Mr. Greenwood and the Baconians believe that the author of the plays abounded in Latin and Greek.  In my opinion his classical scholarship must have seemed slight indeed to Ben, so learned and so vain of his learning:  but this is part of a vexed question, already examined.  So far, Ben’s verses have brought not a hint to suggest that he does not identify the actor, his Beloved, with the author.  Nothing is gained when Ben, in commendatory verses, praises “Thy Art,” whereas, speaking to Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), he said that Shakespeare “wanted art.”  Ben is not now growling to Drummond of Hawthornden:  he is writing a panegyric, and applauds Shakespeare’s “well-turned and true-filed lines,” adding that, “to write a living line” a man “must sweat,” and “strike the second heat upon the Muses’ anvil.”

To produce such lines requires labour, requires conscious “art.”  So Shakespeare had “art,” after all, despite what Ben had said to Drummond:  “Shakespeare lacked art.”  There is no more in the matter; the “inconsistency” is that of Ben’s humours on two perfectly different occasions, now grumbling to Drummond; and now writing hyperbolically in commendatory verses.  But the contrast makes Mr. Greenwood exclaim, “Can anything be more astonishing and at the same time more unsatisfactory than this?” {249a}

Can anything be more like Ben Jonson?

Did he know the secret of the authorship in 1619?  If so, why did he say nothing about the plays of the Great Unknown (whom he called Shakespeare), save what Drummond reports, “want of art,” ignorance of Bohemian geography.  Or did Ben not know the secret till, say, 1623, and then heap on the very works which he had previously scouted praise for the very quality which he had said they lacked?  If so, Ben was as absolutely inconsistent, as before.  There is no way out of this dilemma.  On neither choice are Ben’s utterances “easy to reconcile one with the other,” except on the ground that Ben was—­ Ben, and his comments varied with his varying humours and occasions.  I believe that, in the commendatory verses, Ben allowed his Muse to carry him up to heights of hyperbolical praise which he never came near in cold blood.  He was warmed with the heat of poetic composition and wound up to heights of eulogy, though even now he could not forget the small Latin and less Greek!

We now turn to Mr. Greenwood’s views about the commendatory verses.  On mature consideration I say nothing of his remarks on Ben’s couplets about the bad engraved portrait. {250a} They are concerned with the supposed “Original bust,” as represented in Dugdale’s engraving of 1656.  What the Baconians hope to make out of “the original bust” I am quite unable to understand. {250b} Again, I leave untouched some witticisms {250c} on Jonson’s lines about Spenser, Chaucer, and Beaumont in their tombs—­lines either suggested by, or suggestive of others by an uncertain W. Basse, “but the evidence of authorship seems somewhat doubtful.  How the date is determined I do not know . . . " {251a} As Mr. Greenwood knows so little, and as the discussion merely adds dust to the dust, and fog to the mist of his attempt to disable Ben’s evidence, I glance and pass by.