Some small inaccuracies, too, should be corrected in the second edition.  Dryden, for instance, was not ’Jonson’s successor on the laureate’s throne,’ as Mr. Symonds eloquently puts it, for Sir William Davenant came between them, and when one remembers the predominance of rhyme in Shakespeare’s early plays, it is too much to say that ’after the production of the first part of Tamburlaine blank verse became the regular dramatic metre of the public stage.’  Shakespeare did not accept blank verse at once as a gift from Marlowe’s hand, but himself arrived at it after a long course of experiments in rhyme.  Indeed, some of Mr. Symonds’ remarks on Marlowe are very curious.  To say of his Edward II., for instance, that it ’is not at all inferior to the work of Shakespeare’s younger age,’ is very niggardly and inadequate praise, and comes strangely from one who has elsewhere written with such appreciation of Marlowe’s great genius; while to call Marlowe Jonson’s ‘master’ is to make for him an impossible claim.  In comedy Marlowe has nothing whatever to teach Jonson; in tragedy Jonson sought for the classical not the romantic form.

As for Mr. Symonds’ style, it is, as usual, very fluent, very picturesque and very full of colour.  Here and there, however, it is really irritating.  Such a sentence as ’the tavern had the defects of its quality’ is an awkward Gallicism; and when Mr. Symonds, after genially comparing Jonson’s blank verse to the front of Whitehall (a comparison, by the way, that would have enraged the poet beyond measure) proceeds to play a fantastic aria on the same string, and tells us that ’Massinger reminds us of the intricacies of Sansovino, Shakespeare of Gothic aisles or heaven’s cathedral . . .  Ford of glittering Corinthian colonnades, Webster of vaulted crypts, . . .  Marlowe of masoned clouds, and Marston, in his better moments, of the fragmentary vigour of a Roman ruin,’ one begins to regret that any one ever thought of the unity of the arts.  Similes such as these obscure; they do not illumine.  To say that Ford is like a glittering Corinthian colonnade adds nothing to our knowledge of either Ford or Greek architecture.  Mr. Symonds has written some charming poetry, but his prose, unfortunately, is always poetical prose, never the prose of a poet.  Still, the volume is worth reading, though decidedly Mr. Symonds, to use one of his own phrases, has ’the defects of his quality.’

‘English Worthies.’  Edited by Andrew Lang.  Ben Jonson.  By John Addington Symonds. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

THE POETS’ CORNER—­I

(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1886.)