Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/119

Rh for alchemy, and a telling modern comedy might be modelled on the old. The moral of the whole is the moral of Reynard. We are not cheated by the cleverness of knaves, but by our own folly and greed.

In the year following the performance of The Alchemist was acted Jonson's second and last tragedy, Catiline His Conspiracy, in which Cicero and Sallust are treated as Tacitus and Juvenal had been in Sejanus, and to my mind the former are dramatically less interesting than the latter. Jonson essayed the chorus in the Senecan style. The effect was not, however, to make the play more lyric or classic. Three years later appeared his last great comedy, Bartholmew Fair, stuffed with humours and manners, the coarsest and most rollicking but perhaps the most real in interest and humour of his plays. Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy completes the study of the Puritan begun in The Alchemist. After this play Jonson wrote none that can for a moment compare with these masterpieces. The Devil is an Ass (1631) is ingenious in conception, and the satire on projectors vivid and amusing. The Staple of News (1631) opens admirably, but tails off into tedious dialogue and tedious morality. The New Inn (1631), The Magnetic Lady (1640), and A Tale of a Tub (1640) all reveal diminishing power, and a Jonsonian comedy demanded Herculean vigour.

The popularity of that artificial though poetic trifle the Masque was one of the causes of the decline of the drama under James and Charles. On his numerous productions of this kind