and Sir
Epicure Mammon, Mrs. Purecraft and the Rabbi Busy are all creatures of
flesh and blood, none the less lifelike because they are labelled. In
this point Mr. Symonds seems to us unjust towards Jonson.

We think, also, that a special chapter might have been devoted to Jonson
as a literary critic. The creative activity of the English Renaissance
is so great that its achievements in the sphere of criticism are often
overlooked by the student. Then, for the first time, was language
treated as an art. The laws of expression and composition were
investigated and formularised. The importance of words was recognised.
Romanticism, Realism and Classicism fought their first battles. The
dramatists are full of literary and art criticisms, and amused the public
with slashing articles on one another in the form of plays.

Mr. Symonds, of course, deals with Jonson in his capacity as a critic,
and always with just appreciation, but the whole subject is one that
deserves fuller and more special treatment.

Some small inaccuracies, too, should be corrected in the second edition.
Dryden, for instance, was not 'Jonson's successor on the laureate's
throne,' as Mr. Symonds eloquently puts it, for Sir William Davenant came
between them, and when one remembers the predominance of rhyme in
Shakespeare's early plays, it is too much to say that 'after the
production of the first part of Tamburlaine blank verse became the
regular dramatic metre of the public stage.' Shakespeare did not accept
blank verse at once as a gift from Marlowe's hand, but himself arrived at
it after a long course of experiments in rhyme. Indeed, some of Mr.
Symonds' remarks on Marlowe are very curious. To say of his Edward II.,
for instance, that it 'is not at all inferior to the work of
Shakespeare's younger age,' is very niggardly and inadequate praise, and
comes strangely from one who has elsewhere written with such appreciation
of Marlowe's great genius; while to call Marlowe Jonson's 'master' is to
make for him an impossible claim. In comedy Marlowe has nothing whatever
to teach Jonson; in tragedy Jonson sought for the classical not the
romantic form.

As for Mr. Symonds' style, it is, as usual, very fluent, very picturesque
and very full of colour. Here and there, however, it is really
irritating. Such a sentence as 'the tavern had the defects of its
quality' is an awkward Gallicism; and when Mr. Symonds, after genially
comparing Jonson's blank