PREFATORY NOTICE.

HE publishers having determined, for reasons so good as to admit of no gainsaying, to make this reprint of Ben Jonson's Works an exact reproduction, with improved type and paper, of the original of 1816, and the greater part of the "Life" being in fact set up in type before I became accidentally aware of their intention to enter upon such an undertaking at all, I was only in time to offer a few suggestions, which without in the slightest degree interfering with the integrity of Gifford's text, might make the work more convenient for reference, and place the reader in possession of the few new pieces which have drifted into light during the long interval of fifty-eight years since Gifford's publication.

In

this view, as a most essential aid to the student, and indeed to every reader who looks backward or forward, I pointed out the necessity of inserting the numbers of the acts and scenes in the running heading of every page of the regular dramas; and being anxious to add in every possible way to the importance of those admirable Explorata, or Discoveries, the merits of which have never yet been adequately appreciated, I requested that the line of separation between the subjects treated of might be more distinctly marked, and that a number might be affixed to each separate section; and last, though not least, I pressed the need of a proper table of

contents for the seventh, eighth, and ninth volumes, which had been left by Gifford with nothing more than such a general idea of what might be inside of them, as was contained upon his title-page! the fact being that few works that can be mentioned stand more in need of assistance of this kind, the matter (I speak more particularly of the two last volumes) being so multifarious, and the arrangement, for the most part, so completely unshackled by any discoverable system. Next came the difficulty about the commencing pages of the ninth volume, where Gifford, as I believe, intended in the first instance to print the Newcastle MS., entire, but got frightened by the free nature of some portions, and, endeavouring first to emasculate them, and then to cram the purified portions into a note of portentous length, involved the whole in inextricable confusion. This I have done my best to obviate, and I believe all is now preserved which can honestly be said to be worth preserving. Of the pieces unknown to Gifford, I beg to call particular attention to the Ode Allegorike for which we are indebted to the researches of Mr. Collier, and which will be found at vol. ix. p. 353, and the translation of Martial's Vitam quæ faciunt beatiorem (p. 345). I make no apology for reprinting the whole first act of Every Man in his Humour, as it stood when Lorenzo Senior was Old Knowell, and the gates of Florence represented Moor Fields. I should like to have given the whole, but want of space and want of health alike said no.

It is impossible to read the Conversations with Drummond, as Mr. David Laing has given them to us, without lamenting that Gifford had not seen them in this form before he commenced his labours. His work might then have been free from its greatest blot, the more than rabid insolence and injustice with which Drummond is treated on every possible and impossible occasion. There is nothing in the

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Conversations, in their worst form, condensed and arranged" by some conceited clerk, and garbled by the unscrupulous Theophilus Cibber, to justify onetwentieth part of the abuse which Gifford has heaped upon their recorder; and even that twentieth is left without foundation, when we discover how much has been omitted, how much misplaced, and how much interpolated. Nothing indeed remains to be objected to except the unexpectedly severe summing-up of his guest's character, which Drummond wrote immediately after Jonson quitted Hawthornden for the last time. I have expressed my view of this at length in a note in the proper place, but I was not then aware that Sir Walter Scott, in his Provincial Antiquities, published long before Mr. Laing's important discovery had been made, had stated the whole case with peculiar felicity. "It must be allowed that Drummond and Jonson were men so different in genius and situation, that it may have been difficult for the former to attain a just, or at least an accurate, estimate of the latter. His own powers did not much exceed a decent mediocrity, while Jonson had all the eccentricity of genius. Drummond had lived a retired scholar within his paternal shades: Jonson was a man of the world, a man of the town, accustomed to the freedoms of The Mermaid, and whom, without doing him much injustice, we may suppose scarce amenable at all times to the rules of strict etiquette. As a person of some quality, and rather an amateur of letters than a professed author, Drummond probably might be cautious and punctilious, timid in delivering his opinions, and apt to be

1 Gifford, it will be remembered, wound up by saying, "Enough of Drummond, with whose friendship for our author the common sense of the reader will, I trust, no longer be insulted, except from the lips of hopeless idiotism-longa manantia labra saliva" (p. cxiv.); and Scott commences by good-naturedly alluding to the heavy denunciation under which the attempt has been prohibited.