In sensual Venice, queen city of vices and of arts, he finds a magnificent cheat, and hounds him to a merited retribution in Volpone. Never was such ignoble lust of gold, such shameless artistry in guile, such debasement to evil and the visibly vile. The fearful picture is flashed upon us at the outset, when Volpone says:

Childless and without relations, he has many flatterers who hope to be his heir; and he plays the invalid to encourage their gifts. First Voltore arrives, bearing a huge piece of precious plate. Volpone has cast himself on the bed and buried himself in wraps, coughing as if at the point of death:

'I thank you, signior Voltore,

...

Where is the plate? mine eyes are bad. . . . Your love
Hath taste in this, and shall not be unanswered. ..
I cannot now last long. . . . I feel me going,-
Uh, uh, uh, uh!'

He is exhausted, his eyes close; and Voltore inquires of his parasite, Mosca: 'Am I inscribed his heir for certain?'—

I know no second cause.'

The second is a deaf old miser, Corbaccio, hobbling on the verge of the grave, yet trusting to survive Volpone, whom he is joyed to find more ill than himself:

M. Flows a cold sweat, with a continual rheum,
Forth the resolved corners of his eyes.

C. Is't possible? Yet I am better, ha!

How does he with the swimming of his head
M. O, sir, 'tis past the scotomy, he now

Hath lost his feeling, and hath left to snort:
You hardly can perceive him, that he breathes.
C. Excellent, excellent, sure I shall outlast him:
This makes me young again, a score of years.'

He is reminded that Voltore has been here, to forestall him, leaving a splendid token of regard; but:

'See, Mosca, look,

Here, I have brought a bag of bright cecchines,

Will quite weigh down his plate. . . .

M. Now, would I counsel you, make home with speed,

There, frame a will; whereto you shall inscribe

My master your sole heir. . . .

When he is gone, Corvino, a pearl and a superb diamond.

I.

'Tis true.'

merchant, appears, with an orient
'Am I his heir?'—

'Sir, I am sworn, I may not shew the will
Till he be dead: but here has been Corbaccio,
Here has been Voltore, here were others too,
I cannot number 'em, they were so many.

All gaping here for legacies; but I,
Taking the vantage of his naming you,
Signior Corvino, Signior Corvino, took

Paper, and pen, and ink, and there I ask'd him,
Whom he would have his heir? Corvino. Who
Should be executor? Corvino. And,

To any question he was silent to,

I still interpreted the nods he made

(Through weakness) for consent: and sent home th' others,
Nothing bequeath'd them, but to cry and curse.

Cor. O my dear Mosca!'

Presently he departs; and Volpone, springing up, cries in rap

tures:

My divine Mosca!

Thou hast to-day outgone thyself. . . . Prepare

Me music, dances, banquets, all delights;

The Turk is not more sensual in his pleasures,
Than will Volpone.'

He is accused, before the tribunal, of imposture and rape; and the would-be heirs defend him with an incredible energy of lying and open villainy. Then he writes a will in Mosca's favor, has his death reported, conceals himself, and enjoys the looks of those who have just saved him, now stupefied with disappointNow is Mosca's moment. He has the will, and demands of Volpone half his fortune. Their dispute exposes the common rascality. The arch villain has outwitted himself, and all are sent to the pillory.

ment.

The best testimony to his imagination is The Sad Shepherd, an unfinished pastoral drama, more poetical than dramatic, with nothing low in the comic and nothing inflated in the serious. were not easy to surpass the charm of the opening lines:

'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!'

It

And where should we look for a more masterly delineation of that sorceress of evil, the witch?

'Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell, Down in a pit, o'ergrown with brakes and briars

Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey,

Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground,

'Mongst graves and grots, near an old charnel-house,

Where the sad mandrake grows,

Whose groans are dreadful; and dead-numbing night-shade,

The stupefying hemlock, adder's tongue,

And martagan; the shrieks of luckless owls

We hear, and croaking night-crows in the air!
Green-bellied snakes, blue fire-drakes in the sky,
And giddy flitter-mice with leather wings!
The scaly beetles, with their habergeons,

That make a humming murmur as they fly!

There in the stocks of trees, white fairies do dwell,
And span-long elves that dance about a pool,
With each a little changeling in their arms!

The airy spirits play with falling stars,

And mount the spheres of fire to kiss the moon!
While she sits reading by the glow-worm's light,
Or rotten wood o'er which the worm hath crept,
The baneful schedule of her nocent charms.'

Jonson's fame rests chiefly on his comedies, which constitute by far the largest part of his work. His tragedies are men-ofwar, stately and heavy. Sejanus is distinguished by sustained depth of knowledge and gravity of expression. But more than once, in this and in Cataline, nature forces its way through pedantry and erudition. Cataline's imprecation is fine:

'It is decreed! Nor shall thy fate, O Rome!
Resist my vow. Though hills were set on hills,
And seas met seas, to guard thee, I would through:
I'd plough up rocks, steep as the Alps, in dust,

And lave the Tyrrhene waters into clouds,

But I would reach thy head, thy head, proud city!'

The description of the morning on which the conspirators meet, is powerful and dramatic:

'It is, methinks, a morning full of fate!

She riseth slowly, as her sullen car

Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it.

She is not rosy-fingered, but swoll'n black!

Her face is like a water turned to blood,

And her sick head is bound about with clouds
As if she threatened night ere noon of day!'

The following is vivid and impressive:

The rugged Charon fainted,

And asked a navy rather than a boat,

To ferry over the sad world that came.

The maws and dens of beasts could not receive
The bodies that those souls were frighted from;
And e'en the graves were fill'd with men yet living,
Whose flight and fear had mix'd them with the dead.'

Jonson should have written an epic.

Style.-Massive, erudite, concise, compact, equipoised, rotund; in a word, classic. As literal as Shakespeare's is figurative; as studied as Shakespeare's is intuitive and unrestrained. His adversaries asserted that every line cost him a cup of sack. In prose, terse, sharp, swift, biting. In versification, peculiarly smooth and flowing; for this literary leviathan, it strangely appears, has eminently the merits of elegance and grace. What, for example,

could be more lightsome and airy, more artistic, than the proclamation of the Graces, when Venus has lost her son Cupid?

'Beauties, have you seen this toy,
Called Love, a little boy,
Almost naked, wanton, blind,
Cruel now, and then as kind?

If he be amongst ye, say;
He is Venus' runaway.

She that will but now discover
Where the winged wag doth hover,
Shall to-night receive a kiss,

How or where herself would wish;
But who brings him to his mother
Shall have that kiss, and another.

He hath marks about him plenty;
You shall know him among twenty.
All his body is a fire,

And his breath a flame entire,

That, being shot like lightning in,
Wounds the heart, but not the skin.

At his sight the sun hath turned;
Neptune in the waters burned;
Hell hath felt a greater heat;
Jove himself forsook his seat;
From the centre to the sky
Are his trophies reared high.

Wings he hath, which though ye clip,
He will leap from lip to lip,
Over liver, lights, and heart,
But not stay in any part;
And if chance his arrow misses,
He will shoot himself in kisses.

Rank. In the cluster of poets who sing the meditative, aspiring, and romantic life of the period, Jonson is a soloist; next to Shakespeare, a leader,-a leader by profundity of knowledge and vigor of conception, by the dash of the torrent and the force of the flood. Above all, has he the art of development, the habit of Latin regularity. For the first time, a plot is a symmetrical whole, advancing by consecutive deductions; having a beginning, middle, and end, its subordinate actions well ordered, and its leading truth which they combine to elucidate and establish. He is persuaded that he ought to observe the severity and accuracy of the ancients; not, in the same play,

Make a child new-swaddled, to proceed

Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years; or with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars."

Given a

But in this full attainment of form, he fails in completeness of life. He is too much of a theorist, too little of a seer. peculiarity, he can work it out with logical exactness and realistic intensity. That is, he delineates absorbing singularities rather than persons. He thus inverts the true process of characterization, which conceives the 'humour' as an offshoot of the individual. He is English merely, where Shakespeare is cosmopolitan. He is too ponderous and argumentative. His plots,, admirable of their kind, are external contrivances of the understanding rather than interior organisms of the imaginative