lligence in the
early eighteenth century, that a singular fabric of myth grew up round Ben
Jonson. He was pictured as an incarnation of envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness, directed in the first place towards Shakespere, and then
towards all other literary craftsmen. William Gifford, his first competent
editor, set himself to work to destroy this, and undoubtedly succeeded. But
the acrimony with which Gifford tinctured all his literary polemic perhaps
rather injured his treatment of the case; even yet it may be doubted
whether Ben Jonson has attained anything like his proper place in English
literary history.

Putting aside the abiding influence of a good long-continued course of
misrepresentation, it is still not difficult to discover the source of this
under-estimate, without admitting the worst view or even any very bad view
of Ben Jonson's character, literary and personal. It may be granted that he
was rough and arrogant, a scholar who pushed scholarship to the verge of
pedantry, a critic who sometimes forgot that though a schoolmaster may be a
critic, a critic should not be merely a schoolmaster. His work is saturated
with that contempt of the _profanum vulgus_ which the _profanum vulgus_
(humanly enough) seldom fails to return. Moreover, it is extremely
voluminous, and it is by no means equal. Of his eighteen plays, three
only--_Every Man in his Humour_, _The Alchemist_, and the charming fragment
of _The Sad Shepherd_--can be praised as wholes. His lovely _Masques_ are
probably unread by all but a few scores, if so many, in each generation.
His noble sinewy prose is, for the most part, unattractive in subject. His
minor poems, though not a few of them are known even to smatterers in
literature, are as a whole (or at least it would seem so) unknown. Yet his
merits are extraordinary. "Never" in his plays (save _The Sad Shepherd_)
"tender," and still more rarely "sublime," he yet, in words much better
applied to him than to his pupil Dryden, "wrestles with and conquers time."
Even his enemies admit his learning, his vigour, his astonishing power of
work. What is less generally admitted, despite in one case at least the
celebrity of the facts that prove it, is his observation, his invention,
and at times his anomalous and seemingly contradictory power of grace and
sweetness. There is no more singular example of the proverb, "Out of the
eater came forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness," which has been
h