Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/84

 and admirers of Ben Jonson for the appearance of a work worth almost all his masques together; a work in which the author of The Fox and The Alchemist once more reasserted his claim to a seat which no other poet and no other dramatist could dispute. The last complete and finished masterpiece of his genius is the splendid comedy of The Staple of News. This, rather than The Silent Woman, is the play which should be considered as the third—or perhaps we should say the fourth—of the crowning works which represent the consummate and incomparable powers of its author. No man can know anything worth knowing of Ben Jonson who has not studied and digested the text of Every Man in his Humour, The Fox, The Alchemist, and The Staple of News: but any man who has may be said to know him well. To a cursory or an incompetent reader it may appear at first sight that the damning fault of The Devil is an Ass is also the fault of this later comedy: that we have here again an infelicitous and an incongruous combination of realistic satire with Aristophanic allegory, and that the harmony of the different parts, the unity of the composite action, which a pupil of Aristophanes should at least have striven to attain—or, if he could not, at