"riches fineless" of learning and imagery lavished upon this character perfectly astound the imagination. Nothing can be more masterly than the manner in which it is sustained; the towering sensuality of the man, the visions of luxury and wealth in which his mind roams and revels, his intense realization of the amazing fictions he himself creates, the complete despotism established by his imagination over his senses, and the resolute credulity with which he accommodates the most obstinate facts to his desires, make up a character which in originality, force, and truth of delineation, seems to us only second to Falstaff, or at least, to have, out of Shakspeare, no peer among the comic creations of the English drama.

Volpone, Bobadil, Sejanus, and Catiline are strong delineations which we cannot pause to consider. As a specimen, however, of Jonson's ponderous style, we cannot refrain quoting a few lines in the tragedy of Catiline, from the scene in the first act, on the morning of the conspiracy. Lentulus says:

“Lent. It is methinks a morning full of fate.

It riseth slowly, as her sullen car

Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it.
She is not rosy-finger'd, but swoln black.

Her face is like a water turn'd to blood,

And her sick head is bound about with clouds,
As if she threaten'd night ere noon of day.

It does not look as it would have a hail

Or health wish'd in it, as on other morns."

Lamb, Vol. 11., p. 75.

Catiline, in allusion to the massacres of Sylla, gives a stern and terrible image of death :

"Slaughter bestrid the streets, and stretched himself
To seem more huge";

and he exclaims afterwards :

"Cinna and Sylla

Are set and gone; and we must turn our eyes
On him that is, and shines. Noble Cethegus,
But view him with me here! He looks already
As if he shook a sceptre o'er the senate,
And the aw'd purple dropt their rods and axes.
The statues melt again, and household gods

In groans confess the travails of the city:
The very walls sweat blood before the change;
And stones start out to ruin, ere it comes."

Lamb, Vol. II., p. 78.

It would be easy to extract largely from Jonson's plays to illustrate his powers of satire, fancy, observation, and wit; and to quote numberless biting sentences, that seem steeped "in the very brine of conceit, and sparkle like salt in fire." His masques are replete with beautiful poetry, as delicate as it is rich. We have only space, however, to introduce from The Sad Shepherd one specimen of his sweetness, which seems to have been overlooked by others.

"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:
The world may find the spring by following her,
For other print her airy steps ne'er left.
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
But like the soft west wind she shot along,

And where she went, the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."

Tennyson has a similar idea in The Talking Oak, but has added a subtle imagination, which our old bard's mind would not have been likely to grasp:

"And light as any wind that blows,

So fleetly did she stir,

The flowers, she touched on, dipt and rose,
And turned to look on her."

The plays of Thomas Decker, honest old Decker, are the records of one of the finest and most lovable spirits in English literature. His name has suffered much from Jonson's sharp, cutting scorn, and, indeed, with many readers he still bears about the same relation to old Ben that Cibber does to Pope. But he has found strong and acute friends in Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hunt, and his rare merits as a poet have been felicitously presented. He is, in fact, one of the most fascinating dramatists of his generation, and, with much vulgarity and trash, has passages worthy of the greatest. He is light, airy, sportive, humane, forgetive, and possesses both animal and intellectual spirits to perfection. He seems flushed and

heated with the very wine of life; throws off the sunniest morsels of wit and wisdom with a beautiful heedlessness and unstudied ease; and in his intense enjoyment of life and motion appears continually to exclaim, with his own Matheo, "Do we not fly high?" Though he experienced more than the common miseries and vexations of his class, still, like Old Fortunatus, he seems to be "all felicity up to the brims "; to have "revelled with kings, danced with queens, dallied with ladies, worn strange attires, seen fantasticoes, conversed with humorists, been ravished with divine raptures of Doric, Lydian, and Phrygian harmonies." Every thing in him is swift, keen, sparkling, full of quicksilver briskness and heartiness. His sentiment and his fancies run out of him in the overflowing exuberance of a happy disposition. There is something delightfully simple in his cheerfulness and humanity. His genial imagination plays with divinities. His quiver is full of those winged arrows which strike the mark in the white, though seemingly sent with a careless aim. His sympathies with nature and his kind are wide, deep, and instinctive. His mind speeds freely out among external things, with nothing to check its wide-wandering flights. His Muse leaps, laughs, and sings, of its own sweet will. Even when he condescends to what Hunt calls an "astounding coarseness,' in representing the bloods and men of wit and pleasure about town, which inhabit most of the comedies of the time, there is still a sharpness and quickness of movement which carries the mind swiftly through the mud into a better region. Decker has, strictly speaking, no morality; for nothing in his works seems to depend on will or principle, but to spring from instinctive. sentiments, and when these are delicate or noble he is among the purest of writers. His sweetness and humanity are exquisitely fine. Thus, one passage in his celebrated lines on Patience has become almost world-renowned.

"Patience, my lord, why, 't is the soul of peace;
Of all the virtues, 't is nearest kin to heaven;
It makes men look like gods. The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed."

In the same spirit is his dialogue between the Christian lady and the angel, in the Virgin Martyr, a tragedy written in

connection with Massinger. The refinement of the feeling is almost unmatched by any dramatist under Shakspeare. Dorothea is attended by an angel, disguised as a page, -a "smooth-faced, glorious thing," a thousand blessings "dancing upon his eyes."

"ANGELO. DOROTHEA.

"Dor. My book and taper.

The time, midnight.

Ang. Here, most holy mistress.

"Dor. Thy voice sends forth such music, that I never Was ravished with a more celestial sound.

Were every servant in the world like thee,
So full of goodness, angels would come down.
To dwell with us: thy name is Angelo,
And like that name thou art. Get thee to rest;
Thy youth with too much watching is opprest.

66

Ang. No, my dear lady. I could weary stars,
And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes,
By my late watching, but to wait on you.
When at your prayers you kneel before the altar,
Methinks I'm singing with some quire in heaven,
So blest I hold me in your company.
Therefore, my most lov'd mistress, do not bid
Your boy, so serviceable, to get hence;
For then you break his heart.

"Dor. Be nigh me still, then.

In golden letters down I'll set that day
Which gave thee to me. Little did I hope
To meet such worlds of comfort in thyself,
This little, pretty body, when I, coming
Forth of the temple, heard my beggar-boy,
My sweet-fac'd, godly beggar-boy, crave an alms,
Which with glad hand I gave, with lucky hand;
And when I took thee home, my most chaste bosom
Methought was fill'd with no hot wanton fire,
But with a holy flame, mounting since higher,
On wings of cherubims, than it did before.

"Ang. Proud am I that my lady's modest eye So likes so poor a servant.

"Dor. I have offer'd

Handfuls of gold but to behold thy parents.
I would leave kingdoms, were I queen of some,
To dwell with thy good father; for, the son
Bewitching me so deeply with his presence,
He that begot him must do 't ten times more.

I pray thee, my sweet boy, show me thy parents;
Be not ashamed.

"Ang. I am not I did never

Know who my mother was; but, by yon palace,
Fill'd with bright heav'nly courtiers, I dare assure you,
And pawn these eyes upon it, and this hand,
My father is in heav'n; and, pretty mistress,
If your illustrious hour-glass spend his sand
No worse, than yet it doth, upon my life,
You and I both shall meet my father there,
And he shall bid you welcome.
"Dor. A bless'd day!"

Lamb, Vol. II., pp. 189–191.

Decker's brain was fertile in fine imaginations and choice bits of wisdom, expressed with great directness and point. We give a few specimens.

"See, from the windows

Of every eye Derision thrusts out cheeks
Wrinkled with idiot laughter; every finger
Is like a dart shot from the hand of Scorn."

"The frosty hand of age now nips your blood,
And strews her snowy flowers upon your head,
And gives you warning that within few years
Death needs must marry you; those short minutes,
That dribble out your life, must needs be spent
In peace, not travail."

"Beauty is a painting; and long life

Is a long journey in December gone,

Tedious and full of tribulation."

66

Though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds,
There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors."

"An oath! why 't is the traffic of the soul,

The law within a man; the seal of faith;

The bond of every conscience; unto whom
We set our thoughts like bands."

The Duchess of Malfy, and The White Devil, by John Webster, are among the greatest tragic productions of Shakspeare's contemporaries. They are full of "deep groans and terrible ghastly looks." "To move a horror