In the original version of this comedy there was not a note of poetry from end to end; as it then appeared, it might be said to hold the same place on the roll of Shakespeare’s plays as is occupied by Bartholomew Fair on the roll of Ben Jonson’s.  From this point of view it is curious to contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of the town-bred schoolboy and the country lad.  There is a certain faint air of the fields, the river, and the park, even in the rough sketch of Shakespeare’s farce—­wholly prosaic as it is, and in no point suggestive of any unlikelihood in the report which represents it as the composition or rather as the improvisation of a fortnight.  We know at once that he must have stroked the fallow greyhound that was outrun on “Cotsall”; that he must—­and perhaps once or twice at least too often—­have played truant (some readers, boys past or present, might wish for association’s sake it could actually have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow of good Sir Hugh’s probably not over formidable though “threatening twigs of birch,” at all risks of being “preeches” on his return, in fulfilment of the direful menace held out to that young namesake of his over whose innocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditably vigilant.  On the other hand, no student of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociously familiar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden’s favoured and grateful pupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived to reproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to details from which Hogarth might have shrunk.  Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater or more willing diligence in school hours than he must have lavished on other than scholastic studies in the streets.  The humour of his huge photographic group of divers “humours” is undeniably and incomparably richer, broader, fuller of invention and variety, than any that Shakespeare’s lighter work can show; all the five acts of the latter comedy can hardly serve as counterpoise, in weight and wealth of comic effect, to the single scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moral and theological boundaries of action and intention which distinguish the innocent if not laudable desire to eat pig from the venial though not mortal sin of longing to eat pig in the thick of the profane Fair, which may rather be termed a foul than a fair.  Taken from that point of view which looks only to force and freedom and range of humorous effect, Jonson’s play is to his friend’s as London is to Windsor; but in more senses than one it is to Shakespeare’s as the Thames at London Bridge is to the Thames at Eton:  the atmosphere of Smithfield is not more different from the atmosphere of the playing-fields; and some, too delicate of nose or squeamish of stomach, may prefer Cuckoo Weir to Shoreditch.  But undoubtedly the phantoms of