self-satisfied tone, and of ‘putting himself on you that are my country,’ not doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair majority who would think him a very smart fellow, worthy of all imitation. Now is this play a moral or an immoral one? Of its coarseness we say nothing. We should not endure it, of course, nowadays; and on that point something must be said hereafter: but if we were to endure plain speaking as the only method of properly exposing vice, should we endure the moral which, instead of punishing vice, rewards it? And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among the Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch? What but a background of profligacy and frivolity? A proof, indeed, of the general downward tendencies of the age may be found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself. Howsoever pure and lofty the ideal which he laid down for himself (and no doubt honestly) in the Preface to ‘Volpone,’ he found it impossible to keep up to it. Nine years afterwards we find him, in his ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ catering to the low tastes of James the First in ribaldry at which, if one must needs laugh—as who that was not more than man could help doing over that scene between Rabbi Busy and the puppets?—shallow and untrue as the gist of the humour is, one feels the next moment as if one had been indulging in unholy mirth at the expense of some grand old Noah who has come to shame in his cups. But lower still does Jonson fall in that Masque of the ‘Gipsies Metamorphosed,’ presented to the king in 1621, when Jonson was forty-seven; old enough, one would have thought, to know better. It is not merely the insincere and all but blasphemous adulation which is shocking,—that was but the fashion of the times: but the treating these gipsies and beggars, and their ‘thieves’ Latin’ dialect, their filthiness and cunning, ignorance and recklessness, merely as themes for immoral and inhuman laughter. Jonson was by no means the only poet of that day to whom the hordes of profligate and heathen nomads which infested England were only a comical phase of humanity, instead of being, as they would be now, objects of national shame and sorrow, of pity and love, which would call out in the attempt to redeem them the talents and energies of good men. But Jonson certainly sins more in this respect than any of his contemporaries. He takes a low pleasure in parading his intimate acquaintance with these poor creatures’ foul slang and barbaric laws; and is, we should say, the natural father of that lowest form of all literature, which has since amused the herd, though in a form greatly purified, in the form of ‘Beggars’ Operas,’ ‘Dick Turpins,’ and ‘Jack Sheppards.’ Everything which is objectionable in such modern publications as these was exhibited, in far grosser forms, by one of the greatest poets who ever lived, for the amusement of a king of England; and yet the world still is at a loss to know why sober and God-fearing