Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/100

86 would seem weak and sickly, and its utterance faltering and faint. The principle of decay is at work, and the empire tottering to its fall. There are none of those nobler strifes and passions which are the symptoms of vigorous existence. And we see this in the "Sejanus" of Ben Jonson. There are only two characters with whom the spectator can feel any sympathy, and they are not sufficiently prominent. They are two senators who are noble exceptions to the general depravity of their order, who blush at the degradation into which the once great assembly had sunk.

The amour—for it is a story, not of love, but of lust—that is woven into the plot has nothing of depth or tenderness in it. It may be a faithful picture of the sensual passion of such an age, but excites no sympathetic interest in the reader, and is therefore one among many reasons we might enumerate why this portion of history is not well adapted to dramatic action. But the play has faults which do not belong immediately to the subject. It is too long; and though it does not lack incident, it is incident of an undramatic kind. There is a lack of plot, the speeches are far too lengthy even for orations in the senate, and there are many long passages of rhyming heroics which none but the admirers of French tragedy and Dryden's uncongenial imitation of them will be so hazardous as to praise.

The characters are very numerous, and the most important are men whose crimes have nothing in them to dazzle or cheat us into a temporary admiration. Livia is an abandoned woman; Sejanus himself an unprincipled, ambitious man; and Tiberius a more bestial slave to sense, a murderer, a coward, and yet the despot of the degraded senate. The main interest is centred in these two bad men. The Emperor is a deeper dissembler, and more than equal to the reckless plot-making and versatile