So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company. After him we should say no further testimony on this unpleasant matter ought to be necessary. He may have been morose, fanatical, exaggerative; but his bitter words suggest at least this dilemma. Either they are true, and the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says it was) that of Gehenna: or they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and envy against more successful poets. And what does that latter prove, but that the greatest poet of his age (after Shakspeare has gone) was not as much esteemed as some poets whom we know to have been more filthy and more horrible than he? which, indeed, is the main complaint of Jonson himself. It will be rejoined, of course, that he was an altogether envious man; that he envied Shakspeare, girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest,’ in the prologue to ‘Every Man in his Humour’; and, indeed, Jonson’s writings, and those of many other playwrights, leave little doubt that stage rivalry called out the bitterest hatred and the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, Shakspeare’s great soul was giving way to the pettiest passions, when in ‘Hamlet’ he had his fling at the ‘aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t.’ It may be that he was girding in return at Jonson, when he complained that ‘their writer did them wrong to make them complain against their own succession,’ _i.e._ against themselves, when ‘grown to common players.’ Be that as it may. Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only less great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare: but Jonson certainly is not so in all his charges. Some of the faults which he attributes to Shakspeare are really faults. At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average of his contemporaries, by the evidence of the men’s own plays. We know that the decadence of the stage of which he complains went on uninterruptedly after his time, and in the very direction which he pointed out. On this point there can be no doubt; for these hodmen of poetry ‘made a wall in our father’s house, and the bricks are alive to testify unto this day.’ So that we cannot do better than give a few samples thereof, at least samples decent enough for modern readers, and let us begin, not with a hodman, but with Jonson himself. Now, Ben Jonson is worthy of our love and respect, for he was a very great genius, immaculate or not; ‘Rare Ben,’ with all his faults. One can never look without affection on the magnificent manhood of that rich free forehead, even though one may sigh over the petulance and pride which brood upon the lip and eyebrow, ‘Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love.’