Page:The Works of Ben Jonson - Gifford - Volume 3.djvu/337

Rh "The Fox, the Alchemist, and Silent Woman, "Done by Ben Jonson, and outdone by no man."

But it is time to draw to a conclusion. I shall therefore only subjoin a few lines from Hurd, (a man seldom just to Jonson, never friendly,) and leave the reader to wonder at the perversity which could maintain that the author of the FOX had "stalked for two centuries on the stilts of artificial reputation."

"Later writers for the stage have, no doubt, avoided these defects (the sporting with Corbaccio's deafness, &c. p. 192) of the exactest of our old dramatists. But do they reach his excellencies? Posterity, I am afraid, will judge otherwise, whatever may be now thought of some fashionable comedies. And if they do not,—neither the state of general manners, nor the turn of public taste appears to be such as countenances the expectation of greater improvements."—!—"To those who are not over sanguine in their hopes, our forefathers will perhaps be thought to have furnished (what, in nature, seemed linked together) the fairest example of dramatic, as of real manners." Hor. vol. ii. p. 244.