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multiplied editions, in all the languages of Europe, were everywhere spread, deeply engaged public attention; this work was Huarte's Examen de Ingenios, translated into English as "The Examination of Men's Wits." It was long imagined that the Spaniard had drawn aside the veil from nature herself, revealing among her varieties those of the human character. The secret, "to what profession a man will be most apt," must have taken in a wide circle of inquirers. In the fifth chapter, we learn that "the differences of men's wits depend on the hot, the moist, and the dry; the system is carried on through "the elements" and "the humours." The natural philosophy is of the schools, but the author's anatomy of the brain amounted to a demonstration of the phenomenon, as it seemed to him. He however had struck out some hardy novelties and some mendacious illustrations. The system was long prevalent, and every one now conceived himself to be the passive agent of his predominant temperament or "humour," and looked for that page which was to discover to him his own genius. This work in its day made as great a sensation as the "Esprit " of Helvetius at a later time; and in effect resembled the phrenology of our day, and was as ludicrously applied. The first English version-for there are several-appeared in 1594, and we find that, four years after, "the humours"

were so rife that they served to plot a whole comedy, as well as to furnish an abundance of what they called epigrams," or short satires of the reigning mode.

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Jonson's intense observation was microscopical when turned to the minute evolutions of society, while his diversified learning at all times bore him into a nobler sphere of comprehension. This taste for reality, and this fulness of knowledge on whatever theme he chose, had a reciprocal action, and the one could not go without the other. Our poet doggedly set to "a humour" through its slightest anomalies, and in the pride of his comic art expanded his prototype. Yet this was but half the labour which he loved; his mind was stored with the most burdensome knowledge; and to the scholar the various erudition which he had so diligently acquired threw a more permanent light over those transient scenes which the painter of manners had so carefully copied.

The pertinacity of Jonson in heaping such minute particularities of "a humour," has invariably turned his great dramatic personages into complete personifications of some single propensity or mode of action; and thus the individual is changed into an abstract being. The passion itself is wholly there, but this man of one volition is thrown out of the common brotherhood of man; an individual so artificially constructed as to include

a whole species. Our poet, if we may decide by the system which he pursued, seems to have considered his prodigious dramatic characters as the conduit-pipes to convey the abundant waters which he had gathered into his deep cisterns.

It is surely evident that such elaborate dramatic personages were not extemporary creations thrown off in the heat of the pen. Our poet professed to instruct as much as to delight; and it was in the severity of thought and the austerity of his genius that his nobler conceptions arose. His studious habits have been amply ascertained. When he singled out "a humour," to possess himself of every trait of the anomalous dispositions he contemplated, he must gradually have accumulated, as they occurred, the particulars whence to form the aggregate; and like Swift, in his "Advice to Servants," in his provident diligence he must have jotted down a mass such as we see so curiously unfolded in "the character of the persons," prefixed to " Every Man in his Humour," a singular dramatic sketch. To this mass, with due labour and shaping, he gave the baptism of an expressive name, and conceived that a name would necessarily become a person. If he worked in this manner, as I believe he did, and " the characters" we have just seen confirm the suggestion, it sufficiently explains the space he required to contain his mighty

and unmixed character-the several made into one; and which we so frequently observe he was always reluctant to quit, while a stroke in his jottings remained untold. His cup indeed often runs over, and sometimes the dregs hang on our lips. We have had perhaps too many of these jottings.

But if Jonson has been accused of having servilely given portraits—and we have just seen in what an extraordinary way they are portraits—his learning has also been alleged as something more objectionable in the dramatic art; and we have often heard something of the pedantry of Jonson.

In that elaborate personage Sir Epicure Mammon, we have not only the alchemist and the epicurean to answer that characterising name, but we are not to be set free without enduring the obscure babble of "the projection" and "the projectors"-which assuredly cost some patient sweat of that curious brain-and further being initiated into the gastronomic mysteries of the kitchens of the ancients. Volpone, and "the gentleman who loves not noise," his other masterpieces, like Sir Epicure Mammon, are of the same colossal character. In "The Fox" and "The Fly," the richest veins of antiquity are melted down into his own copious invention; nor had the ancients themselves a picture so perfect, or a scene so living, of those legacy-hunters, though that

vice was almost a profession with them. If true learning in the art of the drama be peccant, our poet is a very saintly sinner; and Jonson indeed was, as Cleaveland has hailed his manes,

"The wonder of a learned age."

The fate of Jonson has inflicted its penalties on his very excellences. Some modern critics, whose delicacy of taste in its natural feebleness could not strain itself to the vigour of Jonson, have strangely failed to penetrate into the depths of that mighty mind; and some modern poets have delivered their sad evidence, that for them the Coryphæus of our elder dramatists has become unintelligible. Of all our dramatists, Jonson, the Juvenal of our drama, alone professed to study the "humour" or manners of the age; but manners vanish with their generation; and ere the century closes even actors cannot be procured to personate characters of which they view no prototype. They remain as the triumphs of art and genius, for those who are studious of this rare combination; but they were the creatures of "the age," and not for "all time," as Jonson himself energetically and prophetically has said of Shakespeare *.

Shadwell, who has left us nearly twenty comedies, and "the god of whose idolatry" was Jonson, in his "He was not of an age, but for all time."-Jonson,