Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/90

 of temporary collapse in judgment and in sense, can be questioned by no sane reader of so much as the argument. To rank any preceding play of Jonson's among those dismissed by Dryden as his 'dotages' would be to attribute to Dryden a verdict displaying the veriest imbecility of impudence; but to The New Inn that rough and somewhat brutal phrase is on the whole but too plausibly applicable.

At the beginning of the next year Jonson came forward in his official capacity as court poet or laureate, and produced 'the Queen's Masque,' Love's Triumph through Calliopolis, and again, at Shrovetide, 'the King's Masque, Chloridia. A few good verses, faint echoes of a former song, redeem the first of these from the condemnation of compassion or contempt: and there is still some evidence in its composition of conscientious energy and of capacity not yet reduced from the stage of decadence to the stage of collapse. But the hymn which begins fairly enough with imitation of an earlier and nobler strain of verse at once subsides into commonplace, and closes in doggrel which would have disgraced a Sylvester or a Quarles. It is impossible to read Chloridia without a regretful reflection on the lapse of time which prevented it from being a