less of Aristotle, Cicero, and Horace, and more of himself. It is therefore less important to know what he thought of Euripides than to know what he thought of Aristotle.
But whatsoever nature at any time dictated to the most happy, or long exercise to the most laborious, that the wisdom and learning of Aristotle hath brought into an art; because he understood the causes of things: and what other men did by chance or custom, he doth by reason; and not only found out the way not to err, but the short way we should take not to err.
'To judge of poets,' says a later note, 'is only the faculty of poets; and not of all poets, but the best.' It is unlucky that in the note preceding it Ben Jonson should have committed himself to the assertion that Euripides, of all men, 'is sometimes peccant, as he is most times perfect.' The perfection of such shapeless and soulless abortions as the Phoenissae and the Hercules Furens is about as demonstrable as the lack of art which Ben Jonson regretted and condemned in the author of Hamlet and Othello.
It is comically pathetic to find that the failure of Jonson's later comedies had led him to observe, with the judicious Aristotle, that 'the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude
