Here did she sigh, here first my hopes were born,
Here first I got a pledge of promised grace;
But ah! what serves to have been made happy so,
Sith passed pleasures double but new woe!’
I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond’s Sonnets to Spenser’s; and they leave Sidney’s, picking their way through verbal intricacies and ‘thorny queaches,’[[34]] at an immeasurable distance behind. Drummond’s other poems have great, though not equal merit; and he may be fairly set down as one of our old English classics.
Ben Jonson’s detached poetry I like much, as indeed I do all about him, except when he degraded himself by ‘the laborious foolery’ of some of his farcical characters, which he could not deal with sportively, and only made stupid and pedantic. I have been blamed for what I have said, more than once, in disparagement of Ben Jonson’s comic humour; but I think he was himself aware of his infirmity, and has (not improbably) alluded to it in the following speech of Crites in Cynthia’s Revels.
‘Oh, how despised and base a thing is man,
If he not strive to erect his groveling thoughts
Above the strain of flesh! But how more cheap,
When even his best and understanding part