found his chief adversary, not among his contemporaries, but in Seneca, and when Jonson armed himself with Aristotle to win the suffrages of a London audience.  Mr. Symonds’ book, consequently, will be opened with interest.  It does not, of course, contain much that is new about Jonson’s life.  But the facts of Jonson’s life are already well known, and in books of this kind what is true is of more importance than what is new, appreciation more valuable than discovery.  Scotchmen, however, will, no doubt, be interested to find that Mr. Symonds has succeeded in identifying Jonson’s crest with that of the Johnstones of Annandale, and the story of the way the literary Titan escaped from hanging, by proving that he could read, is graphically told.

On the whole, we have a vivid picture of the man as he lived.  Where picturesqueness is required, Mr. Symonds is always good.  The usual comparison with Dr. Johnson is, of course, brought out.  Few of ’Rare Ben’s’ biographers spare us that, and the point is possibly a natural one to make.  But when Mr. Symonds calls upon us to notice that both men made a journey to Scotland, and that ’each found in a Scotchman his biographer,’ the parallel loses all value.  There is an M in Monmouth and an M in Macedon, and Drummond of Hawthornden and Boswell of Auchinleck were both born the other side of the Tweed; but from such analogies nothing is to be learned.  There is no surer way of destroying a similarity than to strain it.

As for Mr. Symonds’ estimate of Jonson’s genius, it is in many points quite excellent.  He ranks him with the giants rather than with the gods, with those who compel our admiration by their untiring energy and huge strength of intellectual muscle, not with those ’who share the divine gifts of creative imagination and inevitable instinct.’  Here he is right.  Pelion more than Parnassus was Jonson’s home.  His art has too much effort about it, too much definite intention.  His style lacks the charm of chance.  Mr. Symonds is right also in the stress he lays on the extraordinary combination in Jonson’s work of the most concentrated realism with encyclopaedic erudition.  In Jonson’s comedies London slang and learned scholarship go hand in hand.  Literature was as living a thing to him as life itself.  He used his classical lore not merely to give form to his verse, but to give flesh and blood to the persons of his plays.  He could build up a breathing creature out of quotations.  He made the poets of Greece and Rome terribly modern, and introduced them to the oddest company.  His very culture is an element in his coarseness.  There are moments when one is tempted to liken him to a beast that has fed off books.