Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/112

 And few of Jonson's many moral or gnomic passages are finer than the following;

He that for love of goodness hateth ill Is more crown-worthy still Than he which for sin's penalty forbears His heart sins, though he fears.

This metre, though very liable to the danger of monotony, is to my ear very pleasant; but that of the much admired and doubtless admirable address to Sir Robert Wroth is much less so. This poem is as good and sufficient an example of the author's ability and inability as could be found in the whole range of his elegiac or lyric works. It has excellent and evident qualities of style; energy and purity, clearness and sufficiency, simplicity and polish; but it is wanting in charm. Grace, attraction, fascination, the typical and essential properties of verse, it has not. Were Jonson to be placed among the gods of song, we should have to say of him what Æschylus says of Death—

The spirit of persuasive enchantment, the goddess of entrancing inspiration, kept aloof from him alone of all his peers or rivals. To men far weaker, to poets not worthy to be named with him