It must be admitted, however, that this epithet is sufficiently indefinite to admit widely differing estimates of the value of his works. In a critical view, the most obvious characteristic of his mind is its bulk; but its creativeness bears no proportion to its massiveness. His faculties, ranged according to their relative strength, would fall into this rank:--first, BEN; next, understanding; next, memory; next, humor; next, fancy; and last and least, imagination. Thus, in the strictly poetic action of his mind, his fancy and imagination being subordinated to his other faculties, and not co-ordinated with them, his whole nature is not kindled, and his best masques and sweetest lyrics give no idea of the general largeness of the man. In them the burly giant becomes gracefully _petite_; it is Fletcher's Omphale "smiling the club" out of the hand of Hercules, and making him, for the time, "spin her smocks." Now the greatest poetical creations of Shakespeare are those in which he is greatest in reason, and greatest in passion, and greatest in knowledge, as well as greatest in imagination,--his poetic power being "Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone, Binding all things with beauty." His mind is "one entire and perfect chrysolite," while Jonson's rather suggests the pudding-stone. The poet _in_ Ben, being thus but a comparatively small portion _of_ Ben, works by effort, rather than efficiency, and leaves the impression of ingenuity rather than inventiveness. But in his tragedies of "Sejanus" and "Catiline," and especially in his three great comedies of "The Fox," "The Alchymist," and "The Silent Woman," the whole man is thrust forward, with his towering individuality, his massive understanding, his wide knowledge of the baser side of life, his relentless scorn of weakness and wickedness, his vivid memory of facts and ideas derived from books. They seem written with his fist. But, though they convey a powerful impression of his collective ability, they do not convey a poetic impression, and hardly an agreeable one. His greatest characters, as might be expected, are not heroes or martyrs, but cheats or dupes. His most magnificent cheat is Volpone, in "The Fox"; his most magnificent dupe is Sir Epicure Mammon, in "The Alchymist"; but in their most gorgeous mental rioting in imaginary objects or sense, the effect is produced by a dogged accumulation of successive images, which are linked by no train of strictly imaginative association, and are not fused into unity of purpose by the fire of passion-penetrated imagination.