Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/190

180 that depraves some part of a man's nature without a disease'; and likewise that 'this induced Plato to esteem of Homer as a sacrilegious person, because he presented the gods sometimes laughing.' But this deplorable and degrading instinct of perverse humanity becomes irrepressible and irresistible in the reader who discovers in the author of Bartholomew Fair and The Silent Woman so delicate and sensitive a dislike of plebeian horseplay and farcical scurrility that he cannot at any price abide the insolence and indecency of so vulgar a writer as Aristophanes.

The concluding essay on 'the magnitude and compass of any fable, epic or dramatic,' is of less interest, except to special students, than the animadversions of the writer on more particular subjects of criticism. Constant good sense, occasional felicity of expression, conscientious and logical intensity of application or devotion to every point of the subject handled or attempted, all readers will find, as all readers will expect: and it should be superfluous to repeat that they will find a text so corrupt and so confused as no editor of any but an English classic would venture to publish.

And now it must be evident that if Ben