Indeed, it is a curious psychological study to watch the laborious process by which Jonson drags his thoughts and fancies from the reluctant and resisting soil of his mind, and then lays them, one after the other, with a deep-drawn breath, on his page. Each is forced into form by main strength, as we sometimes see a pillar of granite wearily drawn through the street by a score of straining oxen. Take, for example, Sir Epicure Mammon's detail of the luxuries he will revel in when his possession of the philosopher's stone shall have given him boundless wealth. The first cup of Canary and the first tug of invention bring up this enormous piece of humor:-- "My flatterers Shall be the pure and gravest of divines That I can get for money." Then another wrench of the mind, and, it is to be feared, another inlet of the liquid, and we have this:-- "My meat shall all come in in Indian shells, Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies." Glue that on, and now for another tug:-- "My shirts I 'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment, It shall be such as might provoke the Persian, Were he to teach the world riot anew." And then, a little heated, his imagination is stung into action, and this refinement of sensation flashes out:-- "My gloves of fishes' and birds' skins perfumed _With gums of Paradise and Eastern air_." And now we have an extravagance jerked violently out from his logical fancy:-- "I will have all my beds blown up, not stuffed; Down is too hard." But all this patient accumulation of particulars, each costing a mighty effort of memory or analogy, produces no cumulative effect. Certainly, the word "strains," as employed to designate the effusions of poetry, has a peculiar significance as applied to Jonson's verse. No hewer of wood or drawer of water ever earned his daily wages by a more conscientious putting forth of daily labor. Critics--and among the critics Ben is the most clamorous--call upon us to admire and praise the construction of his plays. But his plots, admirable of their kind, are still but elaborate contrivances of the understanding, all distinctly thought out beforehand by the method of logic, not the method of imagination; regular in external form, but animated by no living internal principle; artful, but not artistic; ingenious schemes, not organic growths; and conveying the same kind of pleasure we experience in inspecting other mechanical contrivances. His method is neither the method of nature nor the method of art, but the method of artifice. A drama of Shakespeare may be compared to an oak; a drama by Jonson, to a cunningly fashioned box, made of oak-wood, with some living plants growing in it. Jonson is big; Shakespeare is great.