"Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other. I will not say with Pope, that every speech may be assigned to the proper speaker, because may speeches there are which have nothing characteristical; but, perhaps, though some may be equally adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find any that can be properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimThe choice is right, when there is reason for choice. "Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectation of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakspeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the book will not know them in the world: Shakspeare approximates the

remote and familiarizes the wonder the event whish ka sa

On the other hand, that he has many faults, will be In the acknowledged by the warmest of his idolaters. first place, he has no moral purpose in view; "he To please was his sacrifices virtue to convenience. chief object: he paid no attention to that retributive justice which, when human affairs are rightly under"We do not like this docstood, pervades them all. trine of retribution," says one of his critics. Probably

BENJAMIN, or, as he himself frequently abbreviates his name, Ben, Jonson, was originally of Scottish descent. His father was of Annandale; subsequently settled at Carlisle; and from thence passed into the service of Henry VIII. Ben was a posthumous child, and was born in Westminster early in the year 1574. He came into the world under no very promising circumstances. Under queen Mary the father had been in prison, probably on account of his religious principles; and there had lost his worldly substance. Subsequently, in Elizabeth's reign, he had embraced holy orders. His preferment, however, must have been scanty; as his mother was obliged to marry a bricklayer the year after his birth. We have no reason to suppose that he was neglected by his new guardian: we know that he was sent to a private school near St. Martin's in the Fields; and there he probably acquired as much information as boys of his age and condition in life usually possessed. It could not, however, be expected that a step-father would make the same sacrifices as a natural parent; and his career of learning would have been arrested too

* Our materials for this life are derived from Fuller's Worthies of England; from the Biographia Britannica; from Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary; from Baker's Biographia Dramatica; from Dryden's Essay on Dramatic Poetry; from Malone's Shakespear, by Boswell; from Campbell's Specimens of British Poets; from Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses; from D'Israeli's Quarrels of Authors; from the Prefaces of Theobald and Rowe;

Suore Cifford's admirable edition of Ben Jonson