Page:The Works of Ben Jonson - Gifford - Volume 6.djvu/315

 that of Fletcher, he might presage the same unfortunate event, should he ever introduce it on the stage. So that posterity can only bewail the perversity of taste, in their injudicious ancestors, whose discouragement of the first, contributed to deprive us of the second pastoral drama, that would do honour to the nation. What we now have, serveth only to encrease our regret; like the remains of some, ancient master, which beget in us the most inexpressible desire of a perfect statue by the same hand. When a work is not completed by its author, or maimed by the hand of time, one would either wish the remains to be inconsiderable, or the beauties less exquisite and charming. In the former case the deficiency is not so much deplored, from our inability to judge of the perfection of the whole; and in the latter, we are very little anxious for what appears to be hardly worth preserving; but when a piece is so far advanced, as to convince us of the excellence of the artist, and of its own superior delicacy, we are naturally touched with concern for what is lost, and set a proper value on the parts which still subsist. .

I cannot compliment my predecessor either on the taste or judgment displayed in this summary, which is drawn up somewhat in the formal style of Vellum. The gravity with which he ventures to conjecture a circumstance which Jonson himself had expressly affirmed, is of a ludicrous cast; but indeed Whalley appears inconsequential and confused'throughout. Jonson had already "feasted the public forty years;" this brings down the date of the Sad Shepherd to 1636; yet the critic imagines that the conclusion of it might have perished when his study was burnt, which took place r at least a dozen years before; since Howell, in a letter writer on the appearance of the Magnetic Lady, reminds Jonson that he had prevented his study from taking fire, and alludes to the former accident, in which his papers perished, as of a remote date.

The next conjecture, namely that Jonson might have left this drama unfinished on account of the ungenerous treatment which the Faithful Shepherdess experienced on its first appearance, is incredibly wild: that pastoral was brought out in 1610, perhaps before, and not heard of again till 1633, when it was acted at court, so that Jonson, after suffering the terrors of its expulsion from the stage to hang over him near thirty years, must have been finally overcome by them, just as the play had acquired a certain degree of favour, and appeared again on the stage. But how little does Whalley seem to know of Jonson! He was not a man to regulate his expectations of good or ill success by the fate of any other person; and though he might, and, in fact,