Nuntius and other persons to relate the fate of the children of Sejanus after his own fall, tolerable perhaps in an interlude like Bale's Kynge Johan, is felt to be without excuse in a tragedy pretending to be regular.

Jonson was not dismayed by the failure of Sejanus. He knew that he had established for himself a strong position on the stage, and this was rendered still more secure by the favour with which he was regarded by the Court. James I. was qualified to appreciate his learning: the Queen delighted to witness, and sometimes to take part in, the Masques which, on festal occasions, no other poet could prepare with equal eloquence and splendour. Backed by the taste of the nobility and the respect of the rising school of dramatists, headed by Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, through the whole of James's reign, found himself in easy circumstances, and the tone of his criticism becomes proportionately less harsh and censorious. During this period were produced all his most successful comedies, Volpone, The Silent Woman, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, The Devil is an Ass; and the comparatively rare occurrence in these of the Inductions by which he attempted, in his early and later days, to guide the judgment of the spectators, shows that he felt himself to be moving with the popular stream. Between 1616-the date of the production of the lastnamed play—and 1625 he seems to have written nothing for the public stage: when he returned to it, a new king was on the throne, and his own dramatic powers had begun to decline.

Volpone (produced in 1605) is perhaps the finest of Jonson's comedies; at any rate, it is the most successful in blending the spirit of the old Morality with the form of the Classic drama. It has a clear and forcible moral, namely, that selfish greed and cunning must necessarily in the end overreach itself. Volpone (the Fox), assisted by his parasite Mosca (the Fly), deludes a number of base flatterers-Voltore (the Vulture), Corbaccio (the Crow), and Corvino (the Raven)-with the belief that he is at the point of death, and that each of them is likely to be his

sole heir. In this hope the fortune-hunters consent to sacrifice to Volpone's caprice, one his self-respect, another the future prospects of his son, the third even the honour of his wife; and when the Fox himself is brought into difficulties through his lust, they all conspire to extricate him by bearing false witness against two innocent persons, who would have been his victims. The latter are

on the point of being condemned, when Volpone,—whose chief delight is in making fools of the knaves who expect to inherit from him,-with the co-operation of Mosca, spreads a report of his own death, and that the parasite is his heir. Disappointed in his hopes, one of the conspirators, Voltore, the advocate, confesses before the court the share he has had in the fraud; and when Volpone, who, in disguise, has been listening to him with dismay, tries to make Mosca contradict the rumour of his death, he finds that it is the interest of the latter to confirm it. Seeing that the game is up, he throws off his disguise and avows his deceit, thus depriving his accomplice of the fruits of his treachery. All the criminals are in this way exposed and punished together.

Traces of the allegorical spirit of the Morality remain in the names of the knavish actors, but the allegory is so finely blended with the action that the characters appear distinctly human. The plot is simple, and probable enough for the stage; though its unity is to some extent marred by the appearance of an absurd English traveller, Sir Politick Would-be, who is introduced merely for the purpose of exhibiting a "humour." The scene is laid in Venice, and the manners throughout are consistently "Italian," the action being thus skilfully relieved of the atmosphere of improbability which might have oppressed it, if a story so wild as that told by the conspirators had been represented as passing muster in an English court of justice. Jonson says, in the prologue to this remarkable play, that it was written in five weeks.

The plot of The Silent Woman (acted in 1609) is far more farcical. Morose, a selfish, unsocial old bachelor, has two main objects of dislike-noise and his nephew.

To get rid of the one, he has trained a barber to shave, and a servant to attend on him, in perfect silence; to spite the other, who is his heir expectant, he has resolved to marry. When the play opens, it appears that the barber has found for his patron a miraculous woman who knows how to hold her tongue: her, Morose is about to take as a wife, and for some reason the nephew, Sir Eugene Dauphine, appears to favour the arrangement, and is greatly vexed with one of his friends, who thinks to do him a service by interfering to prevent the marriage. Fortunately for Dauphine, the sole result of the intervention of the friend is to make Morose eager for the completion of the marriage; the barber, who is now seen to be in the nephew's pay, is sent to fetch a parson, and the ceremony is completed. Hardly has she become Morose's wife, when Epicone shows herself in her true colours, and by her clamours and amazonian impudence begins to make her husband's life a burden to him. Morose is now eager to escape from the trap into which he has been led, and Dauphine's friends (all of whom believe that the marriage is valid and final) amuse themselves at the uncle's expense, by introducing the barber and another of their company, disguised as a divine and a canon lawyer, to consider the position. After the unfortunate man has been deafened by the noise of the disputants, without finding any prospect of relief, Dauphine offers to provide a means of escape, on condition that Morose will make suitable provision for him in the present and the future. The latter, who is ready in his despair to agree to anything, consents, upon which Dauphine causes Epicone to throw off her peruke and other disguises, and shows that his uncle has married a boy.

The character of Morose, with the misfortune of his marriage, is borrowed from the Greek sophist Libanius,1 but the whole contrivance of the plot, with its extremely artfully managed dénouement, is Jonson's, who has also ingeniously combined with the main action several underplots ridiculing the “humours" of the day.

1 Gifford's edition of Ben Jonson, vol. iii. p. 500.

In the Alchemist (1610) the comic subject is furnished by one of the prevailing follies of the age. The craze for the transmutation of metals, which had been ridiculed by so early an author as Chaucer,1 reached its height in the sixteenth century, when Paracelsus spread his impostures all over Europe, and was followed by such successful cheats as Dee and Kelly, whose arts, with the books of Lilly, Cardan, Anthony, and others, had helped to influence the covetous imagination of mankind. The plot of Jonson's play is of the simplest. Lovewit, a householder, has fled from London in fear of the plague, leaving his house under the charge of his servant Face, who allies himself with Subtle the Alchemist, and Dol Common, a woman of the town, to cheat as many dupes as possible in his master's absence. The play is taken up with a representation of the quarrels of the three rogues among themselves, and with the various devices by which they contrive to humour the credulity of their victims. The solution of the situation is provided by the return of Lovewit, with whom Face makes his peace by betraying his two confederates. In no other of his plays has Jonson so richly displayed his vast learning, or so happily woven into the texture of the plot the portraiture of particular characters. The reverend gravity of Subtle, the swelling flood of Epicure Mammon's sensual imagination, which sweeps away even the restraints imposed by his almost equally boundless greed, are represented with splendid power; and the fineness of Jonson's observation particularly displays itself in the nicety with which he discriminates between different kinds of fanaticism, manifested in one direction by the zeal of Ananias, in the other by the casuistry of Tribulation Wholesome.

In 1611 Jonson again attempted the pathos of tragedy. He seems himself to have thought his Catiline superior to Sejanus, for, in dedicating it to Lord Pembroke, he says: "It is the first of this race that ever I dedicated to any person; and had I not thought it the best, it should have been taught a less ambition." Con

1 See Canterbury Tales, "Canon's Yeoman's Tale."

To get rid of the one, he has trained a barber to shave, and a servant to attend on him, in perfect silence; to spite the other, who is his heir expectant, he has resolved to marry. When the play opens, it appears that the barber has found for his patron a miraculous woman who knows how to hold her tongue: her, Morose is about to take as a wife, and for some reason the nephew, Sir Eugene Dauphine, appears to favour the arrangement, and is greatly vexed with one of his friends, who thinks to do him a service by interfering to prevent the marriage. Fortunately for Dauphine, the sole result of the intervention of the friend is to make Morose eager for the completion of the marriage; the barber, who is now seen to be in the nephew's pay, is sent to fetch a parson, and the ceremony is completed. Hardly has she become Morose's wife, when Epicone shows herself in her true colours, and by her clamours and amazonian impudence begins to make her husband's life a burden to him. Morose is now eager to escape from the trap into which he has been led, and Dauphine's friends (all of whom believe that the marriage is valid and final) amuse themselves at the uncle's expense, by introducing the barber and another of their company, disguised as a divine and a canon lawyer, to consider the position. After the unfortunate man has been deafened by the noise of the disputants, without finding any prospect of relief, Dauphine offers to provide a means of escape, on condition that Morose will make suitable provision for him in the present and the future. The latter, who is ready in his despair to agree to anything, consents, upon which Dauphine causes Epicone to throw off her peruke and other disguises, and shows that his uncle has married a boy.

The character of Morose, with the misfortune of his marriage, is borrowed from the Greek sophist Libanius,1 but the whole contrivance of the plot, with its extremely artfully managed dénouement, is Jonson's, who has also ingeniously combined with the main action several underplots ridiculing the "humours" of the day.

1 Gifford's edition of Ben Jonson, vol. iii. p. 500.