Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/106

 necessary to register as it is natural to deplore the detestable fact that he did so. The collection of his epigrams which bears only too noisome witness to this fact is nevertheless by no means devoid of valuable and admirable components. The sixty-fifth, a palinode or recantation of some previous panegyric, is very spirited and vigorous; and the verses of panegyric which precede and follow it are wanting neither in force nor in point. The poem 'on Lucy Countess of Bedford,' for which Gifford seems hardly able to find words adequate to his admiration, would be worthy of very high praise if the texture of its expression and versification were unstiffened and undisfigured by the clumsy license of awkward inversions. The New Cry, a brief and brilliant satire on political gossips of the gobemouche order, has one couplet worthy of Dryden himself, descriptive of such pretenders to statecraft as

talk reserved, locked up, and full of fear, Nay, ask you how the day goes, in your ear; Keep a Star-chamber sentence close twelve days, And whisper what a Proclamation says.

The epitaph on little Salathiel Pavy, who had acted under his own name in the induction to Cynthia's Revels, is as deservedly famous as any