give him warning to forfake his faucy glavering grace and his goggle eye; it does not become him, firrah! Lowin was the original Falstaff, and played innumerable parts of humour and pleasantry: perhaps Ben flings this outrageous farcasm at this actor. We have leave to guess any body, since he fpares nobody.

The Poetafter, notwithstanding the author's predilection for it, is one of Jonson's lowest productions: it was conceived in malice and brought forth in anger. It is indeed a contemptible mixture of the seriocomic, where the names of Auguftus Cæfar, Mecænas, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Tibullus, are all facrificed upon the altar of private resentment. The tranflations from the claffics are meanly literal, as well as harfh and quaint, and far inferior to thofe of Chapman, or any other tranflator of those times. Jonfon's Tucca is a wretched copy, or ape, of the inimitable Falftaff. This comical fatire, as it is called, clofes with an apologetical address to the reader, stuffed

with farther abuse upon the players, with a flender exception in favour of fome better natures amongst them. There is nothing fo remarkable in this dialogue as the author's arrogance. After having laboured most strenuously to give proofs of his importance, in a kind of poetic rapture, he thrufts his friends from him, by telling them, He will try if Tragedy have a more kind aspect, for her favours he will next pursue.' We must suppose, then,

that he was in labour of his

great Sejanus. By the mediation of friends, and most likely by the good-offices of our gentle Shakspeare, a reconciliation was effected between this furly writer and the comedians.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Fonfon's Sejanus.-Affifted in it by Shakspeare. Sejanus inferior to Shakspeare's thirdrate tragedies.- Jonfon's tranflations from the claffics. His ignorance of decency and

decorum. - Defence of Silius commended.— Tiberius and Macro.- Soliloquy of Sejanus. -Catiline.- Condemned originally.- Revived by Charles Hart.— Suppofed at the infigation of Buckingham, Dorfet, &c. Cicero's Speeches immoderately long.— Cicero's character rejected, by Major Mohun, for Cethegus. His excellence in the part.— Fonfon's ladies.

Leonard Digges.

His

verfes on Jonson's three comedies. Jonfon's frown.

Acquainted with the Duke of

Buckingham when the duke was a boy.

Stage-learning required for Jonfon's cha

racters.

SHA

HAKSPEARE not only acted a part in
Sejanus, but wrote fome fcenes for it,

as

as originally reprefented. Of this Jonfon takes notice in an advertisement to an edition of this play printed in 1605; and, though he does not mention his coadjutor's name, he points him out by the appellation of a happy genius. However, it is remarkable, though he condefcended to be the avowed fellow-labourer of Chapman, Marston, Rowley, and others, he affures the reader, with a fneer, that he would not join his own inferior matter to that of the great poet; but he wrote over again those scenes which had been wrought into the piece by the pen of Shakspeare. Who does not wish that Shakspeare had put as high a value upon his true brilliants as Ben did upon his jewels of pafte? The scenes, rejected by Jonfon, Shakspeare did not preferve. I have had fome little fufpicion, that Shakspeare's part of this tragic entertainment might poffibly be that alone which escaped public cenfure; the play, he tells us himself, was univerfally exploded. Nay, he says that the body of Sejanus did

not fare better from the Roman mob than the play did from the spectators.

Ben, notwithstanding, greatly valued himself upon this tragedy. Let any candid judge examine it with the second or third rate tragedies of Shakspeare, and he will find it far inferior to the spirit that reigns in the worst of them.

If, in his historical pieces, our admirable bard is fometimes blameable for overloading his scenes with multiplicity of bufinefs, and with incidents undramatic, Ben Jonfon, in the felection of historical events, is far lefs happy than his rival, The speeches of his principal characters are long and tedious, and neither interesting from sentiment, paffion, or business. His tranflations from the claffics are tiresome and difgufting, and retard, rather than forward, the progress of the play. When the tragedy is brought, by the death of Sejanus, to its proper period, (and which is pompously and too circumstantially related from Juvenal,) the curtain is not

fuffered