the fanatic, who has eaten more roast pig than any one, and rushes about denouncing all the other "Dagons" and "idols," like a bloated English Tartuffe, _le pauvre homme._ The stocks do not daunt him, his tongue remains as free as Mause Headrigg's. In an introduction to this enormous burlesque Jonson throws scoffs at "The Tempest" of Shakespeare. "The Silent Woman" is truly a roaring farce on a singular subject, Morose, a gentleman as impatient of noise, and as certain that all silence except his own was golden, as the Sage of Chelsea. How he is saddled with a wife who, from being "mim as a mouse" becomes the most vociferous of Roaring Boys, and, indeed to the confusion of some boastful gallants, _is_ a boy pranked up for the practical jokes whereby Morose's nephew extracts Morose's money, may be read, with much other mirthful noisy matter, by the curious. "The Devil is an Ass" (1616) is a satire on conjurers, crystal-gazers, projectors, or, as we say, "promoters" of bubble enterprises, and their gulls and "coneys". A walking tour to Scotland (1618-1619), where Jonson was entertained by Drummond of Hawthornden, had for its fruit Drummond's brief notes of his conversation and literary opinions. He did not care much for Drummond's Petrarchian sonnets, "cross-rhymes"; and, as to Shakespeare (whom Drummond himself does not seem to have appreciated), merely said that "he wanted art," and that, in his geography, he was wrong when he gave Bohemia a sea-coast. Happily Ben left splendid tributes other-where (in verses attached to the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, "The Folio" (1623), and in prose), to Shakespeare's genius and character. Drummond's estimate of Ben as a braggart about himself, and a contemner of others, as jealous and vindictive, is only true in part. No man had more or more admiring friends; at taverns he reigned, among the great wits "Sealed of the Tribe of Ben," like an earlier Dryden. His last plays "The New Inn," "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a Tub," were badly received: in an Ode he left the loathèd stage And the more loathsome age; he lost his place of Masque-maker in 1632, but was still befriended by Charles I. He died on 6 August, 1637, before the troubles of the Covenant came to a head. His great collection of books and his treatise on the "Poetics" of Aristotle and the "Art of Poetry" of Horace had already been destroyed by a fire. Many of his beautiful lyrics exhibit that grace, delicacy, and, in the best sense, _poetry_ which are not conspicuous in his plays. "His throne is not with the Olympians but with the Titans," and Tennyson could not endure the gloom which he found in Jonson's comedies. Scott, on the other hand, seems to have known them almost by heart, and constantly quotes them, and, indeed, the whole host of minor Elizabethan playwrights. The learning of Jonson, in Greek no less than in Latin, is a marvel, Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,