Wiltshire Stanton Austin

“ Southey was more to them than a husband and a father. Let the character of the man stand out in its deserved prominence, simple in his tastes and open-hearted, to shame a luxurious and a selfish age: enthusiastic in his calling, to kindle a like flame in a generation, that, amid dissolving institutions and opinions, seems destitute of any settled aim and conviction. There is no need here to ask in behalf of genius an indulgent oblivion of vice and immorality. ”

“ Such was Ben Jonson. It may be enough to say of him that, whatever his faults and weaknesses, he lived on terms of intimacy and affection with the best and greatest men of his day; that there are numerous testimonies to his worth as a man, and his ability and wit as a conversationalist; that his letters breathe a spirit of good feeling and kindness; that, to sum up his character, he was, in the highest sense of the words, laborious, brave, and noble.
He has been compared to many great men—to Shakespeare, to Milton, and others. ”

“ In our advanced stage of civilization, we rely solely upon the genius of the tailor and the milliner; while our forefathers, less enlightened, called in the additional aid of the poet and the artist. The noble of the nineteenth century lounges languidly through a quadrille, bedizened in the coxcombry of an exploded fashion; the noble of the seventeenth exercised both body and mind, and betrayed a heartiness of enjoyment that would provoke only wonder and contempt in a more refined and fastidious age. ”

“ How unfortunate for the fame of Jonson that he had not lived a generation before or after his immortal rival! In such a time he had reigned supreme. In dividing the kingdom of literature, though the dominions of one are wider than the other, the colleagues in the empire are scarce ever mentioned without an invidious comparison being instituted. In literature, as in religion, there is a strong tendency to party spirit—a wish to make a faction and appoint a leader—a setting up of Paul and Apollos, instead of a catholic admiration of genius apart from personal feelings and prejudices. ”

“ The fault in Jonson's two tragedies is that there is not enough to interest flesh and blood in them, and to stir the sympathies, the hopes and fears of humanity. There is a cold, historic sublimity, which, however it may command the homage of the intellect, awakes no responsive echo in the heart. The characters are true to history; true, therefore, to human nature; and they move on in the plot with stern and terrible decision. ”

“ We dare not compare even his rich endowments with Shakespeare's almost omniscience of human character, and profound penetration into the mysteries of the human heart. Spenser must remain the Lord of Allegory. Still farther is Dryden removed from the celestial purity and holy grandeur of Milton. With the satirist and dramatist of the Restoration we cannot breathe the serene atmosphere of the Empyrean, listen to the voices of angel-visitants of Eden, climb the flaming battlements of the universe, or sit at the council-table of Heaven. ”

“ Wit, and language, and humour also in some measure we had before him, but something of art was wanting to the drama before he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such a height. Humour was his proper sphere, and in that he delighted most to present mechanical people. ”

“ Just about this time died William Shakespeare. It is not for us to venture a tribute of weak and insufficient praise to that myriad-minded, God-like man, whose genius has enriched the thought of the world, and whom, in the words of Hallam, we may call "the greatest being Nature ever produced in the human shape;" but we rejoice to be able to record, in spite of malicious assertions to the contrary, that Jonson admired him and loved him while he lived, and loved and praised him when he died. ”

“ Literature has escaped the degrading influences of patronage. For a book to be now successful it is no longer deemed necessary that it should have attached to it the name of an aristocrat, or be cumbered with a dedication teeming with servile if not blasphemous adulation. An author now at once addresses himself to his audience. If he can instruct or interest or amuse his fellow-men, he will not lack reward for his labours without stooping to fawn and flatter. ”

“ And so we speak of the age of Dryden, and of Pope, and of Johnson, as if the literature of each of the eras was represented by these men alone, and there was no work for others to do in it. The long line of light is shed through the dark centuries by the great stars. Where they shine at distant intervals the heaven is blacker, but need we close our eyes to the twinklings of those lesser fires, without whose ray the interspace were darkness?
W. Whitehead was born in the parish of St. Botolph's, in the town of Cambridge. ”

“ Schlegel, with too great severity, but with more depth and truth, has called him "a younger contemporary and rival of Shakespeare, who laboured in the sweat of his brow, and with no great success, to expel the romantic drama from the English stage, and to form it on the model of the ancients." [6] Hazlitt confesses that he cannot much relish Ben Jonson, and remarks that his genius "resembles the grub more than the butterfly, and plods and grovels on, and wants wings to wanton in the idle summer's air, and catch the golden light of poetry." ”

“ To us, accustomed to hear rhyming heroics made the vehicle of parody, burlesque, and bombast, in extravaganzas and travesties, it is difficult to imagine an audience either terror-stricken or melted into pity by sentiments conveyed in stilted heroics, tagged with rhymes. Where long descriptive passages occur, such a poet as Dryden could not but write poetry; but when the dialogue is short and broken, the effect of rhyme is peculiarly absurd. ”

“ There are none of those nobler strifes and passions which are the symptoms of vigorous existence. And we see this in the "Sejanus" of Ben Jonson. There are only two characters with whom the spectator can feel any sympathy, and they are not sufficiently prominent. They are two senators who are noble exceptions to the general depravity of their order, who blush at the degradation into which the once great assembly had sunk.
The amour—for it is a story, not of love, but of lust—that is woven into the plot has nothing of depth or tenderness in it. ”

“ Throughout the whole of the "Ion," we feel that we are on classic ground. Adrastrus, Ctesiphon, and Phocion are Greeks. Without the clumsy tediousness of a prologue, or the truistic platitudes of a chorus, the play is classical throughout, and such as an Englishman of genius, taste, and erudition would write on a Greek subject, avoiding equally the pedantry of Ben Jonson's tragedies, and the anglicisms of Whitehead. There is, throughout the "Ion," the overwhelming idea of a ruthless destiny, strong and sure in its accomplishment. ”

“ He has generally been esteemed as the ablest actor this country has produced. His impersonation of Hamlet has been the theme of universal praise, and no one, before or since, ever approached so near that wondrous ideal. His first interview with the Ghost, a scene generally so tame and ineffective, he managed with such consummate art—so profound was the awe and terror depicted in his countenance—that a shudder would run through the audience as though they also felt the presence of the terrible phantom. ”

“ Then might the page that proudly records our progress have been unstained by the blood of an erring but unfortunate monarch; civil war, and restoration, and revolution might never have added their strange and swift vicissitudes to the catalogue of our crimes and follies; and our literature and our drama had perhaps retained something more of the noble grandeur of the Elizabethan age, and escaped the debasing pollution of the licence which followed unnatural and hypocritical restraint. ”

“ It is trite to tell any well-informed reader that Dryden was satirist, dramatist, didactic poet, essayist, translator, controversialist, and critic; that he was the monarch of his own age, and the idol of the first men of the next; that his life is the history of half a century; and that he is at once the glory and the shame of our literature.
To classify the sons of genius has always been a difficult task ”

“ As far as their morality is concerned, if it be the duty of the satirist to attack vice and expose folly in the main, to make the bad his enemies rather than his enemies bad, we must assign to Pope a higher place than we can to Dryden. If, also, wit, irony, ridicule, be rather than indignant invective and earnest declamation the proper voice of satire, then too, on this ground, must we give to Pope the pre-eminence. Take almost any passages from their writings, and we shall find that such are their distinguishing characteristics as satirists. The satire of Pope, is a burnished Damascus blade. ”

“ I have more in hand than Bonaparte or Marquis Wellesley—digesting Gothic law, gleaning moral history from monkish legends, and conquering India, or rather Asia with Albuquerque, filling up the chinks of the day by hunting in Jesuit chronicles, and compiling 'Collectanea Hispanica and Gothica.' Meantime, 'Madoc' sleeps, and my lucre of gain compilation ('Specimens of the English Poets') goes on at night, when I am fairly obliged to lay history aside, because it perplexes me in my dreams. ”

“ Her powers as an actress were of the highest order, and her forte lay in genteel comedy. She excelled in male characters, "and her gait or walk," says her biographer, "was free, manlike, and modest in breeches." For years she was a reigning toast, and dramatic writers vied with each other in studying her powers, and in adapting their pieces to her peculiar excellencies. She was included in all the plays of Rowe and Congreve, who each endeavoured to captivate the heart of their idol by love speeches placed in the mouths of her fictitious adorers on the stage. ”

“ Smooth verse of average merit, from a very young man at College, striving by his pen to supply his necessities, was not likely to provoke hostile criticism, especially when there was nothing in it bold, new, or heterodox, to jar against prevailing tastes and prejudices; and imitation is flattery so delicate and sincere, that Pope would doubtless encourage even a faint echo of his own matchless lines from an admirer and disciple. ”

“ John Skelton was poet-laureate to King Henry VIII. He was the last who bore the title in its primary signification as a University degree, the last whose qualification for the office was skill in Latin versification.
The little we know of this singular writer only serves to provoke our curiosity. A jesting priest, with coarse humour, his rough laugh tingled rudely in the ear of Wolsey, and cowled monks waxed wroth at his strange and caustic satire. ”

“ It is there that, unseen by their fellow-men, they are torn by the intellectual agony in the struggle for subsistence or the pursuit of fame. We must read them in their works, and think of the thousands of hours of careful study and patient thought in which those stately volumes were elaborated which have outlived envy and anger, and taken their place in the literature of England. And viewed in this light, even if it lack event and excitement, Jonson's life is not devoid of noble moral, and heroic example. ”

“ The once great and free republic, whose internal history had been the vehement and protracted struggle of powerful classes, whose external history the record of valiantly won victories and extended territory, was now groaning under its own bulk, and had exchanged its ancient liberties for the despotism of the sword. Society was in a state so corrupt that barbarism, because purer, would have been preferable to it. ”

“ Without attempting to show that Jonson was a martyr in so holy a cause as this, it may be said of him that he was one of a small class which we find sometimes in history, and which we occasionally see among contemporaries, who, while they merit and enjoy the strong love of friends and family, are, if not generally unpopular, frequently involved in controversy and quarrel. They are not good, easy men—they have no hypocritical reticence, no diplomatic dissembling, no tender compassion for vices and follies. ”

“ His mother, who was a woman of great beauty and sprightliness, contrasting strangely with the severe gravity of her husband, has well-nigh had her fair fame tarnished through the culpable vanity or levity of her son, who among boon companions would sometimes indulge in sly inuendoes touching Shakespeare's preference for his father's inn. "Where are you running to so fast?" said an Oxford dignitary one day to little Davenant, whom he met in the street, scampering along in breathless haste. ”

“ Oh, incomparable land, in which a sonnet or a satire is repaid with archbishoprics and dukedoms! Well may the Abbé exclaim: "It is not surprising, we have had many poets amongst us, who have exulted in the title of Poet to the King; whilst we have had no one who has taken that of Poet-Laureate!" ”