into it so many oaths of their own that they were censured by the High Commission Court: an interference of authority which caused the Registrar of Plays to scrutinise with severity the language of all plays submitted to him, and a noticeable difference to be made in the verbal decency of the comedies produced within the decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. Jonson, however, was acquitted of all blame on the score of profanity.

Nor must

it be inferred from Gill's invective that The Magnetic Lady was a failure. Dryden speaks of all the plays written in Jonson's last years as "dotages"; and it must be admitted that this comedy scarcely deserves to be regarded, either in point of action, character, or dialogue, as a worthy close to the celebrated series of "Humours." Worse plays, however, have succeeded, and the audiences of the time may have been satisfied with a species of entertainment that does not now seem very satisfying. The same may be said of The Tale of a Tub, licensed for acting at the Blackfriars Theatre 7th May 1633, in which the poet seems to have aimed at the same kind of effect that had proved so successful in Bartholomew Fair :-

No state affairs, nor any politic club
Pretend we in our tale here of a tub;
But acts of clowns and constables to-day
Stuff out the scene of our ridiculous play.
A cooper's wit, or some such busy spark,
Illumining the high constable, and his clerk,
And all the neighbourhood, from old records
Of antique proverbs, drawn from Whitsun-lords,
And their authorities, at Cakes and Ales,
With country precedents and old wives' tales,
We bring you now, to show what different things
The cotes of clowns are from the courts of kings.1

The play represents the farcical adventures of a bride who, on her wedding-day, is carried off in turn by a number of suitors who are all anxious to marry her, and who each endeavour to outwit the other in a manner somewhat resembling the complication in Gammer Gurton's Needle. All the dramatis persona are of the rustic 1 Prologue to A Tale of a Tub.

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order, and some of them speak in dialect. The comedy was performed before the King, whom the poet perhaps hoped to amuse, as he suggests in his prologue, with an imitation of manners and language radically opposed to those of the Court. If such was his expectation, the design was one which might have commended itself to a lover of novelty and curiosity like James I., but which would scarely have been congenial with the melancholy humour of his son.

The Tale of a Tub was Jonson's last work for the public stage, and, with the exception of two Masques,—each entitled Love's Welcome, written, one in 1633 the other in 1634, for the Earl of Newcastle, on the occasions of the King's visits to Welbeck and Bolsover, the last of his dramatic compositions. He died on the 6th August 1637, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, with an inscription on the stone over his grave, “O rare Ben Jonson !”

The dramas of Ben Jonson, like those of Shakespeare, are inspired by a general view of human life and action; but the leading principles of the two poets are of a very different, and in many respects of a mutually antagonistic character. Shakespeare was, partially at least, in sympathy with some of the ideas which had been introduced into England from Italy: Jonson was vehemently opposed to them. Beginning his poetic career as a follower of Marlowe, Shakespeare learned from that master the dramatic value of Machiavelli's conception of Virtù,-the power of the free, resolute, unswerving exertion of the human will, and though reflection and experience taught him the limits of this philosophy, though he came to realise the power of conscience-whether determined by the Catholic or the reformed aspect of the Christian religion as a restraining influence on human conduct, his primary conception of tragic or comic action was from first to last based on stories reflecting the spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Ben Jonson, on the contrary, drew his ethical notions mainly from the teaching of Mediæval Catholicism. Bred as a member of the Church of England, he had been converted, while in prison, to the doctrines of the Roman Church; and though about the year

1606 he publicly proclaimed the energy of the feeling which prompted him to rejoin the Anglican communion, the character of his dramas is determined by the didactic aims which the Catholic Church had from early days sought to promote by means of the Miracle Plays and Moralities. His principles are therefore naturally and inevitably opposed to the view of life and man's nature presented by dramatists of the school of Marlowe. By genius a satirist and a moralist, rather than a poetic creator, his mode of thought brought him into antagonism with the impulse of lyrical sentiment which inspired the early Romantic movement. Bearing in mind this initial bent of his genius, we may readily trace his dramatic development in (1) his tragedies, (2) his comedies, and (3) his Masques.

1. Of his tragedies little need be added to what has been already said in the review of his life. His moral and didactic conception of the drama led him to regard tragedy from the medieval point of view, as a vehicle for the lesson to be learned from the downfall of geat men, and particularly great sinners. He concludes his Sejanus as follows:

Let this example move the insolent man
Not to grow proud and careless of the gods.
It is an odious wisdom to blaspheme,
Much more to slighten or deny their powers:
For whom the morning saw so great and high,
Thus low and little 'fore the even doth lie.

The same moral is repeated in Catiline, but here it is enforced, in Seneca's manner, by means of a chorus at the close of each of the first four acts. When Jonson has selected his moral example, he does not, like Shakespeare and the early Romantic school, conceive it lyrically, but contemplates it from without, or rather strives, by means of his minute historical learning, to enter into the motives of the different actors, and to present the facts to the spectators as nearly as possible after the manner in which they may be conceived to have actually happened. This method, suited to history rather than to poetry, cut him off from contact with the imagination of the specta

tors, and, by depriving his historical tragedies of that universal human, though modern, atmosphere in which a play like Julius Cæsar or Antony and Cleopatra moves, gave them an unsympathetic and over-didactic air which roused resentment in the audience. His lack of lyric enthusiasm, with the coldness of conception which is the result of it, is quite sufficient to account for Jonson's failure to please in the paths of tragedy.

acter.

2. In the sphere of comedy the case is far different: here most of his compositions are full of life, energy, and charYet even in comedy our appreciation of his merits must depend on our willingness to enter imaginatively into his aims, and to place ourselves in as close sympathy as possible with the audiences for whom he immediately wrote. Though his plays breathe the spirit of humanity, what is universal in them is presented in such a local and particular garb, that it can only be discerned by a certain effort of the intellect. As we have already seen, his aim was to present

Deeds, and language, such as men do use,
And persons, such as Comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

In this definite attempt to blend instruction with amusement (utile dulci), we recognise the spirit of the old Morality. Equally apparent is the influence of the forms employed by the Morality-maker, in the allegory and abstraction, mixed with the closest imitation of real objects, which characterise so many of Jonson's comedies. It shows itself in the allegorical names of Every Man out of his Humour, Sordido, Fungoso, Asper, Macilente, Shift, Fastidious Brisk, etc., no less than in the direct allegory— the Fountain of Self-Love-and the abstract personagesPhantaste, Argurion, Arete, Philautia-of Cynthia's Revels. The plot of The Devil is an Ass is largely suggested by the practice of the old stage and its indispensable personages the Devil and the Vice; constant references, moreover, to this tradition throughout the play show how deeply it had

entered into Jonson's conception of comedy. Though in Jonson's three great comedies-Volpone, The Silent Woman, and The Alchemist-the form of the interlude temporarily disappears, and though the element of abstraction seems to be almost eliminated from Bartholomew Fair, this latter play breathes, in its realistic imitation, precisely the same spirit as Hick Scorner and The Three Ladies of London; and the allegorical form re-emerges again in The Staple of News, where the Lady Pecunia (a lineal descendant of Lady Mede), Mortgage, Statute, Band, and Wax, take part in the action of the play, and Mirth, Taste, Expectation, and Censure serve as interpreters of its meaning.

With the Mediæval tradition Jonson skilfully blended the form of the Classic comic drama, leaning to the manner sometimes of the Middle, and sometimes of the New Comedy at Athens. His general conception is vividly illustrated by a passage in the Induction to Every Man out of his Humour :

MITIS. I travail with another objection, signior, which I fear will be enforced against the author ere I can be delivered of it. CORDATUS. What is it?

MIT. That the argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the lady's waiting-maid; some such cross-wooing, with a clown to their serving-man, better than to be thus near and familiarly allied to the time.

CORD. You say well, but I would fain hear one of these outworn judgments define once, Quid sit comedia? If he cannot, let him content himself with Cicero's definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who would have a comedy to be imitatio vitæ, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis; a thing pleasant and ridiculous, and accommodated to the correction of manners.

He thus opposes to the idea of the Romantic comedy, illustrated in Twelfth Night, the idea of the Classic comedy, defined by Cicero; in other words, while the Romantic dramatists sought to provoke laughter mainly by the accidents of fortune exhibited in action, Jonson threw all his efforts into the representation of incongruities. of character. This principle is the source equally of his strength and weakness as a writer of comedy. As a