Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/69

 spontaneous notes of nature, their profound and searching pathos, their strange and thrilling tone of reality, the beauty and the terror and the truth of every touch, are the signs of a great, a very great tragic poet: and it is all but unimaginable that such an one could have been, but a year or so afterwards, the author of Sejanus—and again, eight years later, the author of Catiline. There is fine occasional writing in each, but it is not dramatic: and there is good dramatic work in each, but it is not tragic.

For two years after the appearance of Catiline there is an interval of silence and inaction in the literary life of its author; an intermission of labour which we cannot pretend to explain in the case of this Herculean workman, who seems usually to have taken an austere and strenuous delight in the employment and exhibition of his colossal energies. His next work is one of which it seems all but impossible for criticism to speak with neither more nor less than justice. Gifford himself, the most devoted of editors and of partisans, to