Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/114

 The Celebration of Charis in ten lyric pieces would be a graceful example of Jonson's lighter and brighter inspiration if the ten were reduced to eight. His anapæsts are actually worse than Shelley's: which hope would fain have assumed and charity would fain have believed to be impossible. 'We will take our plan from the new world of man, and our work shall be called the Pro-me-the-an'—even the hideous and excruciating cacophony of that horrible sentence is not so utterly inconceivable as verse, is not so fearfully and wonderfully immetrical as this: 'And from her arched brows such a grace sheds itself through the face.' The wheeziest of barrel-organs, the most broken-winded of bagpipes, grinds or snorts out sweeter melody than that. But the heptasyllabic verses among which this monstrous abortion rears its amorphous head are better than might have been expected; not, as Gifford says of one example, 'above all praise,' but creditable at their best and tolerable at their worst.

The miscellaneous verses collected under the pretty and appropriate name of Underwoods comprise more than a few of Ben Jonson's happiest and most finished examples of lyric, elegiac, and gnomic or didactic poetry; and likewise not a