any unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the result of the necessary movement of the verse.

3. Spenser displays great skill in harmonizing his descriptions of external nature and actual incidents with the allegorical character and epic activity of the poem. Take these two beautiful assages as illustrations of what I mean::

By this the northerne wagoner had set

His sevenfol teme behind the stedfast starre
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wide deepe wandring arre;
And chearefull chaunticlere with his note shrill
Had warned once, that Phoebus' fiery carre

In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,

Full envious that Night so long his roome did fill;

When those accursed messengers of hell,
That feigning dreame, and that faire-forged spright
Came, &c. B. i. c. 2, st. 1.

At last, the golden orientall gate

Of greatest Heaven gan to open fayre;

And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre;
And hurld his glistring beams through gloomy ayre.
Which when the wakeful Elfe perceiv'd, streightway
He started up, and did him selfe prepayre

In sunbright armes and battailons array;

For with that Pagan proud he combat will that day.

Ib. c. 5, st. 2.

Observe also the exceeding vividness of Spenser's descriptions. They are not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque; but are composed of a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams. Compare the following passage with any thing you may remember in pari materia in Milton or Shakspeare:

His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold,

Both glorious brightnesse and great terrour bredd;
For all the crest a dragon did enfold

With greedie pawes, and over all did spredd
His golden winges; his dreadfull hideous hedd,

Close couched on the bever, seemd to throw

From flaming mouth bright sparkles fiery redd,
That suddeine horrour to faint hartes did show;

And scaly tayle was stretcht adowne his back full low.

L*

Upon the top of all his loftie crest

A bounch of haires discolourd diversly,

With sprinkled pearle and gold full richly drest,
Did shake, and seemd to daunce for jollitie;

Like to an almond tree ymounted hye

On top of greene Selinis all alone,

With blossoms brave bedecked daintily,

Whose tender locks do tremble every one

At everie little breath that under heaven is blowne.

Ib. c. 7, st. 31-2.

4. You will take especial note of the marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene. It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there. It reminds me of some lines of my own :

Oh! would to Alla!

The raven or the sea-mew were appointed
To bring me food !-or rather that my soul
Might draw in life from the universal air!
It were a lot divine in some small skiff
Along some ocean's boundless solitude
To float forever with a careless course
And think myself the only being alive!

Remorse, Act iv. sc. 3.

Indeed Spenser himself, in the conduct of his great poem, may be represented under the same image, his symbolizing purpose being his mariner's compass :

-

As pilot well expert in perilous wave,

That to a stedfast starre his course hath bent,
When foggy mistes or cloudy tempests have
The faithfull light of that faire lampe yblent,
And coverd Heaven with hideous dreriment;
Upon his card and compas firmes his eye,
The maysters of his long experiment,
And to them does the steddy helme apply,

Bidding his winged vessell fairely forward fly.

So the poet through the realms of allegory.

B. ii. c. 7, st. 1.

5. You should note the quintessential character of Christian

chivalry in all his characters, but more especially in his women. The Greeks, except. perhaps, in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women interesting, but by unsexing them, as in the instances of the tragic Medea, Electra, &c. Contrast such characters with Spenser's Una, who exhibits no prominent feature, has no particularization, but produces the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance :—

From her fayre head her fillet she undight,
And layd her stole aside: her angels face,
As the great eye of Heaven, shyned bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place;

Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace.

B. i. c. 3, st. 4.

6. In Spenser we see the brightest and purest form of that nationality which was so common a characteristic of our elder poets. There is nothing unamiable, nothing contemptuous of others, in it. To glorify their country-to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the heart-this was their passion and object; and how dear and important an object it was or may be, let Spain, in the recollection of her Cid, declare! There is a great magic in national names. What a damper to all interest is a list of native East Indian merchants! Unknown names are non-conductors; they stop all sympathy. No one of our poets has touched this string more exquisitely than Spenser; especially in his chronicle of the British Kings (B. ii. c. 10), and the marriage of the Thames with the Medway (B. iv. c. 11), in both which passages the mere names constitute half the pleasure we receive. To the same feeling we must in particular attribute Spenser's sweet reference to Ireland :—

Ne thence the Irishe rivers absent were;

Sith no lesse famous than the rest they be, &c. Ib.

And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep.

Ib.

And there is a beautiful passage of the same sort in the Colin Clout's Come Home Again :

"One day," quoth he, "I sat, as was my trade,

Under the foot of Mole," &c.

Lastly, the great and prevailing character of Spenser's mind is

fancy under the conditions of imagination, as an ever-present but not always active power. He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination, in kind or degree, as Shakspeare and Milton have; the boldest effort of his powers in this way is the character of Talus.* Add to this a feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling, and above all, a deep moral earnestness which produces a believing sympathy and acquiescence in the reader, and you have a tolerably adequate view of Spenser's intellectual being.

LECTURE VII.

BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, AND MASSINGER

A CONTEMPORARY is rather an ambiguous term, when applied to authors. It may simply mean that one man lived and wrote while another was yet alive, however deeply the former may have been indebted to the latter as his model. There have been instances in the literary world that might remind a botanist of a singular sort of parasite plant, which rises above ground, independent and unsupported, an apparent original; but trace its roots, and you will find the fibres all terminating in the root of another plant at an unsuspected distance, which, perhaps, from want of sun and genial soil, and the loss of sap, has scarcely been able to peep above the ground.-Or the word may mean those whose compositions were contemporaneous in such a sense as to preclude all likelihood of the one having borrowed from the other. In the latter sense, I should call Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shakspeare, though he long survived him; while I should prefer the phrase of immediate successors for Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, though they too were Shakspeare's contemporaries in the former sense.

* B. 5. Legend of Artegall.—Ed.

BEN JONSON.*

Born, 1574.-Died, 1637.

BEN JONSON is original; he is, indeed, the only one of the great dramatists of that day who was not either directly produced, or very greatly modified, by Shakspeare. In truth, he differs from our great master in every thing—in form and in substance—and betrays no tokens of his proximity. He is not original in the same way as Shakspeare is original; but after a fashion of his own, Ben Jonson is most truly original.

The characters in his plays are, in the strictest sense of the term, abstractions. Some very prominent feature is taken from the whole man, and that single feature or humor is made the basis upon which the entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's dramatis persona are almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient actors; you know from the first scene-sometimes from the list of names-exactly what every one of them is to be. He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was external or open to, and likely to impress, the senses. He individualizes, not so much, if at all, by the exhibition of moral or intellectual differences, as by the varieties and contrasts of manners, modes of speech and tricks of temper; as in such characters as Puntarvolo, Bobadill, &c.

I believe there is not one whim or affectation in common life noted in any memoir of that age which may not be found drawn and framed in some corner or other of Ben Jonson's dramas; and they have this merit, in common with Hogarth's prints, that not a single circumstance is introduced in them which does not play upon, and help to bring out, the dominant humor or humors of the piece. Indeed I ought very particularly to call your attention to the extraordinary skill shown by Ben Jonson in contriving situations for the display of his characters. In fact, his care and anxiety in this matter led him to do what scarcely any of the dramatists of that age did—that is, invent his plots. It is not a first perusal that suffices for the full perception of the elaborate artifice of the plots of the Alchemist and the Silent Woman;

From Mr. Green's note.-Ed.

"In Jonson's comic inventions," says Schlegel, "a spirit of observation is manifested more than fancy."-Vol. iv. p. 93.