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 men of virtuous
principles but violent passions. Hence 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," &c.

These 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 scene--

"Madam, '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 Shakespeare."

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 Fletcher.

"I'd have a state of wit convok'd, which hath
A _power_ to take up on common faith:"--

This is an instance of that modifying of quantity by emphasis, wit