Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/79

 most sweetly: but two out of the eleven lines which compose it, the fifth and the sixth, are positively and intolerably bad. The barbarous and pedantic license of inversion which disfigures his best lyrics with such verses as these—'Create of airy forms a stream,' 'But might I of Jove's nectar sup'—is not a fault of the age but a vice of the poet. Marlowe and Lyly, Shakespeare and Webster, Fletcher and Dekker, could write songs as free from this blemish as Tennyson's or Shelley's. There is no surer test of the born lyric poet than the presence or absence of an instinctive sense which assures him when and how and where to use or to abstain from inversion. And in Jonson it was utterly wanting.

The next year's masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, would be very graceful in composition if it were not rather awkward in construction. The verses in praise of dancing are very pretty, sedate, and polished: and the burlesque part (spoken by 'Messer Gaster' in person) has more than usual of Rabelaisian freedom and energy. The antimasque afterwards prefixed to it, For the Honour of Wales, is somewhat ponderous in its jocularity, but has genuine touches of humour and serious notes of character in its 'tedious and brief' display of the