which represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and most persistent species of comedy in the language.  None the less, Jonson’s comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which comedy long continued to run.  To mention only Shakespeare’s Falstaff and his rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame Quickly, and the rest, whether in “Henry iv.” or in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” all are conceived in the spirit of humours.  So are the captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of “Henry V.,” and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage.  It was not Jonson’s fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade “the humour:  into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard.”  There was an anonymous play called “Every Woman in Her Humour.”  Chapman wrote “A Humourous Day’s Mirth,” Day, “Humour Out of Breath,” Fletcher later, “The Humourous Lieutenant,” and Jonson, besides “Every Man Out of His Humour,” returned to the title in closing the cycle of his comedies in “The Magnetic Lady or Humours Reconciled.”

With the performance of “Every Man Out of His Humour” in 1599, by Shakespeare’s company once more at the Globe, we turn a new page in Jonson’s career.  Despite his many real virtues, if there is one feature more than any other that distinguishes Jonson, it is his arrogance; and to this may be added his self-righteousness, especially under criticism or satire.  “Every Man Out of His Humour” is the first of three “comical satires” which Jonson contributed to what Dekker called the ‘poetomachia’ or war of the theatres as recent critics have named it.  This play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical picture of the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature, couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire—­as a realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy—­there had been nothing like Jonson’s comedy since the days of Aristophanes.  “Every Man in His Humour,” like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson’s contemporaries.  The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama.  Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in “The Acharnians” and Socrates in “The Clouds,” to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again.  What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency.  With the arrogant attitude mentioned