nothing. We should not endure it, of course, nowadays; and on that
point something must be said hereafter: but if we were to endure
plain speaking as the only method of properly exposing vice, should
we endure the moral which, instead of punishing vice, rewards it?

And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among the
Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch? What but a background of
profligacy and frivolity?

A proof, indeed, of the general downward tendencies of the age may be
found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself. Howsoever pure and
lofty the ideal which he laid down for himself (and no doubt
honestly) in the Preface to 'Volpone,' he found it impossible to keep
up to it. Nine years afterwards we find him, in his 'Bartholomew
Fair,' catering to the low tastes of James the First in ribaldry at
which, if one must needs laugh--as who that was not more than man
could help doing over that scene between Rabbi Busy and the puppets?-
-shallow and untrue as the gist of the humour is, one feels the next
moment as if one had been indulging in unholy mirth at the expense of
some grand old Noah who has come to shame in his cups.

But lower still does Jonson fall in that Masque of the 'Gipsies
Metamorphosed,' presented to the king in 1621, when Jonson was forty-
seven; old enough, one would have thought, to know better. It is not
merely the insincere and all but blasphemous adulation which is
shocking,--that was but the fashion of the times: but the treating
these gipsies and beggars, and their 'thieves' Latin' dialect, their
filthiness and cunning, ignorance and recklessness, merely as themes
for immoral and inhuman laughter. Jonson was by no means the only
poet of that day to whom the hordes of profligate and heathen nomads