by men who have "wild wealth," and who send, over the earth, "to please the witty gluttony of a meal." This is, indeed, Catiline's speech from Sallust. The revolutionaries are not forgotten; they shall have shares, when the present men are down. Catiline's douce humanité does not forbid him to kill a slave, whose blood he mixes with wine; and the conspirators drink thereof, as binding them to their oath. The chorus of the first act concludes, that Asia, conquered by Romans' virtue, has by her vices brought Romans to their ruin.

Cicero is the prime mover, of course, in the catastrophe. In Act iv. 2 he speaks for more than 300 lines hardly interrupted-chiefly a metrical version from the First Oration. Jonson is said to have been not a little vain of this undramatic performance. It may be compared with Silius' denunciation of Sejanus, already quoted; and they express the author's high hard work. Every one knows, (Cicero cries), of your wild conspiracy. The whole senate knows of your plots.

"O age and manners! this the consul sees,

The senate understands, yet this man lives!—
Lives! ay, and comes here into council with us,
Partakes the public cares, and with his eye
Marks and points out each man of us to slaughter.

There was that virtue once in Rome, when good men
Would, with more sharp coercion, have restrained

A wicked citizen, than the deadliest foe.

We have that law, still, Catiline, for thee.

O, ye immortal gods! in what clime are we,

What regions do we live in, in what air?
What commonwealth or state is this we have?
Here, here, amongst us, our own number, fathers,
In this most holy council of the world
They are, that seek the spoil of me, of you,
Of ours, of all . .

Two undertook this morning, before day

To kill me in my bed. All this I knew."

Cicero urges Catiline to go into voluntary exile:

"Go pernicious plague!

Out of the city, to the wished destruction
Of thee and those, that, to the ruin of her,
Have ta'en that bloody and black sacrament-

-the sacramentum; and blood mingled with wine, for the oath-takers.

"Thou Jupiter, whom we do call the STAYER

Both of this city and this empire, wilt,

With the same auspice thou didst raise it first,
Drive from thy altars, and all other temples,
And buildings of this city, from our walls,

Lives, states, and fortunes of our citizens,
This fiend, this fury, with his complices,

And all th' offence of good men, these known traitors

Unto their country, thieves of Italy,

Joined in so damned a league of mischief, thou

Wilt with perpetual plagues, alive and dead,

Punish for Rome, and save her innocent head."

Thus the oration ends. Jonson is said to have taken special pains with this part, where he tries to drive Catiline away from Rome. He went. But it was a danger. Catiline gathered forces. "The victory fell indeed to the republic; but," as Sallust adds, "it was accompanied with such loss, as to check all feeling of joy, since the bravest of the troops were either killed in the action, or left it grievously wounded, and unfit for service." Petreius marched at the head of 'the army of the people of Rome,' and urges the safety of the whole state against the revolutionaries:

"for your own republic,

For the raised temples of the immortal gods,
For all your fortunes, altars, and your fires,
For the dear souls of your loved wives and children,
Your parents' tombs, your rites, laws, liberty,
And briefly for the safety of the world;

Against such men, as only by their crimes

Are known; thrust out by riot, want, or rashness.

And who in such a cause, and 'gainst such fiends,
Would not now wish himself all arm and weapon,
To cut such poisons from the earth, and let
Their blood out, to be drawn away in clouds,

And poured on some uninhabitable place,

Where the hot sun and slime breeds nought but monsters?

Chiefly, where this sure joy shall crown our side,

That the least man that falls upon our party
This day, (as some must give their happy names

To fate, and that eternal memory

Of the best death, writ with it, for their country,)
Shall walk at pleasure in the tents of rest."

This passage, and that of the enmeshing and suicide of Silius are justly felt to show Jonson's power and energy and noble poetry. They certainly show how much better known his tragedies ought to be, and would be, perhaps, but for Shakespeare's overpowering fame.

This speech of Petreius, of course, suggests to the Shakespeare reader to turn to Henry V's first speech before Harfleur, and to that on the morning of Agincourt:

"On, on, you noblest English,

Whose blood is fet from fathers of war proof!

Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,

And teach them how to war." (H. V., iii. 1).

The whole sings by comparison.

And H. V, iv. 3-before Agincourt; what exhilaration; what character of the 'singer', Henry; the lustre of whose eye shone on every man, thawing cold fear. He does not argue, nor denounce, but preaches love, to the heart, and the ecstasy of glorious war:

"We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

He that outlives this day and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named.

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he'll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother."

It is a great contrast to

"Chiefly when this sure joy shall crown our side,
That the least man that falls upon our party
This day, (as some must give their happy names
To fate, and that eternal memory

Of the best death, writ with it, for their country,)
Shall walk at pleasure in the tents of rest."

This is surely 'labouring', by comparison.

And then the conventional ending for the soldier's reward in the next life; reflective, if you like, but not spontaneous, not rising out of the spirit and stir of the moment before the fight. How that speech of Petreius begins-like a treatise—

"It is my fortune and my glory, soldiers,

This day to lead you on."

And Henry bursts forth:

"Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead."

It is hard not to go on, to the great song-as one must repeatsuch singing, such varied notes, from low to high, such form, such flexibility, such magnificence:

"In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspéct;

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock

O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean."

And it does not end there. This is another art from Jonson's.

"This is an art

That doth mend nature, change it rather, but

The art itself is nature."

Yet Dryden, in his succeeding day, feels he is opposing a common opinion, with: "for my part I consider Shakespeare equal to Ben Jonson, if not superior."

Notice, too, Shakespeare's alliteration, and the collocation of sounds in various lines.

But in Jonson for all his saying that Shakespeare wanted art, if his saying it was; at any rate he prided himself on careful work-what of

"Chiefly when this sure joy shall crown our side."

And Petreius' last line,

"Move forward with your eagles,

And trust the senate's and Rome's cause to heaven"?

Cicero shows his cunning in the city. He hears there of Catiline's Gaulish allies. Shall he arrest them? No, but let them go on plotting; arranges that they get papers implicating the conspirators; and, as they leave Rome, has them seized, with some of the Catiline men, together with the papers showing the guilt of these. Then Cicero's denunciation of the revolution is heard again:

"Lay but the thought of it before you, fathers,
Think but with me you saw this glorious city
The light of all the earth, tower of all nations,
Suddenly falling in one flame!

Catiline come

With his fierce army, and the cries of matrons,
The flight of children, and the rape of virgins,
Shrieks of the living, with the dying groans,
On every side t' invade your sense; until
The blood of Rome were mixed with her ashes!
This was the spectacle these friends intended
To please their malice."

To Cicero, Cato and Caesar and others exclaim:

"We owe our lives unto him, and our fortunes."
"Our wives, our children, parents and our gods."
"The commonwealth owes him a civic garland:

He is the only father of his country."

"Let there be public prayer to all the gods,
Made in that name for him."

"And in these words:

'For that he hath, by his vigilance, preserved

Rome from the flame, the senate from the sword,

And all her citizens from massacre.'"

Such was the conspiracy of Catiline. He died fiercely in defeat.

Jonson is said to have taken every hint he could, from Sallust to his own day, 'for the correct formation of his characters, to place them before our eyes as they appeared in the writings of those who lived and acted with them.' It approaches as has been noted, the method of Spenser's histriographer rather than that of his poet historical. It results in