great genius, immaculate or not; 'Rare Ben,' with all his faults.
One can never look without affection on the magnificent manhood of
that rich free forehead, even though one may sigh over the petulance
and pride which brood upon the lip and eyebrow,


'Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.'


A Michael Angelo who could laugh, which that Italian one, one
fancies, never could. One ought to have, too, a sort of delicacy
about saying much against him; for he is dead, and can make, for the
time being at least, no rejoinder. There are dead men whom one is
not much ashamed to 'upset' after their death, because one would not
have been much afraid of doing so when they were alive. But 'Rare
Ben' had terrible teeth, and used them too. A man would have thought
twice ere he snapt at him living, and therefore it seems somewhat a
cowardly trick to bark securely at his ghost. Nevertheless it is no
unfair question to ask--Do not his own words justify the Puritan
complaints? But if so, why does he rail at the Puritans for making
their complaints? His answer would have been that they railed in
ignorance, not merely at low art, as we call it now, but at high art
and all art. Be it so. Here was their fault, if fault it was in
those days. For to discriminate between high art and low art they
must have seen both. And for Jonson's wrath to be fair and just he
must have shown them both. Let us see what the pure drama is like
which he wishes to substitute for the foul drama of his
contemporaries; and, to bring the matter nearer home, let us take one
of the plays in which he hits deliberately at the Puritans, namely