Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/120

 more unequal poem than the elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester is hardly to be found anywhere; but the finest passages are noble indeed. The elegiac poems on the famous demi-mondaine Venetia Stanley, who made a comparatively respectable end as Lady Digby, are equally startling and amusing in their attribution to that heroine of a character which would justify the beatification if not the canonization of its immaculate possessor. The first of these is chiefly remarkable for a singular Scotticism—'where Seraphim take tent of ordering all'; the fragment of the second, as an early attempt—I know not whether it be the earliest—to introduce the terza rima into English verse. There are one or two fine stanzas in the fourth, and the Apotheosis of this singular saint has a few good couplets; it contains, however, probably the most horrible and barbarous instance of inversion which the violated language can display:

Such indefinable enormities as this cannot but incline us to think that this great scholar, this laurelled invader and conqueror of every field and every province of classic learning, was intus et in