Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/28

can lay claim to no merit beyond that of an unlovely photograph, we find a really humorous conception embodied in a really amusing type of vanity and folly; and are all the more astonished to find a writer capable of such excellence and such error as every competent reader must recognize in the conception and execution of this rather admirable than delightful play. For Molière himself could hardly have improved on the scene in which a lady who is confident of her intuitive capacity to distinguish a gentleman from a pretender with no claim to that title is confronted with a vulgar clown, whose introducers have assured her that he is a high-bred gentleman masquerading for a wager under that repulsive likeness, She wonders that they can have imagined her so obtuse, so ignorant, so insensible to the difference between gentleman and clown: she finds that he plays his part as a boor very badly and transparently; and on discovering that he is in fact the boor she would not recognize, is driven to vanish in a passion of disgust. This is good comedy: but we can hardly say as much for the scene in which a speculator who has been trading on the starvation or destitution of his neighbours and tenants is driven to hang himself in despair at the