jingle in his ears one after another the most barbarous words in their obscure vocabulary, wrangle, and make between them as much noise as a couple of bells in a belfry. Following their advice he declares himself impotent. The wedding-guests propose to toss him in a blanket; others demand an immediate inspection. Fall after fall, shame after shame; nothing serves him; his wife declares that she consents to "take him with all his faults." The lawyer proposes another legal method; Morose shall obtain a divorce by proving that his wife is faithless. Two boasting knights, who are present, declare that they have been her lovers. Morose, in raptures, throws himself at their knees, and embraces them. Epicone weeps, and Morose seems to be delivered. Suddenly the lawyer decides that the plan is of no avail, the infidelity having been committed before the marriage. "O, this is worst of all worst worsts that hell could have devis'd! marry a whore, and so much noise!" There is Morose then, declared impotent and a deceived husband, at his own request, in the eyes of the whole world, and moreover married for ever. Sir Dauphine comes in like a clever rascal, and as a succouring deity. "Allow me but five hundred during life, uncle," and I free you. Morose signs the deed of gift with alacrity; and his nephew shows him that Epicone is a boy in disguise.1 Add to this enchanting farce the funny parts of the two accomplished and gallant knights, who, after having boasted of their bravery, receive gratefully, and before the ladies, flips and kicks.2 Never was coarse physical laughter more adroitly produced.

1 Epicone, v.

2 Compare Polichinelle in Le Malade imaginaire; Géronte in Les Fourberies de Scapin.

In this broad coarse gaiety, this excess of noisy transport, you recognise the stout roysterer, the stalwart drinker who swallowed hogsheads of Canary, and made the windows of the Mermaid shake with his bursts of humour.

V.

Jonson did not go beyond this; he was not a philosopher like Molière, able to grasp and dramatise the crisis of human life, education, marriage, sickness, the chief characters of his country and century, the courtier, the tradesman, the hypocrite, the man of the world.1 He remained on a lower level, in the comedy of plot,2 the painting of the grotesque, the representation of too transient subjects of ridicule, too general vices.5 If at times, as in the Alchemist, he has succeeded by the perfection of plot and the vigour of satire, he has miscarried more frequently by the ponderousness of his work and the lack of comic lightness. The critic in him mars the artist; his literary calculations strip him of spontaneous invention; he is too much of a writer and moralist, not enough of a mimic and an actor. But he is loftier from another side, for he is a poet; almost all writers, prose-authors, preachers even, were so at the time we speak of. Fancy abounded, as well as the perception of colours and forms, the need and wont of enjoying through the imagination and the eyes. Many of Jonson's pieces, the Staple of News, Cynthia's Revels,

1 Compare l'Ecole des Femmes, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois-gentilhomme, Le Malade imaginaire, Georges Dandin.

2 Compare les Fourberies de Scapin.

3 Compare les Fâcheux.

4 Compare les Précieuses Ridicules.

are fanciful and allegorical comedies like those of Aristophanes. He there dallies with the real, and beyond the real, with characters who are but theatrical masks, abstractions personified, buffooneries, decorations, dances, music, pretty laughing whims of a picturesque and sentimental imagination. Thus, in Cynthia's Revels, three children come on "pleading possession of the cloke" of black velvet, which an actor usually wore when he spoke the prologue. They draw lots for it; one of the losers, in revenge, tells the audience beforehand the incidents of the piece. The others interrupt him at every sentence, put their hands on his mouth, and taking the cloak one after the other, begin to criticise the spectators and authors. This child's play, these gestures and loud voices, this little amusing dispute, divert the public from their serious thoughts, and prepare them for the oddities which they are to look upon. We are in Greece, in the valley of Gargaphie, where Diana1 has proclaimed "a solemn revels." Mercury and Cupid have come down, and begin by quarrelling; the latter says: "My light feather-heel'd coz, what are you any more than my uncle Jove's pander? a lacquey that runs on errands for him, and can whisper a light message to a loose wench with some. round volubility? . . . One that One that sweeps the gods' drinking-room every morning, and sets the cushions in order again, which they threw one at another's head over night?" 2

They are good-tempered gods. Echo, awoke by Mercury weeps for the "too beauteous boy Narcissus":

"That trophy of self-love, and spoil of nature,

Who, now transformed into this drooping flower,

1

By Diana, Queen Elizabeth is meant.

2

Cynthia's Revels, i. 1.

Hangs the repentant head, back from the stream...
Witness thy youth's dear sweets, here spent untasted,
Like a fair taper, with his own flame wasted! . . .
And with thy water let this curse remain,

As an inseparate plague, that who but taste

A drop thereof, may, with the instant touch,
Grow doatingly enamour'd on themselves." 1

The courtiers and ladies drink thereof, and behold, a sort of a review of the follies of the time, arranged, as in Aristophanes, in an improbable farce, a brilliant show. A silly spendthrift, Asotus, wishes to become a man of the court and of fashionable manners; he takes for his master Amorphus, a learned traveller, expert in gallantry, who, to believe himself, is

"An essence so sublimated and refined by travel... able to speak the mere extraction of language; one that . . . was your first that ever enrich'd his country with the true laws of the duello; whose optics have drunk the spirit of beauty in some eight-score and eighteen princes' courts, where I have resided, and been there fortunate in the amours of three hundred forty and five ladies, all nobly if not princely descended, . . . in all so happy, as even admiration herself doth seem to fasten her kisses upon me."

"12

Asotus learns at this good school the language of the court, fortifies himself like other people with quibbles, learned oaths, and metaphors; he fires off in succession supersubtle tirades, and duly imitates the grimaces and tortuous style of his masters. Then, when he has drunk the water of the fountain, becoming suddenly pert and rash, he proposes to all comers a tournament of "court compliment." This odd tournament

is held before the ladies; it comprises four jousts, and at each the trumpets sound. The combatants perform in succession "the BARE ACCOST;" "the BETTER REthe SOLEMN ADDRESS; and " the PERFECT In this grave buffoonery the courtiers are The severe Crites, the moralist of the play, copies their language, and pierces them with their own weapons. Already, with grand declamation, he had rebuked them thus:

GARD; CLOSE."1 beaten.

"O vanity,

How are thy painted beauties doated on,
By light, and empty idiots! how pursu'd

With open and extended appetite !

How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
Rais'd on their toes, to catch thy airy forms,

Still turning giddy, till they reel like drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,

With the long irksomeness of following time!" 2

To complete the overthrow of the vices, appear two symbolical masques, representing the contrary virtues. They pass gravely before the spectators, in splendid array, and the noble verses exchanged by the goddess and her companions raise the mind to the lofty regions of serene morality, whither the poet desires to carry us: