For gloss on the _Conversations_, for reduction to something like system of the critical remarks scattered through the works, and for the nearest approach we can have to a formal presentment of Ben’s critical views, we must go to the _Discoveries_.[271] ----- Footnote 271: The best separate edition is that of Prof. Schelling of Philadelphia (Boston, U.S.A., 1892). I give the pp. of this, as well as the Latin Headings of sections, which will enable any one to trace the passage in complete editions of the Works such as Cunningham’s Gifford. It is strange that no one has numbered these sections for convenience of reference. ----- The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—_Timber_, _Explorata_, _Discoveries_, and _Sylva_—with others of its peculiarities, is explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it. [Sidenote: _The_ Discoveries.] It never appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its author’s death. The _Discoveries_ are described as being made “upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notions of the times.” They are, in fact, notes unnumbered and unclassified (though batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that of his friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter _Essays_. The influence of those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is prominent: large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and for some time[272] the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on _Perspicuitas—elegantia_ (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing noteworthy about it, and _Bellum scribentium_ (p. 10) is only a satiric exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer _Nil gratius protervo libro_ (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined with the old complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.[273] There is just but rather general stricture in _Eloquentia_ (p. 16) on the difference between the arguments of the study and of the world. “I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says Ben, “than I would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”[274] _Memoria_ (p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business. _Censura de poetis_ (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at Euphuism, in _De vere argutis_, opens with a tolerably confident note, “Nothing in our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole being pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-rhymer’s[275] works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages.” The famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and the development of Ben’s view, “would he had blotted a thousand,” leads to a more general disquisition on the