witness "the approaching cliffs of Albion " in the passage cited above.

The epigram of Jonson to King James, from which the lines above are taken, was written in 1604. The "Panegyric" on the same sovereign's accession, written in the previous year and the earliest extended piece of Jonson's writing in couplets, shows beyond any cavil the beginnings of those qualities which, developed, differentiate the couplet of Dryden and Pope from others' usage of the same measure, and it displays what is more important, a treatment and mode of dealing with material, a diction and style which equally determine its kinship.

We cannot expect the laws which govern organic growth to coincide with those controlling constructive ingenuity; a house is built, a tree grows, and the conscious and self-controlled development of such a man as Jonson is alien to the subtle and harmonious unfolding of a genius like Shakespeare's. What we do find in Jonson's use of the devices of the later classicists is a full recognition of their actual value, and an application of each to the special needs and requirements of the work which he may have in hand. Thus he employed the couplet for epigram and epistle alike, but used it with greater terseness and more in accord with later usage in the former, feeling that fluency and a somewhat negligent manner at times were fitting to epistolary style. The liberality of Jonson's spirit, despite his own strong preferences, caused him to admit into his practice forms which theoretically he disap

proved. He had the sanction of Catullus and Tibullus for his lyrics, but he even stooped to write a few sonnets, to bits of pastoral in the prevailing mode like a Nymph's Passion, and to concetti, like the dainty trifle, That Women are but Men's Shadows. This eclecticism of practice in the great classical theorist, combined with the strong influence of Donne's subtle novelty of treatment and the older romantic influence of Spenser, perpetuated in men like Drayton, Drummond and the later Spenserians, delayed the incoming tide of classicism, which setting in, none the less, about the time of the accession of Charles I, became the chief current until after the Restoration, and reached its full when Milton, the last of the Elizabethans, died.

Nothing could more strongly exemplify this eclecticism in the practice of Jonson than the fact that two such diverse men as Robert Herrick and Edmund Waller were alike his poetical "sons." Herrick, the man, has a naïve and engaging personality, which is choice, though not more sterling than the solid worth of Ben Jonson himself; whilst the frank paganism of Herrick, the poet, and his joy in the fleeting beauties of nature are things apart from Jonson's courtly and prevailingly ethical appraisement of the world. Notwithstanding, Herrick had his priceless lyrical gift of Jonson, though he often surpassed his master in it. Unhappily for his fame, he inherited also Jonson's occasional grossness of thought, his fondness for the obscenities of Martial; and he surpassed his master in this as well.

Waller's debt to Jonson is also two-fold: in the lyric,

which he impoverished and conventionalized, and in occasional verse, for which he possessed a peculiar talent, and which he freed of the weight of Jonson's learning, his moral earnestness and strenuousness of style, codifying the result into a system which was to give laws to generations of poets to come. Waller was a man, the essence of whose character was time-serving, to whom ideals were nothing, but to whom immediate worldly success, whether in social life or letters, was much; a man whose very unoriginality and easy adaptability made him precisely the person to fill what has been deftly called the post of "Coryphaeus of the long procession of the commonplace." The instinct of his followers was right in singling Waller out for that position of historical eminence, not because, as a boy, he sat down and deliberately resolved on a new species of poetry, but because he chose out with unerring precision just those qualities of thought, form and diction which appealed to the people of his age, and wrote and re-wrote his poetry in conformity with them. In Carew, Waller found the quintessence of vers de société, and “reformed "it of its excessive laces and falling-bands to congruity with the greater formality which governed the costume of the succeeding century. Lastly, in Jonson he found an increasing love of that regularity of rhythm which results from a general correspondence of length of phrase with length of measure, amongst much with which he was in little sympathy, a minute attention to the niceties of expression, a kind of spruce antithetical diction, and a versification of a constructiveness suited to the epigram

matic form in which the thought was often cast. In Sandys, Fairfax, Drummond and some others, he found a smoothness and sweetness of diction, in which these poets departed measurably from their immediate contemporaries and preserved something of the mellifluousness of the Spenserians. With almost feminine tact Waller applied these things to his unoriginal but carefully chosen subject-matter, and in their union wrought his success.

The real value of the following age of repression consisted in its recognition of the place that the understanding must hold - not only in the production of prose - but in the production of every form of enduring art. It endeavored to establish a standard by which to judge, and failed, less because of the inherent weakness of the restrictive ideal, than because the very excess of the imaginative age preceding drove the classicists to a greater recoil and made them content with the correction of abuse instead of solicitous to found their reaction upon a sure foundation. The essential cause of this great change in the literature of England, above all question of foreign origin, precocious inventiveness of individual poets, artificial and "classical heroic couplets," lies in the gradual increase of the understanding as a regulative force in the newer literature, the consequent rise of a well-ordered prose, and the equally consequent suppression for several decades of that free play of the imagination which is the vitalizing atmosphere of poetry.

VI

THE COMMON FOLK OF SHAKESPEARE

seems to me," says Walt

Whitman, "of astral genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His contributions, especially to the literature of the passions, are immense, forever dear to humanity and his name is always to be reverenced in America. But there is much in him ever offensive to democracy. He is not only the tally of feudalism, but I should say Shakespeare is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism in literature.'

With such an arraignment of Shakespeare's universality and his sympathy with his fellow men, let us consider the common folk of his plays with a view to discover the poet's actual attitude towards that humbler station in life into which he was himself indisputably born. For our purpose we exclude all personages of rank, all his characters of gentle birth, together with all those, whatever their varying degrees of servitude, who wait upon royalty or form in any wise a part or parcel of the households of great folk. This excludes all of Shakespeare's heroes. It will also exclude Shakespeare's fools, from trifling Launce and delectable Feste to the sad-eyed companion in folly of 1 Complete Writings, Prose, ii, 277.