He has a good deal to say of Ben Jonson, in other places as well as in this Essay on the Drama.[145] He was evidently well acquainted with that poet, and admired him without liking him.  Somewhere he calls him “the dry and dogged Jonson,"[146] and again he speaks of his genius in very high terms.  The contrast between Shakspere and Jonson moved him even to epigram:[147] “In reading Shakespeare we often meet passages so congenial to our nature and feelings that, beautiful as they are, we can hardly help wondering they did not occur to ourselves; in studying Jonson, we have often to marvel how his conceptions could have occurred to any human being.”  It was characteristic of Scott to note the fact that Shakspere wrote rapidly, Jonson slowly, for he was fond of getting support for his theory that rapid writing is the better.

As early as 1804 Scott referred to The Changeling as “an old play which contains some passages horribly striking,"[148] and in so doing voiced, as Mr. Swinburne says, “the first word of modern tribute to the tragic genius of Thomas Middleton."[149] Scott also praised Massinger highly, especially for his strength in characterization, and once called him “the most gentleman-like of all the old English dramatists."[150] He discussed Beaumont and Fletcher sympathetically, for he knew them well and frequently quoted from them.  He named Shirley, Ford, Webster, and Dekker in a group, and spoke of the singular profusion of talents devoted in this period to the writing of plays, an observation which is made more explicitly later in the Journal, when he has just been reading an old play which, he says, “worthless in the extreme, is, like many of the plays in the beginning of the seventeenth century, written to a good tune.  The dramatic poets of that time seem to have possessed as joint-stock a highly poetical and abstract tone of language, so that the worst of them often remind you of the very best."[151] This circumstance he accounts for by a reference to the audiences, and this in turn he seems to ascribe partly to the great number of theaters then open in London.  He dwells so much on the evils of limiting the number of play-houses to two or three, that we may fairly consider it one of his hobbies, and it is possible that he had some slight influence toward increasing that public opposition to the theatrical monopoly which finally, in 1843, resulted in the nullification of the patents.

Scott’s discussion of Restoration drama is admirably vigorous and clear.  He probably simplified the matter too much at some points, indeed, as for example in over-estimating the influence exerted upon the stage by Charles II. and his French tastes, and in tracing the origin of the French drama to romances.  But in general his facts are right and his deductions fair.  Mr. Saintsbury has accused him of depreciating Dryden’s plays, especially the comedies, out of disgust at their indecency; yet in judging the period as a whole he seems to discriminate sufficiently