It would form an interesting essay, or rather series of essays, in a periodical work, were all the attempts to ridicule new phrases brought together, the proportion observed of words ridiculed which have been adopted, and are now common, such as strenuous, conscious, &c., and a trial made how far any grounds can be detected, so that one might determine beforehand whether a word was invented under the conditions of assimilability to our language or not. Thus much is certain, that the ridiculers were as often wrong as right; and Shakspeare himself could not prevent the naturalization of accommodation, remuneration, &c.; or Swift the gross abuse even of the word idea. ACT I. FALL OF SEJANUS. Arruntius. The name Tiberius, I hope, will keep, howe'er he hath foregone The dignity and power. Silius. Sure, while he lives. Arr. And dead, it comes to Drusus. Should he fail, To the brave issue of Germanicus; And they are three: too many (ha ?) for him To have a plot upon? Sil. I do not know The heart of his designs; but, sure, their face Looks farther than the present. Arr. By the gods, If I could guess he had but such a thought, My sword should cleave him down, &c. The anachronic mixture in this Arruntius of the Roman republican, to whom Tiberius must have appeared as much a tyrant as Sejanus, with his James-and-Charles-the-First zeal for legitimacy of descent in this passage, is amusing. Of our great names Milton was, I think, the first who could properly be called a republican. My recollections of Buchanan's works are too faint to enable me to judge whether the historian is not a fair exception. Act ii. Speech of Sejanus:Adultery it is the lightest ill I will commit. A race of wicked acts Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent, &c. The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakspeare over his contemporaries :—and yet what contemporaries!―giant minds indeed! Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and yet in no genuine part of Shakspeare's works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear to come. Act v. Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune. This scene is unspeakably irrational. To be lieve, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy against him. VOLPONE. THIS admirable, indeed, but yet more wonderful than admirable, play is from the fertility and vigour of invention, character, language, and sentiment the strongest proof, how impossible it is to keep up any pleasurable interest in a tale, in which there is no goodness of heart in any of the prominent characters. After the third act, this play becomes not a dead, but a painful, weight on the feelings. Zeluco is an instance of the same truth. Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot; which they might have been, and the objects of interest, without having been made characters. In novels, the In novels, the person, in whose fate you are most interested, is often the least marked character of the whole. If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might be produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover. EPICENE. THIS is to my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and, more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the management of a judicious and stage-understanding play-wright; and an actor, who had studied Morose, might make his fortune. Act i. sc. 1. Clerimont's speech : He would have hanged a pewterer's 'prentice once on a Shrove Tuesday's riot, for being 'o that trade, when the rest were quiet. The old copies read quit, i. e. discharged from working, and gone to divert themselves. Whalley's note. It should be quit, no doubt; but not meaning 'discharged from working,' &c.—but quit, that is, acquitted. The pewterer was at his holiday diversion as well as the other apprentices, and they as forward in the riot as he. But he alone was punished under pretext of the riot, but in fact for his trade. Act ii. sc. 1. Morose. Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method, than by this trunk, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of sounds? What does 'trunk' mean here and in the 1st scene of the 1st act? Is it a large eartrumpet?-or rather a tube, such as passes from parlour to kitchen, instead of a bell? Whalley's note at the end. Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn of mind and as humor is a personal quality, the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an extravagant unnatural caricatura. If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays, this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar conception of the nature and conditions of the drama and dramatic personation. Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea : For he knew, poet never credit gain'd By writing truths, but things, like truths, well feign'd. By 'truths' he means 'facts.' Caricatures are not less so, because they are found existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and leaves caricatures to farce. The safest and truest defence of old Ben would be to call the Epicæne the best of farces. The defect in Morose, as in other of Jonson's dramatis persona, lies in this;-that the accident is not a prominence growing out of, and nourished by, the character which still circulates in it, but that the character, such as it is, rises out of, or, rather, consists in, the accident. Shakspeare's comic personages have exquisitely characteristic features; however awry, disproportionate, and laughable they may be, still, like Bar |