To be most readily found in Rogers’s _Memorials of the Earl of Stirling_ (vol. ii. pp. 205-210; Edinburgh, 1877), where, however, it appears merely as one of the Appendices to a book of more or less pure genealogy, without the slightest editorial information as to date or _provenance_. It seems to be taken from the 1711 folio of Drummond’s _Works_: and to have been written in 1634, between Bacon’s death and Ben’s. Footnote 267: From Park, and from Messrs Gayley and Scott. I did not always agree with my late friend Dr Grosart: but I think he was better advised when he called it “disappointing.” ----- Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not wholly his fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic armed at all points. [Sidenote: _Ben Jonson: his equipment._] His knowledge of literature was extremely wide, being at the same time solid and thorough. While he had an understanding above all things strong and masculine, he was particularly addicted, though in no dilettante fashion, to points of form. His whole energies, and they were little short of Titanic, were given to literature. And, lastly, if he had not the supremest poetic genius, he had such a talent that only the neighbourhood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short was not in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of attitude: for these, if kept within bounds, and tempered by that enthusiasm for letters which he possessed, are not bad equipments for the critic. It was rather in the fact that he still came too early for it to be possible for him, except by the help of a miracle, to understand the achievements and value of the vernaculars. By his latest days, indeed,[268] the positive performance of these was already very great. Spain has hardly added anything since, and Italy not very much, to her share of European literature; France was already in the first flush of her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier history: and what Ben’s own contemporaries in England had done, all men know. But mediæval literature was shut from him, as from all, till far later; he does not seem to have been much drawn to Continental letters, and, perhaps in their case, as certainly in English, he was too near—too much a part of the movement—to get it into firm perspective. ----- Footnote 268: It may be well to point out that these days carried him far beyond the point at which we have stopped for Italian and for French. His solidarity with the Elizabethans proper, however, makes his inclusion here imperative: and the fact must be taken into consideration in judging the relative lengths of this and the preceding chapters. -----