Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/181

Rh her excellence is shown. He tells the Lady Carey that while others are virtuous in this or that humour—phlegm, blood, melancholy, or choler—she has virtue so entire that it has made even her beauty virtuous, exciting not to passion but to goodness. Jonson's eulogies are in a different strain. He can be fancifully complimentary, but it is in a more Humanist and elegant, a less pedantic style,—witness the beautiful lines to the Countess of Bedford or those to Susan, Countess of Montgomery, or those to Mary Lady Wroth—

"He that but saw you wear the wheaten hat          Would call you more than Ceres if not that;           And drest in shepherd's tire who would not say           You were the bright Œnone, Flora, or May?"

Delicacy and pathos are blended in his epitaphs. If "Underneath this sable hearse" is not Jonson's, it is quite Jonsonian. But Jonson's most characteristic and classical eulogies are relevant and appropriate appreciations, compliments a man might be proud to receive, because they tell something about him to posterity, couched in a style and verse often obscure and harsh, but often vigorous and felicitous. The very ruggedness of the lines to Chief-Justice Egerton and those to Sir Henry Savile give them an air of burly veracity which is very taking. His eulogy of Shakespeare in the lines prefixed to the First Folio contains juster criticism of Shakespeare's genius and Shakespeare's art than anything he said or wrote in prose. The ease and urbanity of Horace Jonson never attained, but his best eulogies have classical relevancy and restraint.