——‘If this man Had but a mind allied unto his words, How blest a fate were it to us, and Rome? Men are deceived, who think there can be thrall Under a virtuous prince. Wish’d liberty Ne’er lovelier looks than under such a crown. But when his grace is merely but lip-good, And that, no longer than he airs himself Abroad in public, there to seem to shun The strokes and stripes of flatterers, which within Are lechery unto him, and so feed His brutish sense with their afflicting sound, As (dead to virtue) he permits himself Be carried like a pitcher by the ears To every act of vice; this is a case Deserves our fear, and doth presage the nigh And close approach of bloody tyranny. Flattery is midwife unto princes’ rage: And nothing sooner doth help forth a tyrant Than that, and whisperers’ grace, that have the time, The place, the power, to make all men offenders!’ The only part of this play in which Ben Jonson has completely forgotten himself, (or rather seems not to have done so), is in the conversations between Livia and Eudemus, about a wash for her face, here called a _fucus_, to appear before Sejanus. Catiline’s Conspiracy does not furnish by any means an equal number of striking passages, and is spun out to an excessive length with Cicero’s artificial and affected orations against Catiline, and in praise of himself. His apologies for his own eloquence, and declarations that in all his art he uses no art at all, put one in mind of Polonius’s circuitous way of coming to the point. Both these tragedies, it might be observed, are constructed on the exact principles of a French historical picture, where every head and figure is borrowed from the antique; but somehow, the precious materials of old Roman history and character are better preserved in Jonson’s page than on David’s canvas. Two of the most poetical passages in Ben Jonson, are the description of Echo in Cynthia’s Revels, and the fine comparison of the mind to a temple, in the New Inn; a play which, on the whole, however, I can read with no patience.