sound philosophy in 1616 with Sir M. Hale's speech from the bench in a trial of a witch many years afterwards.* Act ii. sc. 1. Meercraft's speech :— Sir, money's a whore, a bawd, a drudge.— I doubt not that 'money' was the first word of the line, and has dropped out: Money! Sir, money's a, &c. THE STAPLE OF NEWS. Act. IV. sc. 3. Pecunia's speech : No, he would ha' done, That lay not in his power: he had the use Of your bodies, Band and Wax, and sometimes Statute's. Read (1815), -he had the use of Your bodies, &c. TOW, however, I doubt the legitimacy of my transposition of the 'of' from the beginning of this latter line to the end of the one preceding; -for though it facilitates the metre and reading of the latter line, and is frequent in Massinger, this disjunction of the preposition from its case seems * In 1664, at Bury St. Edmonds on the trial of Rose Cullender and Amy Duny. Ed. to have been disallowed by Jonson. Perhaps the better reading is— O' your bodies, &c.— the two syllables being slurred into one, or rather snatched, or sucked, up into the emphasized 'your.' In all points of view, therefore, Ben's judgment is just; for in this way, the line cannot be read, as metre, without that strong and quick emphasis on 'your' which the sense requires ;—and had not the sense required an emphasis on your,' the tmesis of the sign of its cases' of,'' to,' &c. would destroy almost all boundary between the dramatic verse and prose in comedy:-a lesson not to be rash in conjectural amendments. 1818. Ib. sc. 4. P. jun. I love all men of virtue, frommy Princess.'Frommy,' fromme, pious, dutiful, &c. Act v. sc. 4. Penny-boy sen. and Porter: I dare not, will not, think that honest Ben had Lear in his mind in this mock mad scene. THE NEW INN. ACT I. sc. 1. Host's speech: A heavy purse, and then two turtles, makes.— 'MAKES,' frequent in old books, and even now used in some counties for mates, or pairs. Ib. sc. 3. Host's speech : -And for a leap O' the vaulting horse, to play the vaulting house.— Instead of reading with Whalley 'ply' for ' play,' I would suggest horse' for house.' The meaning would then be obvious and pertinent. The punlet, or pun-maggot, or pun intentional, horse and house,' is below Jonson. The jeu-de-mots just below Read a lecture Upon Aquinas at St. Thomas à Waterings— had a learned smack in it to season its insipidity. Ib. sc. 6. Lovel's speech : Then shower'd his bounties on ine, like the Hours, And press the liberality of heaven Down to the laps of thankful men! Like many other similar passages in Jonson, this is εἶδος χαλεπὸν ἰδεῖν a sight which it is difficult to make one's self see,-a picture my fancy cannot copy detached from the words. Act ii. sc. 5. Though it was hard upon old Ben, yet Felton, it must be confessed, was in the right in considering the Fly, Tipto, Bat Burst, &c. of this play mere dotages. Such a scene as this was enough to damn a new play; and Nick Stuff is worse still,-most abominable stuff indeed! Act iii. sc. 2. Lovel's speech: So knowledge first begets benevolence, Benevolence breeds friendship, friendship love.— Jonson has elsewhere proceeded thus far; but the part most difficult and delicate, yet, perhaps, not the least capable of being both morally and poetically treated, is the union itself, and what, even in this life, it can be. NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. SEWARD'S Preface. 1750. The King And No King, too, is extremely spirited in all its characters; Arbaces holds up a mirror to all inen of virtuous principles but violent passions. Ilence he is, as it were, at once magnanimity and pride, patience and fury, gentleness and rigour, chastity and incest, and is one of the finest mixtures of virtues and vices that any poet has drawn, 3:c. T HESE are among the endless instances of the abject state to which psychology had sunk from the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the present reign of George III.; and even now it is but just awaking. Ib. Seward's comparison of Julia's speech in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, act iv. last sceneMadam, 'twas Ariadne passioning, &c. with Aspatia's speech in the Maid's Tragedy— I stand upon the sea-beach now, &c. Act. ii. and preference of the latter. It is strange to take an incidental passage of one writer, intended only for a subordinate part, and compare it with the same thought in another writer, who had chosen it for a prominent and principal figure. Ib. Seward's preference of Alphonso's poisoning in A Wife for a Month, act i. sc. 1, to the passage in King John, act v. sc. 7,— Poison'd, ill fare! dead, forsook, cast off! Mr. Seward! Mr. Seward! you may be, and I trust you are, an angel; but you were an ass. Ib. Every reader of taste will see how superior this is to the quotation from Shakspeare. Of what taste? Ib. Seward's classification of the plays: Surely Monsieur Thomas, the Chances, Beggar's Bush, and the Pilgrim, should have been placed in the very first class! But the whole attempt ends in a woful failure. HARRIS'S COMMENDATORY POEM ON I'D have a state of wit couvok'd, which hath HIS is an instance of that modifying of quan THIS tity by emphasis, without which our elder poets cannot be scanned. Power,' here, instead of being one long syllable-pow'r-must be sound |