and can admire the dramatist’s solid good sense, his great learning, his skill in construction, and the astonishing fertility of his invention.  His characters are not revealed from within, like Shakspere’s, but built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute, laborious particulars.  The difference will be plainly manifest if such a character as Slender, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, be compared with any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Jonson’s plays; with Master Stephen, for example, in Every Man in his Humor; or, if Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same comedy, perhaps Jonson’s masterpiece in the way of comic caricature. Cynthia’s Revels was a satire on the courtiers and the Poetaster on Jonson’s literary enemies.  The Alchemist was an exposure of quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted with learning. Volpone is the most powerful of all his dramas, but is a harsh and disagreeable piece; and the state of society which it depicts is too revolting for comedy.  The Silent Woman is, perhaps, the easiest of all Jonson’s plays for a modern reader to follow and appreciate.  There is a distinct plot to it, the situation is extremely ludicrous, and the emphasis is laid upon a single humor or eccentricity, as in some of Moliere’s lighter comedies, like Le Malade Imaginaire, or Le Medecin malgre lui.

In spite of his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a light enough touch in lyric poetry.  His songs have not the careless sweetness of Shakspere’s, but they have a grace of their own.  Such pieces as his Love’s Triumph, Hymn to Diana, the adaptation from Philostratus,

  Drink to me only with thine eyes,

and many others entitle their author to rank among the first of English lyrists.  Some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous verse, the Forest and Underwoods; others in the numerous masques which he composed.  These were a species of entertainment, very popular at the court of James I., combining dialogue with music, intricate dances, and costly scenery.  Jonson left an unfinished pastoral drama, the Sad Shepherd, which contains passages of great beauty; one, especially, descriptive of the shepherdess

                              Earine,
  Who had her very being and her name
  With the first buds and breathings of the spring,
  Born with the primrose and the violet
  And earliest roses blown.

1.  A History of Elizabethan Literature.  George Saintsbury.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1877.

2.  Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1877.

3.  The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose.  Edited by J. Hannah.  London:  Bell & Daldy, 1870.

4.  The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.  London:  Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1867.

5.  Bacon’s Essays.  Edited by W. Aldis Wright.  Macmillan & Co. (Golden Treasury Series.)