heavily from the realism of Jonson’s methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and tediousness to modern readers.  The truth is he was less a satirist of contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and follies of his own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and elaborateness of the plots which he constructed for their exposure.  At the first glance his people are contemporary types, at the second they betray themselves for what they are really—­cock-shies set up by the new comedy of Greece that every “classical” satirist in Rome or France or England has had his shot at since.  One wonders whether Ben Jonson, for all his satirical intention, had as much observation—­as much of an eye for contemporary types—­as Shakespeare’s rustics and roysterers prove him to have had.  It follows that all but one or two of his plays, when they are put on the stage to-day are apt to come to one with a sense of remoteness and other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare or Moliere.  His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which is the Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have done service to many since the ancients fashioned them years ago.  Jealous husbands, foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a boastful soldier, a cunning slave—­they all are merely counters by which the game of comedy used to be played.  In England, since Shakespeare took his hold on the stage, that road has been stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse.

Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in his intention.  Had he kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting on to it types he had learned from books, he might have made himself an English Moliere—­without Moliere’s breadth and clarity—­but with a corresponding vigour and strength which would have kept his work sweet.  And he might have founded a school of comedy that would have got its roots deeper into our national life than the trivial and licentious Restoration comedy ever succeeded in doing.  As it is, his importance is mostly historical.  One must credit him with being the first of the English classics—­of the age which gave us Dryden and Swift and Pope.  Perhaps that is enough in his praise.

CHAPTER IV

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

(1)

With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative writers that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, had passed away.  Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a dozen years earlier, and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many other men whom we class roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work under James, their temper and their ideals belong to the earlier day.  The seventeenth century, not in England only but in Europe, brought a new way of thinking