It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist; and it is usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric comedy and because of the weight of pedantic learning with which he burdened his two tragic failures. The second point marks an obvious error of detail; the first is too crude a statement to be accepted; to say that he failed because his genius was unsuited to tragedy is to tell us nothing at all. Jonson did not write a good tragedy, but we can see no reason why he should not have written one. If two plays so different as _The Tempest_ and _The Silent Woman_ are both comedies, surely the category of tragedy could be made wide enough to include something possible for Jonson to have done. But the classification of tragedy and comedy, while it may be sufficient to mark the distinction in a dramatic literature of more rigid form and treatment—it may distinguish Aristophanes from Euripides—is not adequate to a drama of such variations as the Elizabethans. Tragedy is a crude classification for plays so different in their tone as _Macbeth_, _The Jew of Malta_, and _The Witch of Edmonton_; and it does not help us much to say that _The Merchant of Venice_ and _The Alchemist_ are comedies. Jonson had his own scale, his own instrument. The merit which _Catiline_ possesses is the same merit that is exhibited more triumphantly in _Volpone_; _Catiline_ fails, not because it is too laboured and conscious, but because it is not conscious enough; because Jonson in this play was not alert to his own idiom, not clear in his mind as to what his temperament wanted him to do. In _Catiline_ Jonson conforms, or attempts to conform, to conventions; not to the conventions of antiquity, which he had exquisitely under control, but to the conventions of tragico-historical drama of his time. It is not the Latin erudition that sinks _Catiline_, but the application of that erudition to a form which was not the proper vehicle for the mind which had amassed the erudition. If you look at _Catiline_—that dreary Pyrrhic victory of tragedy—you find two passages to be successful: Act II. scene i, the dialogue of the political ladies, and the Prologue of Sylla’s ghost. These two passages are genial. The soliloquy of the ghost is a characteristic Jonson success in content and in versification— Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night So heavy on thee, and my weight so light? Can Sylla’s ghost arise within thy walls, Less threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls Of thee and thine? Shake not the frighted heads Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds? Or as their ruin the large Tyber fills, Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills?...