And some perhaps would be apt to say of Jonson, as it was said of Demosthenes,--_non displicuisse illi jocos, sed non contigisse_. I will not deny, but that I approve most the mixt way of comedy; that which is neither all wit, nor all humour, but the result of both. Neither so little of humour as Fletcher shews, nor so little of love and wit as Jonson; neither all cheat, with which the best plays of the one are filled, nor all adventure, which is the common practice of the other. I would have the characters well chosen, and kept distant from interfering with each other; which is more than Fletcher or Shakespeare did: But I would have more of the _urbana, venusta, salsa, faceta_, and the rest which Quintilian reckons up as the ornaments of wit; and these are extremely wanting in Ben Jonson. As for repartee, in particular; as it is the very soul of conversation, so it is the greatest grace of comedy, where it is proper to the characters. There may be much of acuteness in a thing well said; but there is more in a quick reply: _Sunt enim longè venustiora omnia in respondendo quàm in provocando_. Of one thing I am sure, that no man ever will decry wit, but he who despairs of it himself; and who has no other quarrel to it, but that which the fox had to the grapes. Yet, as Mr Cowley (who had a greater portion of it than any man I know) tells us in his _Character of Wit_,--rather than all wit, let there be none. I think there is no folly so great in any poet of our age, as the superfluity and waste of wit was in some of our predecessors: particularly we may say of Fletcher and of Shakespeare, what was said of Ovid, _In omni ejus ingenio, facilius quod rejici, quàm quod adjici potest, invenies:_ The contrary of which was true in Virgil, and our incomparable Jonson. Some enemies of repartee have observed to us, that there is a great latitude in their characters, which are made to speak it: and that it is easier to write wit than humour; because, in the characters of humour, the poet is confined to make the person speak what is only proper to it; whereas, all kind of wit is proper in the character of a witty person. But, by their favour, there are as different characters in wit as in folly. Neither is all kind of wit proper in the mouth of every ingenious person. A witty coward, and a witty brave, must speak differently. _Falstaff_ and the _Liar_ speak not like _Don John_ in the "Chances," and _Valentine_ in "Wit without Money." And Jonson's _Truewit_ in the "Silent Woman," is a character different from all of them. Yet it appears, that this one character of wit was more difficult to the author, than all his images of humour in the play: for those he could describe and manage from his observations of men; this he has taken, at least a part of it, from books; Witness the speeches in the first act, translated _verbatim_ out of Ovid, "_De Arte Amandi_." To omit what afterwards he borrowed from the sixth satire of Juvenal against women.