Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/96

 be observed, is as ready with a quotation from Chaucer as Goody Polish in The Magnetic Lady or Lovel in The New Inn.

Of this great dramatist's other than dramatic work in poetry or in prose this is not the place to speak: and his two posthumous fragments of dramatic poetry, interesting and characteristic as they are, can hardly affect for the better or for the worse our estimate of his powers. Had Mortimer his Fall been completed, we should undoubtedly have had a third example of rhetorical drama, careful, conscientious, energetic, impassive and impressive; worthy to stand beside the author's two Roman tragedies: and Mortimer might have confronted and outfaced Sejanus and Catiline in sonorous audacity of rhythmic self-assertion and triumphant ostentation of magnificent vacuity. In The Sad Shepherd we find the faults and the merits of his best and his worst masques so blended and confounded that we cannot but perceive the injurious effect on the Laureate's genius or instinct of intelligence produced by the habit of conventional invention which the writing of verse to order and the arrangement of effects for a pageant had now made inevitable and incurable. A masque in-