one of the elements in which he liveth); a dissembler of ill parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth; thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or done; he is passionately kynde and angry; careless either to gaine or keep; vindicative, but, if he be well answered, at himself.

For any religion, as being versed in both. Interpreteth best sayings and deeds often to the worst. Oppressed with fantasie, which hath ever mastered his reason, a generall disease in many Poets. His inventions are smooth and easie; but above all he excelleth in a Translation.

With due allowance for the personal feeling which pervades these memoranda, they give incomparably the most vivid portrait in existence of an Elizabethan man of letters. The man they deal with, while not the greatest poet of his time, was distinctly the most conspicuous personal figure among those whose profession was literature. An excellent scholar, according to the contemporary standard; a playwright who never deigned to sacrifice his artistic conscience to popular caprice; a lyric poet acceptable alike to the great folk who patronized him, and to the literary followers who gathered about him at his favorite taverns; laureate; chief writer of the masques which were so characteristic a diversion of the court;- he went sturdily through life with more renown than fortune. Born before the outburst of Elizabethan literature, he lived until the times of Charles I. had begun to be troublous. He lies in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey, with the epitaph "O rare Ben Jonson" cut in the pavement above his head.

In 1616, the year when Shakespeare died, Jonson published in folio a collection of his plays and poems. To this he gave the characteristic title of Works.' There were current jokes, of course, about the absurdity of so naming a volume of obvious plays; but the name was well chosen. What Jonson achieved, he achieved by conscientious labor. Drummond was right when he wrote, "Above all he excelleth in a Translation." Jonson knew two things thoroughly: the language and literature of classical Rome, and the language and life of London under Elizabeth, James, and Charles. The former he pos- ·

sessed to a degree almost unique; the latter, of course, he shared to the full with the human beings about him. As his two tragedies show, as is shown by many passages in his comedies, and again and again in his lyrics, the thing he could do supremely well was to turn the lifelessness of the classics into terms of contemporary vitality. In the best sense of the word, no better translator ever lived: he never forgot that faithfulness to his original is only half the task of the translator, who adds only to the dead weight of printed matter if he fail to bear to living men, in living language, tidings that without him were to them unmeaning.

The very tralt which made him a consummate translator, however, made him, in spite of his vigorous personality, a less effective original writer than many of his less gifted contemporaries. Inevitably, a man who becomes saturated with classical literature becomes possessed of the chief ideal which pervades it, the ideal which maintains that there is one definite way in which things ought to be done, as distinguished from the innumerable other ways in which they ought not to be done. The general trait of the Elizabethan drama is untrammeled freedom of form. Jonson, as a dramatist, felt conscientiously bound to keep in mind the laws of classical composition. In this respect, his work is more analogous to that which has prevailed on the stage of France and of Italy than to that which has characterized the stage of England. "Shakspeer," he told Drummond, "wanted art." No one ever admired Shakespeare more sturdily than did Ben Jonson. All the same, he could never forget that Shakespeare broke every rule of dramatic art maintained by the authorities of Greece and Rome. By the same token, Jonson's own plays never achieved the full vitality of Elizabethan England.

This fact has been generally remarked. Another trait of his, which greatly affected his dramatic writing, has hardly been recognized. He told Drummond, we may remember, that he had seen his dead child in a vision; and that he had lain awake watching strange figures battling about his great toe. In modern terms, this means that he was gifted with an exceptional visual imagination. The chief imaginative trait of the Elizabethan drama is sympathetic insight: whatever else the dramatists knew of their characters, they knew how those characters must have felt; they were in full touch not with their physical life, but with their emotional. In Jonson's case, all this was reversed; one often doubts whether he were in deep emotional sympathy with his characters, but one is sure that he knew precisely how those characters looked and moved. When one has been reading Shakespeare, or almost any of his other contemporaries, Jonson's plays often seem obscure and puzzling. If in such case one turn for an hour to Hogarth, the whole thing is explained. Jonson's imagination was primarily visual; though his vehicle was poetry, his conception was again and again that of painting. Ask yourself not what Jonson's characters felt, but what they looked like, and they will spring into life.

The analogy between Jonson and Hogarth, indeed, is very suggestive. Not only were both gifted with singular fertility of visual imagination, but both alike instinctively expressed themselves in such exaggerated terms as in our time would be called caricature, and as in Jonson's time were called humorous. Both seized upon some few characteristic traits of the personages with whom they dealt, and so

Both were

emphasized these traits as to make them monstrous. stirred by conscious moral purpose; both had a crude but wholesome sense of fun; both knew London to the core. In spite of the century and more which separates them, they may well be studied together. Whoever understands the one will understand the other.

For both alike were really artists. In the color and the texture of Hogarth's paintings, one feels, for all their seeming ugliness of purpose, a genuine sense of what is beautiful. In Jonson's verses, from beginning to end, one feels, as surely as one feels the occasional limitations of pedantry, that higher, purer spirit of classical culture, which maintains that whatever a poet utters should be phrased as beautifully as his power can phrase it. In some lyrics, and in certain lines and passages of his plays, Jonson fairly excels. A scholar and a Londoner, vigorous, sincere, untiring, he stands in our literature as the great type of a sturdy British artist.

In the selections which follow, an attempt has been made to give some slight evidence of his purposes and his achievement. The two passages from his posthumous 'Timber, or Discoveries' may suggest at once his literary method and the temper in which he regarded his chief contemporary. His well-known verses on Shakespeare repeat

in more studied form the latter views, and at the same time show his mastery of English verse. The prologue to 'Every Man in His Humour states his dramatic creed. The passage from 'Sejanus' shows his great, if superficial, mastery of Roman life and manners. The passage from the Silent Woman' shows at once his "humorous » manner, and his consummate power of translation; for the tirade against women is taken straight from Juvenal. Finally, the necessarily few fragments from his other plays, and selections from his lyrics, may perhaps serve to indicate the manner of thing which his conscientious art has added to permanent literature.

DR

ON STYLE

From Timber, or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter'

E STILO, ET OPTIMO SCRIBEndi Genere. For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries, to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style. In style, to consider what ought to be written, and after what manner, he must first think and excogitate his matter, then choose his words, and examine the weight of either.