Shallow and Mrs. Quickly which put in (so to speak) a nominal reappearance in the Merry Wives of Windsor are comparatively as poor and thin if set over against the full rich outlines of Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again are at all points alike inferior to the real Shallow and the genuine Quickly of King Henry IV.  It is true that Jonson’s humour has sometimes less in common with Shakespeare’s than with the humour of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle.  For all his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly once or twice burnt but so much as a stray pinch of fugitive incense on the altar of Cloacina; the only Venus acknowledged and adored by those three latter humourists.  If not always constant with the constancy of Milton to the service of Urania, he never turns into a dirtier byway or back alley than the beaten path trodden occasionally by most of his kind which leads them on a passing errand of no unnatural devotion to the shrine of Venus Pandemos.

When, however, we turn from the raw rough sketch to the enriched and ennobled version of the present play we find it in this its better shape more properly comparable with another and a nobler work of Jonson’s—­with that magnificent comedy, the first avowed and included among his collection by its author, which according to all tradition first owed its appearance and success to the critical good sense and generous good offices of Shakespeare.  Neither my duly unqualified love for the greater poet nor my duly qualified regard for the less can alter my sense that their mutual relations are in this one case inverted; that Every Man in his Humour is altogether a better comedy and a work of higher art than the Merry Wives of Windsor.  Kitely is to Ford almost what Arnolphe is to Sganarelle. (As according to the learned Metaphraste “Filio non potest praeferri nisi filius,” even so can no one but Moliere be preferred or likened to Moliere.) Without actually touching like Arnolphe on the hidden springs of tragedy, the jealous husband in Jonson’s play is only kept from trenching on the higher and forbidden grounds of passion by the potent will and the consummate self-command of the great master who called him up in perfect likeness to the life.  Another or a deeper tone, another or a stronger touch, in the last two admirable scenes with his cashier and his wife, when his hot smouldering suspicion at length catches fire and breaks out in agony of anger, would have removed him altogether beyond the legitimate pale of comedy.  As it is, the self-control of the artist is as thorough as his grasp and mastery of his subject are triumphant and complete.