himself, and gave to his humor a scornful, rather than a genial tone. He huffs even in his hilarity; his fun is never infectious; and his very laughter is an assertion of superior wisdom. He has none of that humanizing humor which, in Shakespeare, makes us like the vagabonds we laugh at, and which insures for Dogberry and Nick Bottom, Autolychus and Falstaff, warmer friends among readers than many great historic dignities of the state and the camp can command. In regard to the materials of the dramatist, Jonson, in his vagrant career, had seen human nature under many aspects; but he had surveyed it neither with the eye of reason, nor the eye of imagination. His mind fastened on the hard actualities of observation, without passing to what they implied or suggested. Deficient thus in philosophic insight and poetic insight, his shrewd, contemptuous glance rarely penetrated beneath the manners and eccentricities of men. His attention was arrested, not by character, but by prominent peculiarities of character,--peculiarities which almost transformed character into caricature. To use his own phrase, he delineated humors rather than persons, that is, individuals under the influence of some dominant affectation, or whim, or conceit, or passion, that drew into itself, colored, and mastered the whole nature,--"an acorn," as Sir Thomas Browne phrases it, "in their young brows, which grew to an oak in their old heads." He thus inverts the true process of characterization. Instead of seeing the trait as an offshoot of the individual, he individualizes the trait. Every man is _in_ his humor, instead of every humor being in its man. In order that there should be no misconception of his purpose, he named his chief characters after their predominant qualities, as Morose, Surly, Sir Amorous La Fool, Sir Politic Would Be, Sir Epicure Mammon, and the like; and, apprehensive even then that his whole precious meaning would not be taken in, he appended to his _dramatis personæ_ further explanations of their respective natures. This distrust of the power of language to lodge a notion in another brain is especially English; but Ben, of all writers, seems to have been most impressed with the necessity of pounding an idea into the perceptions of his countrymen. His mode resembles the attempt of that honest Briton, who thus delivered his judgment on the French nation: "I hate a Frenchman, sir. Every Frenchman is either a puppy or a rascal, sir." And then, fearful that he had not been sufficiently explicit, he added, "Do you take my idea?"