the reminiscent character of the proæmia to the several books of his Controversies led Jonson into an application of the rhetorician's words to himself (18 8–29, 28 17–29 3), to the eloquence of Lord Bacon (30 10-21), or to his recollection of Shakespeare (23 22–24). A diligent study of the Institutes of Quintilian and the Poetics of Aristotle inspires respectively the essays on style and poetry. In another place we find traces of Plutarch running through several pages, dipping into the various topics of the Morals, gleaning an anecdote here and there from the Lives, and diverted through similarity of subject-matter into other allusions. The more usual Greek and Latin classics are of course pervading; and quotations from the writings of Petronius Arbiter, Varro, Aulus Gellius, Vitruvius, and the collections of Stobæus are sufficient to prove the range and the diversity of Jonson's classical reading. Of the moderns he has made no less use; and we find frequent reference or familiar allusion to the commentaries and original works of the famous scholars of the classical Renaissance, such as the Scaligers, Erasmus, Vives, Lipsius, Heinsius, and others. Elsewhere a consideration of the attributes of princes brings into discussion tenets of Macchiavelli, and involves the citation of several passages of The Prince (see pp. 37–39 passim); whilst other notes are the result of a recent study of the essay On the Advancement of Learning or other parts of the Instauratio Magna. (For references to these several authors, see the Index and Notes.)

Thus we find the Discoveries, like all the other productions of this veritable Titan, attesting Jonson's unparalleled reading and that audacious power with which he has appropriated the literary spoils of all ages to his royal will and disposal, holding a reckless course beneath a burden of learning that must have overpowered a less than colossal frame. In the words of Mr. Symonds (Ben Jonson, English Worthies, p. 52): "This wholesale and indiscriminate trans

lation is managed with admirable freedom. He held the prose writers and poets of antiquity in solution in his spacious memory. He did not need to dovetail or weld his borrowings into one another, but rather, having fused them in his own mind, poured them plastically forth into the mould of thought."

...

In a case like the present we should guard against applying our own conditions to a consideration of the past. In the essay on style (see 77 14) Jonson speaks of an ability "to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use" as "a requisite in our poet" only second to "natural wit" and the exercise of his powers. And Dryden shows his appreciation of this theory, as well as of its practice, in the words: "The greatest man of the last age, Ben Jonson, . . was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow. . But he has done his robberies so openly that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him" (An Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Arber's English Garner, iii. pp. 551 and 519). Plagiarism has been well termed “ an invention of the nineteenth century," and, in view of the extended borrowings of Shakespeare and other lesser Elizabethans, may properly be considered a crime little recognized as such to that age. Jonson was consistent in theory and practice, and believed a great thought to be always his who expresses it best. As to Jonson's power in this respect, we may agree with the judicious Fuller when he says: "What was ore in others he was able to refine unto him (Worthies of England, ed. 1840, ii. p. 425).

Finally, whatever may be said of Jonson's other works, in that under consideration the very title disarms criticism in this particular. "Silva, timber, the raw material of facts and thoughts," are the author's words; and such is the

humble relation which he would have the Discoveries bear to the Forest and Underwoods of his works.

4. STYLE.

The Discoveries 66 come in character as in time midway between Hooker and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern form" (Saintsbury, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 219). Two things explain this position. Jonson's vocabulary is somewhat more antiquated than that of most of his contemporaries, and the conservatism of increasing years only added to that of constitution. "Words borrowed of antiquity," he writes, "do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes; for they have the authority of years and out of their intermission do win themselves a kind of grace like newness" (61 14-18). A comparison of the vocabulary of Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesie with that of the Discoveries, written nearly sixty years later, will disclose a far larger number of words demanding explanation in the latter. On the other hand, a like comparison between the two works with reference to the structure of sentence and paragraph will exhibit a form and symmetry, a sense of order and proportion, and a consciousness of the demands of literary presentment in the Discoveries for which we may look in vain in the somwhat loosely-strung periods and formless paragraphs of the Defense. This contrast becomes the more startling when we remember that Sidney's work is characterized by a logical sequence and continuity of thought often wanting in the disjointed entries of the Discoveries.

The chief traits of Jonson's prose are force, condensity and directness. The first often rises to genuine eloquence and displays in its reserve and union with grace a truly classic dignity. (See the well-known passage on the eloquence of

Bacon, 30 7-21; 17 8-13, 33 6-22 and many others.) Jonson's condensity and directness are pervading, and achieved largely by a prevailing shortness and crispness in the construction of sentence, and an omission of qualifiers and connectives wherever the sense permits.

"Brevity is attained in matter by avoiding idle complements, prefaces, protestations, parentheses, superfluous circuit of figures and digressions: in the composition, by omitting conjunctions . . . and such like idle particles, that have no great business in a serious letter but breaking of sentences, as oftentimes a short journey is made long by unnecessary baits" (70 4-12). As an example of the application of these principles, read the passage on Counsel (3 18-4 4) which Mr. Swinburne describes as possessed of "too strong a flavor of the style of Tacitus in its elaborate if not laborious terseness of expression" (Study of Ben Jonson, p. 131); and notice Jonson's further expression of his theory on this subject: "Periods are beautiful when they are not too long (62 31). Elsewhere he commends "a strict and succinct style . . . where you can take away nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest" (ibid. 19-21).

Jonson is rarely obscure; and involved or confused constructions are totally foreign to the constitution of a mind by nature clear, precise and painful in its attention to detail. Such occasional obscurities as do occur are almost invariably traceable to excessive condensity, as: "In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy and disposition of poems better observed than in Terence and the later [Greek poets] who thought" etc. (57 35-58 5); or to Latin influence as : "Creatures . . . that continually labor under their own misery and other's envy," i.e. the envy which they feel towards others. (47 15, and see 36 7). Other instances of Latinism are, the variation between the infinitive and imperative, 54 25-28; "he denied figures to be invented" 28 35; etc.: a comparison of the passages translated from

Quintilian and Seneca will disclose many other examples. Barring the use of several words in their Latin sense, as: opinion, reputation (63), discipline, learning (73), copy, abundance (26 32), voice, remark, saying (37 17), delicate, chosen (44 22), election, selection (56 18), translations, metaphors (60 25), to concoct, to digest (77 20), and offices, duties or obligations (78 26), many of them common to the age; occasional forms like umbractical (16 25), indagations (28 11), or digladiation (66 35); and the still rarer coining of a word like recession (50 19); Jonson's vocabulary is remarkably English for a scholar of his day.

Jonson considered that "some words are to be culled out for ornament and color," but they had better grow in our style as in a meadow," etc. (61 31; see also on this topic 62 2, 63 16–32 and 63 33-64 14). His practice is entirely consistent with this, and it would be difficult to find a writer of equal vigor so sparing in the use of figures. In the Discoveries Jonson shows a prevailing preference for simile over metaphor, and elaborated comparisons like that of the world to a play (36 22 seqq.), or even the apt figure of the evil man riding coated and booted through the dirty ways of the world (43 19-24) are rare. (See, however, 65 19 seqq.) He often caps a semi-humorous passage with an implied or expressed comparison that amounts almost to the force of the like trick of Swift or Carlyle; thus counsellors that advise a prince to be cruel are called "hangmen's factors" (396), and the depth of certain writers, which you may find "with your middle finger" is "cream-bowl or but puddle-deep (25 13).

Again, Jonson rarely indulges in hyperbole; unless we can grant that term, in a somewhat extended sense, to those passages in which he becomes impassioned through bitterness of feeling (21 16-31 and 43 24 seqq.), or through power and brilliancy of satire and invective: see especially the essay on Parasites (51 10 seqq.). This latter quality is