Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/178

 humane, as reasonable, as full of sympathy and of judgment—as these reflections and animadversions of a scholar living in the first half or quarter of the seventeenth, I have never chanced to meet with it.

The forty-eight notes or entries which complete the sum of Ben Jonson's Discoveries should be considered as composing an essay on style, continuous in aim though desultory in treatment. The cruel, stupid, and insolent neglect of his editors has left it in so disjointed and dislocated a condition that we can only read it as we might read so many stray notes jotted down irregularly at odd moments on the first sheet or scrap of paper which might have fallen under the fatigued and fitful hand of the venerable poet. The very last entry is a repetition of a former remark and a former quotation, tumbled in by some blundering printer's devil with no reference whatever to the sentence preceding it. As to the punctuation, let one example stand for many, 'Again, whether a man's genius is best able to reach thither, it should more and more contend, lift, and dilate itself.' To rectify this hopeless nonsense does not require the skill of a Bentley or a Porson. It is obvious that Jonson must have written 'whither a man's genius is best able to