the birth of the future King James II.
The memorial ode on the death of Sir Henry Morison has thoughtful and powerful touches in it, as well as one stanza so far above the rest that it gains by a process which would impair its effect if the poem were on the whole even a tolerably good one. The famous lines on 'the plant and flower of light' can be far better enjoyed when cut away from the context. The opening is as eccentrically execrable as the epode of the solitary strophe which redeems from all but unqualified execration a poem in which Gifford finds 'the very soul of Pindar'—whose reputation would in that case be the most inexplicable of riddles. Far purer in style and far more equable in metre is the 'ode gratulatory' to Lord Weston; and the 'epithalamion' on the marriage of that nobleman's son, though not without inequalities, crudities, and platitudes, is on the whole a fine and dignified example of ceremonial poetry. Another of the laureate's best effusions of official verse is the short ode which bids his 'gentle Muse' rouse herself to celebrate the king's birthday, 'though now our green conceits be grey,' with good wishes which have a tragic ring in the modern reader's ear. A ​more unequal poem than the elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester is hardly to be found anywhere; but the finest passages are noble indeed. The elegiac poems on the famous demi-mondaine Venetia Stanley, who made a comparatively respectable end as Lady Digby, are equally startling and amusing in their attribution to that heroine of a character which would justify the beatification if not the canonization of its immaculate possessor. The first of these is chiefly remarkable for a singular Scotticism—'where Seraphim take tent of ordering all'; the fragment of the second, as an early attempt—I know not whether it be the earliest—to introduce the terza rima into English verse. There are one or two fine stanzas in the fourth, and the Apotheosis of this singular saint has a few good couplets; it contains, however, probably the most horrible and barbarous instance of inversion which the violated language can display:
Such indefinable enormities as this cannot but incline us to think that this great scholar, this laurelled invader and conqueror of every field and every province of classic learning, was intus et in ​cute an irreclaimable and incurable barbarian. And assuredly this impression will be neither removed nor modified when we come to examine his translations from Latin poetry. If the report is to be believed which attributes to Ben Jonson the avowal of an opinion that above all things he excelled in translation, Translations.it must be admitted that for once the foolish theory which represents men of genius as incapable of recognizing what is or is not their best work or their most distinguishing faculty is justified and exemplified after a fashion so memorable that the exception must be invoked to prove the rule. For a worse translator than Ben Jonson never committed a double outrage on two languages at once, I should be reluctant to quote examples of this lamentable truth, if it were not necessary to vindicate his contemporaries from such an imputation as is conveyed in the general belief that his method of translation is merely the method of his age. The fact is that it is as exceptionally abominable as his genius, when working on its own proper and original lines, is exceptionally admirable. I am no great lover of Horace, but I cannot pretend to think that the words
Si torrere jecur quaeris idoneum
​are adequately rendered by the words
If a fit liver thou dost seek to toast.
Fate and fire did a double injury, if not a double injustice, to Ben Jonson, when his commentary on Horace's Art of Poetry was consumed and his translation of the text preserved. The commentary in which Donne was represented under the name of Criticus must have been one of the most interesting and valuable of Jonson's prose works: the translation is one of those miracles of incompetence, incongruity, and insensibility, which must be seen to be believed. It may be admitted that there is a very happy instance of exact and pointed rendering from the ninth and tenth lines of the original in the eleventh and twelfth lines of the translation.
Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.
Scimus.
Pope himself could not have rendered this well-known passage more neatly, more smoothly, more perfectly and more happily than thus—
But equal power to painter and to poet
Of daring all hath still been given: we know it.
And in the seventh line following we come upon this indescribable horror—an abomination of which ​Abraham Fraunce or Gabriel Harvey would by charitable readers have been considered incapable: as perhaps indeed they were.
A scarlet piece or two stitch'd in; when or Diana's grove or altar, with the bor- D'ring circles of swift waters, &c., &c.
'The bellman writes better verses,' said Mr. Osbaldistone, when he threw poor Frank's away. Walt Whitman writes no worse, a modern critic will reflect on reading these.
The version of one of Martial's gracefullest epigrams flows more pleasantly than usual till it ends with a horrible jolt, thus:—
He that but living half his days dies such, Makes his life longer than 'twas given him, much.
And Echo answers—Much! Gifford, however, waxes ecstatic over these eight lines. 'It is the most beautiful of all the versions of this elegant poem,' and, if we may believe him, 'clearly and fully expresses the whole of its meaning.' Witness the second line—
Thou worthy in eternal flower to fare.
That is no more English than it is Latin—no more accurate than it is intelligible. The original is as simple as it is lovely:—
Liber in æternâ vivere digne rosâ.
​It would be worse than superfluous to look among his other versions from Horace for further evidence of Ben Jonson's incomparable incompetence as a translator, But as this has been hitherto very insufficiently insisted on,—his reputation as a poet and a scholar standing apparently between the evidence of this fact and the recognition of it,—I will give one crowning example from The Poetaster. This is what Virgil is represented as reading to Augustus—and Augustus as hearing without a shriek of agony and horror.
Meanwhile the skies 'gan thunder, and in tail Of that fell pouring storms of sleet and hail.
'In tail of that'! Proh Deûm atque hominum fidem! And it is Virgil—Virgil, of all men and all poets—to whom his traducer has the assurance to attribute this inexpressible atrocity of outrage!
The case of Ben Jonson is the great standing example of a truth which should never be forgotten or overlooked; that no amount of learning, of labour, or of culture will supply the place of natural taste and native judgment—will avail in any slightest degree to confer the critical faculty upon a man to whom nature has denied it. Just judg​ment of others, just judgment of himself, was all but impossible to this great writer, this consummate and indefatigable scholar, this generous and enthusiastic friend. The noble infirmity of excess in benevolence is indisputably no less obvious in three great writers of our own century; great, each of them, like Ben Jonson, in prose as well as in verse: one of them greater than he, one of them equal, and one of them hardly to be accounted equal with him. Victor Hugo, Walter Savage Landor, and Théophile Gautier, were doubtless as exuberant in generosity—the English poet was perhaps as indiscriminate in enthusiasm of patronage or of sympathy—as even the promiscuous panegyrist of Shakespeare, of Fletcher, of Chapman, of Drayton, of Browne, of Brome, and of May; and moreover of one Stephens, of one Rutter, of one Wright, of one Warre, and of one Filmer. Of these last five names, that of the worthy Master Joseph Rutter—Ben's 'dear son, and right learned friend'—is the only one which signifies to me the existence of an author not utterly unknown. His spiritual father or theatrical sponsor is most copious and most cordial in his commendations of the good man's pastoral drama; he has not mentioned its one crowning excellence—the quality for which, having ​tried it every night for upwards of six weeks running, I can confidently and conscientiously recommend it. Chloral is not only more dangerous but very much less certain as a soporific: the sleeplessness which could resist the influence of Mr. Rutter's verse can be curable only by dissolution; the eyes which can keep open through the perusal of six consecutive pages must never hope to find rest but in the grave.
The many ceremonial or occasional poems addressed to friends and patrons of various ranks and characters, from the king and queen to a Mr. Burges and a Mr. Squib, are of equally various interest, now graver and now lighter, to a careful student of Ben Jonson as a poet and a man. Nor, when due account is taken of the time and its conventional habits of speech, does it seem to me that any of them can be justly charged with servility or flattery, or, as the writer might have said, with 'assentation.' Leges Convivales.But these effusions or improvisations are of no more serious importance than the exquisitely neat and terse composition of the 'Leges Convivales,' or the admirable good sense and industry, the admirable perspicacity and perspicuity, which will be recognized no less in the Latin than in the English part of his ​English Grammar. English Grammar.It is interesting to observe an anticipation of Landor's principle with respect to questions of orthography, in the preference given to the Latin form of spelling for words of Latin derivation, while admitting that this increase of accuracy would bring the written word no nearer to the sound uttered in speaking. The passage is worth transcription as an example of delicately scrupulous accuracy and subtly conscientious refinement in explanation.
Alii hæc haud inconsultò scribunt abil, stabil, fabul; tanquam a fontibus habilis, stabilis, fabuia: veriùs, sed nequicquam proficiunt. Nam consideratiùs auscultanti nec i nec u est, sed tinnitus quidam, vocalis naturam habens, quæ naturaliter his liquidis inest.
A point on which I am sorry to rest uncertain whether Landor would have felt as much sympathy with Jonson's view as I feel myself is the regret expressed by the elder poet for the loss of the Saxon characters that distinguished the two different sounds now both alike expressed, and expressed with equal inaccuracy, by the two letters th. 'And in this,' says Jonson—as it seems to me, most reasonably, 'consists the greatest difficulty of our alphabet and true writing.'
The text of the grammar, both Latin and ​English, requires careful revision and correction; but indeed as much must be said of the text of Jonson's works in general. Gifford did very much for it, but he left not a little to be done. And the arrangement adopted in Colonel Cunningham's beautiful and serviceable edition of 1875 is the most extraordinary—at least, I hope and believe so—on record. All the misreadings of the edition of 1816 are retained in the text, where they stand not merely uncorrected but unremarked; so that the bewildered student must refer at random, on the even chance of disappointment, to an appendix in which he may find them irregularly registered, with some occasional comment on the previous editor's negligence and caprice: a method, to put it as mildly as possible, somewhat provocative of strong language on the part of a studious and belated reader—language for which it cannot rationally be imagined that it is he who will be registered by the recording angel as culpably responsible. What is wanted in the case of so great an English classic is of course nothing less than this: a careful and complete edition of all his extant writings, with all the various readings of the various editions published during his lifetime, This is the very least that should be exacted; and this ​is less than has yet been supplied. Edition after edition of Shakespeare is put forth under the auspices of scholars or of dunces without a full and plain enumeration of the exact differences of text—the corrections, suppressions, alterations, and modifications—which distinguish the text of the quartos from the too frequently garbled and mangled, the sometimes transfigured and glorified text of the folio. And consequently not one devoted student in a thousand has a chance of knowing what he has a right to know of the gradations and variations in expression, the development and the self-discipline in display, of the most transcendent intelligence that ever illuminated humanity. And in the case of Shakespeare's most loyal comrade and panegyrist—though sometimes, it may be, his rather captious rival and critic—the neglect of his professed devotees and editorial interpreters has been scarcely less scandalous and altogether as incomprehensible. In every edition which makes any pretence to completeness, or to satisfaction of a serious student's indispensable requisites and inevitable demands, the first text of Every Man in his Humour should of course be given in full. Snatches and scraps of it are given in the notes to the edition of 1816; the first act is ​reprinted—the first act alone—in the appendix to the first volume of the edition of 1875. What would be said by Hellenists or Latinists if such contemptuous indolence, such insolence of neglect, were displayed by the editor of a Greek or Latin poet—assuming that his edition had been meant for other than fourth-form or fifth-form service? Compare the devotion of their very best editors to Shakespeare and to Jonson with the devotion of Mr. Ellis to Catullus and Mr. Munro to Lucretius. It is a shame that Englishmen should not be forthcoming who would think it worth while to expend as much labour, and would be competent to bring that labour to as good an end, in the service of their own immortal countrymen, as is expended and as is attained by classical scholars in the service of alien and not more adorable gods, And on one point—a point indeed of more significance than importance—the capricious impertinence of such editors as do condescend to undertake any part of such a task is so inexplicable except on one supposition that we are tempted to embrace, or at least to accept, the assumption that the editor (for instance) of Ben Jonson considers the author of The Silent Woman, Bartholomew Fair, and certain metrical emetics classified under the head ​of Epigrams, as a writer fit to be placed in the hands of schoolgirls. And even then it is difficult to imagine why we come upon certain rows of asterisks in the record of his conversations with Drummond, and in the anonymous interlude written—as Gifford supposes—'for the christening of a son of the Earl of Newcastle, to whom the king or the prince stood godfather.' Even if Jonson had taken—as on such an occasion it would be strange if he had taken—the utmost license of his friends Aristophanes and Rabelais, this would be no reason for treating the reader like a schoolboy or a Dauphin, What a man of genius has written for a public occasion is public property thenceforward and for ever: and the pretence of a man like Gifford to draw the line and determine the limit of publicity is inexpressibly preposterous.
The little interlude, however broad and even coarse in its realistic pleasantry, is a quaint and spirited piece of work; but there are other matters in Colonel Cunningham's appendix which have no right, demonstrable or imaginable, to the place they occupy. It is incredible, it is inconceivable, that Jonson should ever have written such a line as this by way of a Latin verse:
Macte: tuo scriptores lectoresque labore (!!!)
​'Les chassepots partiraient d'eux-mêmes'—birch would make itself into spontaneous rods for the schoolboy who could perpetrate so horrible an atrocity. The repulsive and ridiculous rubbish which has ignorantly and absurdly been taken for 'a fragment of one of the lost quaternions of Eupheme' is part, 1 am sorry to say, of an elegy by Francis Beaumont on one Lady Markham. It is an intolerable scandal that the public should be content to endure such an outrage as the intrusion of another man's abominable absurdities into the text of such a writer as Ben Jonson. This effusion of his young friend's, which must surely have been meant as a joke—and a very bad, not to say a very brutal one, is probably the most hideous nonsense ever written on the desecrated subject of death and decay. A smaller but a serious example of negligence and incompetence is patent in the text of the ten lines contributed by Jonson to the Annalia Dubrensia—that most pleasant and curious athletic anthology, the reissue of which is one of the wellnigh countless obligations conferred on students of the period by the devoted industry, energy, and ability of Dr. Grosart. He, of course, could not fail to see that the first of these lines was corrupt. 'I cannot bring my Muse to dropp ​Vies' is obviously neither sense nor metre. It is rather with diffidence than with confidence that I would suggest the reading double in place of the palpably corrupt word drop: but from Gifford's explanation of the gambling term vie I should infer that this reading, which certainly rectifies the metre, might also restore the sense. Another obvious error is to be noted in the doggrel lines on Lady Ogle, which afford a curious and compact example of Ben Jonson's very worst vices of style and metre. Still, as Ben was not in the habit of writing flat nonsense, we ought evidently to read 'in the sight of Angels,' not, as absurdly printed in the edition of 1875 (ix. 326), 'in the Light'; especially as the next verse ends with that word. The commendatory verses on Cynthia's Revenge which reappear at page 346 of the same volume had appeared on page 332 of the volume immediately preceding. Such editorial derelictions and delinquencies are enough to inoculate the most patient reader's humour with the acerbity of Gifford's or Carlyle's. Again, this appendix gives only one or two fragments of the famous additional scenes to The Spanish Tragedy, while the finest and most important passages are omitted and ignored. For one thing, however, we have ​reason to be grateful to the compiler who has inserted for the first time among Ben Jonson's works the fine and flowing stanzas described by their author as an allegoric ode. This poem, which in form is Horatian, has no single stanza so beautiful or so noble as the famous third strophe of the Pindaric ode to Sir Lucius Cary on the death of Sir Henry Morison; but its general superiority in purity of style and fluidity of metre is as remarkable as the choice and use of proper names with such a dexterous felicity as to emulate while it recalls the majestic and magnificent instincts of Marlowe and of Milton.
If the fame of Ben Jonson were in any degree dependent on his minor or miscellaneous works in verse, it would be difficult to assign him a place above the third or fourth rank of writers belonging to the age of Shakespeare. His station in the first class of such writers, and therefore in the front rank of English authors, is secured mainly by the excellence of his four masterpieces in comedy; The Fox and The Alchemist, The Staple of News and Every Man in his Humour: but a single leaf of his Discoveries is worth all his lyrics, tragedies, elegies, and epigrams together. That golden little book of noble thoughts and subtle observations is ​the one only province of his vast and varied empire which yet remains for us to examine; and in none other will there be found more ample and more memorable evidence how truly great a man demands our homage—'on this side idolatry'—for the imperishable memory of Ben Jonson.
* ↑ In the original edition, 'most gentile and fine': a curious Italianism which must have seemed questionable or unallowable to the author's maturer taste.
* ↑ Compare Æn. iv. 160.
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