last and most important task shall be performed by one of our German countrymen. The literary intercourse of the English and German nations reverses the commercial: the former deal, if I may hazard the expression, in raw productions, the latter in those of workmanship. Literary history worth the name is not of long date even with us, yet owes its existence to a German, and was, perhaps, not likely to originate elsewhere. The ingenious author of the "History of the poetic Literature of the German Nation" has repeatedly been reported to have engaged in a similar task concerning the period of Shakspeare: - if it were so, we should no longer stand in need of gleaning the "dead and scattered limbs" of history, but see before us the whole of it, pervaded as it were with the breath and stir of life, and know the secret and almost imperceptible relations of national and individual existences. Till then, it will be a hazardous enterprize to write upon a particular subject with a view to its connection with literary and public life at large, the more especially if the character of the poet in review was greatly influenced by the circumstances of the time. Thus it is with Ben Jonson, whose poetry was almost pamphlet-writing. Notwithstanding this, I have undertaken to draw a sketch of his life and literary character, hoping that, if I myself should fall short to the truth, I might help some other to arrive at it; for the most insignificant performance may prove a step in the scale of science, or promote knowledge at least by meeting with contradiction. The short treatise now offered does not attempt. to claim the merit of any new discoveries of documents which were, indeed, out of my reach but I have only endeavoured to present a narrative which may exhibit the character of Ben Jonson in connection with the spirit of his age.

Benjamin Jonson, or, as the name is commonly styled, Ben Jonson, was a cotemporary, and passed for the rival, of Shakspeare, which circumstance alone would suffice to immortalize his memory. He was born in 1574 - Shakspeare's junior by ten years and died in 1637. His literary fate has at all times been very fickle and capricious, and not only his

coevals, but posterity have not yet arrived, with respect to him, at a certain standard. We are, indeed, inclined to assume that length of time is the surest arbiter of human affairs, and that all things in a long course of years will settle, like water, in their proper level and situation. But this too natural belief will hold good only with authors of absolute perfection, that live on in the hearts and mouths of mankind, and belong, not to the antiquities or curiosities of our present literature, but to its living substance: in all cases, however, tried before the tribunal of learned criticism, there is not, for aught I know, a single instance of absolute unanimity. Notwithstanding the copiousness of our systems and theories we are̱ swayed in questions of polite literature by individual sympathies and antipathies, and literary characters, even when dead, share the destiny of the living, to be honoured and cherished by some, and hated or despised by others.

Such has also been the fate of Ben Jonson, on whom from his first coming before the world as a poet to the present day praises and censures have alternately been lavished. As I am not writing a critical analysis, but an historical memoir, it would be to no purpose to dwell on these any longer: suffice it, then, to say, that his principal adversaries of later times are to be found among the followers of the literary school called romantic, as the late Augustus William Schlegel, Mr. Lewis Tieck, and their partisans; his most able apologizers among his English editors, of whom Mr. Gifford is beyond all comparison the foremost. Whether this excellent critic in his vindication of Ben Jonson's character was prompted by a wellgrounded indignation at the shallow censures and misconstructions of his antagonists, or led astray by too natural a partiality for a subject he had made the business of his life, he has undoubtedly gone too far. He might have pleaded for Ben Jonson without derogating from the reputation of Shakspeare, and need not exchange the office of an historian for that of an advocate. Surely, had he not been prejudiced by somewhat too eager a desire of carrying the victory by any means, he would have been aware of that crisis in English literature announced and ripened particularly by the compositions of Ben Jonson, when

poetry lost the stamp of genuine nature and simplicity, creative genius was succeeded by sophisticated refinement, sensibility by reflexion, everlasting truth by accidental reality: he would, in all probability, have perceived the proud stream of popular English poetry ebbing into shallow by-channels, which were soon swallowed up by the sands. How much or how little Ben Jonson contributed towards this change of public taste and literary industry, and in what manner he became instrumental to a general revolution of thought and sentiment, these questions I dare not answer directly, but shall endeavour, by relating what shall seem connected with them, to explain in some measure, and get nearer to, their purport.

At the time of Shakspeare's first applying himself to the theatre, dramatic poetry was yet in that state of barbarousness and wild extravagance always characterizing the first attempts at art of a sound and vigorous, though rude and intemperate, spirit. Real genius will first manifest itself by displaying its strength; at a later period it begins to aim at beauty. On the accession of Elizabeth the English nation had gone through a mighty religious revolution, and was entering the second stage of modern culture, viz the literary. For there are three different phases in the history of the nations of modern Europe after their deliverance from the hierarchal and feudal fetters of the middle ages: the religious, the literary, and political existences. Soon after the commencement of Elizabeth's reign literary concerns came to be uppermost in England, though this country then became famous in different ways; soon after the death of the queen it was engrossed by political strifes. We perceive in this that rule of history first pointed out by the excellent Mr. Gervinus, and not to be refuted by the objection, that the principles and tendencies of a bygone may extend into, and act upon, the following period. National life cannot indeed be analyzed and decomposed by categories of philosophy, and its animated organism does not secern, as by a chimical process, a caput mortuum of the past. But new notions, and a new bent of thought, brought on through a natural turn of public life, imperceptibly convey themselves into the popular mind, and in a manner take its whole substance into their service. In the

history of England the theorem above mentioned is more evi-. dent than anywhere else, which may be accounted for by the tranquil and uninterrupted agency of nationality. All the great commotions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeded from the people, and whatever was great and excellent in those days, had the mark of its age and country upon it, and grew from the very heart of the nation. The genius of Great Britain never looked more like itself.

We are not going to expatiate here upon the origin of the British drama, nor shall we dwell on the grossnesses of that popular poetry struggling into a human shape in the latter half of the sixteenth century, it being our purpose not to consider its rise, but its decline. We cannot, however, avoid making a few short remarks upon the immediate predecessors of Shakspeare. If we compare the compositions of Marlow, Green, and their cotemporaries, rude as they undoubtedly were, but filled with the breath of life and genuine passion, with the dull and inanimate productions of the foregoing time, they should seem to have made towards perfection not a step, but a giant-stride. Marlow and Green, whose names are most commonly matched with that of Shakspeare, were fully aware of the true and the only end and destination of art: the creating of the ideal. But "overstepping the modesty of nature" they deviated in different ways. From all we know of these poets it should appear, that both of them indulged in wild and irregular habits, and gave themselves up to loose and frivolous principles. Such were never great poets. True poetry is the offspring of an harmonious combination of all the faculties of the mind, and arises, like an image on the surface of the water, from the deep of an unruffled soul. Marlow, on the contrary, and Green, the one reckless and rakish on purpose, the other now a libertine, now a penitent, both dying a miserable death, stand in a similar relation to Shakspeare as Reinhold Lenz and other youthful German poets of the eighteenth century to Goethe.. Their respective characters also display themselves in their compositions. Marlow was no doubt master of all the magic of terror and pathos, but more frequently falling into turgidness of declamation, and at last, like one crying himself hoarse, be

coming exhausted and languid, does seldom arrive at his ends; the light-headed Green, being unequal to deeper conceptions, but distinguished for a flowing pen and a happy turn for merriment, always trying to make up what he wants in unity and depth of thought, by his arts of small-talk and nicety of dialogue, has no purposes worth while at all. The excellences of both, released from their faults, were concentrated and heightened in Shakspeare, whose poetry was the finishing touch and keystone of all that had been before him. However matchless in itself, it bore the features, and was tinctured with the manners, of the age. Not a form or subject of poetry, not a turn of verse and language in Shakspeare, that he did not draw from the existing store of his nation; his productions, sprung up from their native soil and nourished with its sap, were in the strictest sense of the word, nature's handywork. His genius was wholly devoted to his country and imbued with its spirit; he disdained even pretending to what is vulgarly falsely called originality, that is to say taking one's way off the common road of thought and sentiment, but only strove "to show the age and body of the time his form and pressure," by which means he not only became the model and standard of his age, but exemplary for all times to come.

There has at all times been a sort of poetry detached from public life and indulging in a kind of refined selfishness: this may also be found in periods of utter decay and depravity. But a poetry like that of Shakspeare and his coevals, sympathizing with all the glories and follies of the day, cannot well be conceived but in a healthy, vigorous, and active age. David Hume, to be sure, and other historians, are on no good terms with the time in review, because they took into account only the infirmities of the body politic, which brought on, at a later date, the wellknown revolution. The reports given by the moralists of the time sound still worse. With a zeal to be imparted only by religion, the Puritans took the field against the sins of mankind; wisdom cried out in the streets, and no man regarded it; thick volumes appeared against the favourite vices of the time; an old play partly written by Green, entitled "A Looking-glass for London and its Inhabitants," shows the