Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.
O soul, be chang'd into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean; ne'er be found.
Thunder, and enter the Devils.
O mercy, heaven, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents,
Ugly hell, gape not
I'll burn my books:

let me breathe awhile:
come not, Lucifer:
O Mephistophilis !"

Lamb, Vol. I., pp. 36-38.

It is supposed that Marlowe wrote the principal portion of the old plays which Shakspeare altered into the Second and Third Parts of Henry the Sixth. Malone, on comparing the latter with their originals, found that 1,771 lines had been taken without alteration, 2,373 altered, and only 1,899 had been added. Greene, in his Groat'sworth of Wit, published in 1592, addressing, it is conjectured, Marlowe, exclaims, "Yes, trust them not [the players], for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with a tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as any of you, and, being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country.'

Next to Shakspeare, there is no dramatist of the period whose name is so familiar to English ears as that of Ben Jonson, though he is probably less read than either Massinger or Fletcher. The associations connected with his name have contributed to keeping it alive, for he is, in most points of his character, the very embodiment of England, a veritable, indubitable John Bull. The base of his character is sound, strong, weighty sense, with that infusion of insular prejudice which keeps every true Englishman from being a cosmopolite, either in literature, arts, government, or manners. He has also that ingrained coarseness, which, in the Anglo-Saxon mind, often coexists with the sturdiest morality, and, though it disconnects virtue from delicacy, prevents vice from allying itself with refinement. In reading Jonson we continually fall upon expressions which "no young lady ought to read"; still there is nothing which tends to corrupt the morals as well as to vulgarize the speech. Virtue and vice, honesty and baseness, indulge in no coquetry in his representations. We are acquainted with no dramatist. whose characters, bad and good, are better adapted to excite

in us the same feelings that we should experience, if we met them in actual life.

With this basis of sound English sense, Jonson has fancy, humor, satire, learning, a large knowledge of men and motives, and a remarkable command of language, sportive, scornful, fanciful, and impassioned. One of the fixed facts in English literature, he is too strongly rooted ever to be upset. He stands out from all his contemporaries, original, peculiar, leaning on none for aid, and to be tried by his own merits alone. Had his imagination been as sensitive as that of many of his contemporaries, or his self-love less, he would probably have fallen into their conscious or unconscious imitation of Shakspeare; but as it was, he remained satisfied with himself to the last, delving in his own mine. His "mountain belly and his rocky face" are good symbols of his hard, sharp, decided, substantial, and arrogant mind. His life and writings both give evidence of great vitality and force of character. Composition must have been with him a manual labor, for he writes with all his might. The weaknesses of his character, his perversity, his bluff way of bragging of his own achievements, his vanity, his domineering egotism, his love of strong food, his deep potations, and the heartiness, good-will, and latent sense of justice which underlie all, are thoroughly English, and make him as familiar to the imagination as a present existence. We speak of Shakspeare's mind, but Jonson starts up always in bodily proportions. He seems some boon companion whom we have seen in a preëxistent state. Shakspeare's creations, from Hamlet to Falstaff, are more real to us than Shakspeare himself; but we have a more intense conception of Jonson than we have of any of his characters, not even excepting Bobadil and Sir Epicure Mammon. His life. was commensurate with the whole generation of great poets to which he belonged. He survived Shakspeare twenty-one years. His biography is better known than that of any of his contemporaries.

Jonson's life was checkered by many vicissitudes. He was born in the city of Westminster, in the year 1574. His father went out of the world about a month after our poet came into it; and his worthy mother shortly after married a master-bricklayer. By the aid of some friend, whose name is unknown, he was sent to Westminster school and

transferred thence to Cambridge university. After staying there a short time, his resources failed him, and he returned home to work at the trade of his father-in-law. This occupation, however, he could not long endure, and he went as a volunteer in the army serving in Flanders. He distinguished himself by his valor, and prided himself no little on having conquered and killed an enemy, in the view of both armies, in single combat. The trade of arms, however, does not appear to have been attended in his case with any lucrative results, and he returned home at the end of one or two campaigns. Shortly after, at about the age of nineteen, he went upon the stage, as actor and journeyman writer; but for four years seems to have done little more than make additions to old plays, or furnish scenes to other dramatists. In 1596, however, when he was only twenty-two years old, his Every Man in his Humor, the most generally popular of his plays, was produced. Previously to this he had killed a brotherplayer in a duel, and came near being hanged for it; had turned Roman Catholic, and been suspected of a share in a Popish conspiracy; and had got married; three incidents in the life of a young man just at maturity, which show quite an extraordinary aptitude for affairs.

The scene of Every Man in his Humor, as originally written, was in Italy. It was popular from the first. In 1598, Jonson became acquainted with Shakspeare, and through his influence was enabled to bring out his play, as now remodelled with English names, at the Blackfriars theatre. Shakspeare is supposed to have acted the part of the elder Knowell in this comedy. In 1599, Jonson brought out Every Man out of his Humor, the first representation of which was attended by Queen Elizabeth. In the epilogue to the play, hyperbole is racked to find terms of adoring admiration for the queen. Jonson, in his conversations with Drummond, did not hesitate to give his real opinion about the haughty Tudor's susceptibility to flattery. In this play the author shows that contempt for public opinion which breaks out in so many of his prefaces. He calls the public "that many-mouthed, vulgar dog." Cynthia's Revels was acted in 1600, and excited much opposition. Decker and Marston were prominent among those it offended; and in consequence, Jonson's next play, The Poetaster, was especially devoted to satirizing them and exalting himself. To

any one who desires to know his tremendous sway over the vocabulary of scorn, contempt, hatred, and invective, we would commend this comedy. Decker and Marston are introduced under the names of Crispinus and Demetrius, and remorselessly ridiculed. The opinions they are made to express of Jonson himself are exceedingly racy, and enable us to judge what were the feelings experienced towards him by some of his contemporaries. Thus, Demetrius (Marston) says, "Horace! he is a mere sponge; nothing but humors and observation; he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when he comes home squeezes himself dry again." Another calls him "a sharp, thorny-tooth'd, satirical rascal"; one that would "sooner lose his best friend than his least jest "; a thing "all dog and scorpion, that carries poison in his teeth, and a sting in his tail." In the arraignment, Decker is called poetaster and plagiary; Marston, play-dresser and plagiary; and they are accused of taxing Jonson falsely of self-love, arrogance, impudence, railing, filching by translation," &c., for a base and envious purpose. In their sentence we are favored with a view of the "local habitations" of the poets of the day; for they are forbidden to defame our poet" at booksellers' stalls, in taverns, two-penny rooms, tyring-houses, noblemen's buttresses, and puisné's chambers." The enemies of Jonson are summed up as "fools or jerking pedants," "buffoon, barking wits," tickling "base, vulgar ears," with "beggarly and barren trash." In the "Apologetical Dialogue," at the end of the play, all phrases of scorn and contempt are exhausted to cover his opponents with infamy. He speaks of his own works as

"Things that were born when none but the still night And his dumb candle say his pinching throes";

and he closes with a lofty expression of his own studious habits and devotion to letters:

"I that spend half my nights and all my days Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face

To come forth with the ivy or the bays,

And in this age can hope no other grace,

Leave me! There's something come into my thought
That must and shall be sung high and aloof,

Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof.”

There is in this play a good representation given of the different feelings with which different classes at that day regarded poetry. Thus, one of the characters calls Homer "a poor blind rhyming rascal, that lived obscurely up and down in booths and tap-houses, and scarce ever made a good meal in his sleep, the *** hungry beggar"; but Jonson, speaking through the lips of another, exclaims,

"Would men but learn to distinguish spirits,
And set true difference 'twixt those jaded wits
That run a broken pace for common hire,
And the high raptures of a happy muse,
Borne on the wings of her immortal thought,
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,

And beats at heaven's gates with her bright hoofs,

They would not then, with such distorted faces

And desperate censures, stab at Poesy;

They would admire bright knowledge, and their minds
Should ne'er descend on so unworthy objects

As gold, or titles."

The character of Virgil, in this play, has been conjectured to refer to Shakspeare, and Horace's (Jonson's) encomium on him is characteristic and true.

“Hor. His learning savors not the school-like gloss,
That most consists in echoing words and terms,

And soonest wins a man an empty name :
Nor any long, or far-fetch'd circumstance,
Wrapt in the curious general'ties of arts;
But a direct and analytic sum

Of all the worth and first effects of arts.
And for his poesy, 't is so rammed with life,
That it shall gather strength of life, with being,
And live hereafter more admired than now."

Lamb, vol. II., p. 68.

The Poetaster made Jonson many enemies, as well it might. Decker replied in The Satiromastrix, or the Untrussing of a Humorous Poet. It contains some beautiful poetry, and some capital hits. One of the females in the play says, "That same Jonson has a most ungodly face, by my fan; it looks for all the world like a rotten russet apple, when 't is bruised. It's better than a spoonful of cinnamonwater next my heart, for me to hear him speak; he sounds it so i' th' nose; and O, to see his face make faces, when