scholar’s rather than a poet’s temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time.  As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never veiled his scorn of those—­Shakespeare among them—­whom he conceived to do so; but he knew and valued his own work, as his famous last word to an audience who might be unsympathetic stands to witness,

“By God ’tis good, and if you like it you may.”

Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two contemporary comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one As You Like It, the other What You Will.  Of the two attitudes towards the public, and they might stand as typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can claim complete sincerity.  A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their favours is not a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it is apt to succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its opposite.

Jonson’s theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he set it against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly of Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to Every Man Out of His Humour—­one of his earlier plays.  “I travail with another objection, Signor, which I fear will be enforced against the author ere I can be delivered of it,” says Mitis.  “What’s that, sir?” replies Cordatus.  Mitis:—­“That the argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke’s son, and the son to love the lady’s waiting maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near and familiarly allied to the times.”  Cordatus:  “You say well, but I would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define Quin sit comoedia?  If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero’s definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who would have a comedy to be invitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis; a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous and accommodated to the correction of manners.”  That was what he meant his comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular comedy of the day, Twelfth Night and Much Ado.  Shakespeare might play with dukes and countesses, serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises; he would come down more near and ally himself familiarly with the times.  So comedy was to be medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its follies and its sins; and it was to be constructed with regularity and elaboration, respectful to the Unities if not ruled by them, and built up of characters each the embodiment of some “humour” or eccentricity, and each when his eccentricity is displaying itself at its fullest, outwitted and exposed.  This conception of “humours,” based on a physiology which was already obsolescent, takes