Chapter 94

“So knowledge first begets benevolence, Benevolence breeds friendship, friendship love.”

Jonson has elsewhere proceeded thus far; but the part most difficult and delicate, yet, perhaps, not the least capable of being both morally and poetically treated, is the union itself, and what, even in this life, it can be.

NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

SEWARD’S Preface. 1750.—

“The _King and No King_, too, is extremely spirited in all its characters; Arbaces holds up a mirror to all men of virtuous principles but violent passions. Hence he is, as it were, at once magnanimity and pride, patience and fury, gentleness and rigour, chastity and incest, and is one of the finest mixtures of virtues and vices that any poet has drawn,” &c.

These are among the endless instances of the abject state to which psychology had sunk from the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the present reign of George III.; and even now it is but just awaking.

_Ib._ Seward’s comparison of Julia’s speech in the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, act iv. last scene—

“Madam, ’twas Ariadne passioning,” &c.

with Aspatia’s speech in the _Maid’s Tragedy_—

“I stand upon the sea-beach now,” &c.—Act ii.—

and preference of the latter.

It is strange to take an incidental passage of one writer, intended only for a subordinate part, and compare it with the same thought in another writer, who had chosen it for a prominent and principal figure.

_Ib._ Seward’s preference of Alphonso’s poisoning in _A Wife for a Month_,