In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It breaks out side by side with, and sometimes even within, his sweetest lyrics; it interposes what may be called _parabases_ in the most unexpected passages[269] of his plays. [Sidenote: _His_ Prefaces, _&c._] _The Poetaster_ is almost as much criticism dramatised as _The Frogs_. But there are three “places,” or groups of places, which it inspires, not in mere suggestion, but with propriety—the occasional Prefaces, or observations, to and on the plays themselves, the _Conversations with Drummond_, and, above all, the at last fairly (though not yet sufficiently) known _Discoveries_ or _Timber_. ----- Footnote 269: Take as one of a hundred, and from the less read pieces, that interesting passage in the masque of _The New World Discovered in the Moon_, which Gifford has made more interesting by a further discovery in Theobald’s copy:— _Chro._ Is he a man’s poet or a woman’s poet, I pray you? _2nd Her._ Is there any such difference? _Fact._ Many, as betwixt your man’s tailor and your woman’s tailor. _1st Her._ How, may we beseech you? _Fact._ I’ll show you: your man’s poet may break out strong and deep i' the mouth, ... but your woman’s poet must flow, and stroke the ear, and as one of them said of himself sweetly— “Must write a verse as smooth and calm as cream, In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.” Whereon the injured “Tibbalds”: “_Woman’s Poet, his soft versification—Mr P——_.” The Induction to _Every Man out of His Humour_, a very large part of _Cynthia’s Revels_, with its principal character of Crites, and its audacious self-praise in the Epilogue, not a little of _The Silent Woman_, and scores of other places in play and poem, might be added. ----- To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered critical passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson than for a History of Criticism. The “Address to the Readers” of _Sejanus_, which contains a reference to the author’s lost _Observations on Horace, his Art of Poetry_ (not the least of such losses) is a fair specimen of them: the dedication of _Volpone_ to “the most noble and most equal sisters, Oxford and Cambridge,” a better. In both, and in numerous other passages of prose and verse, we find the real and solid, though somewhat partial, knowledge, the strong sense, the methodic scholarship of Ben, side by side with his stately, not Euphuistic, but rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but slightly excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner of assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most unguarded form in the _Conversations_ with Drummond.