Ben Jonson Ms Volpone ; or, The Fore. (Leonard Smitbers
and Co.)—It was intended in this edition to decorate Volpone with twenty-four illustrations by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, but the artist died without completing more than designs for five initial letters, a frontispiece, and a cover. In four of these seven designs we see Mr. Beardsley at his best, and in one of them at his worst. There is something a little incongruous in the association of Aubrey Beardsley with Ben Jonson, whose broad, robust common-sense seems alien to the spirit of this artist's work ; we can better fancy his extraordinary genius disporting itself in the loaded atmosphere and strong subtle poetry and inhuman imaginations of Cyril Tournenr. In Jonson there was nothing " Italianate," and never was writer freer from any touch of morbidity. The sonorous blows of his hammer fell on full-bodied vice, and on follies saliently absurd ; no dubiety of possible virtue lurks in the villainy he trounces, nor any complicating hint of a humanity that may underlie the humours he is ridiculing. The volume contains a short sketch of Beardsley's life and work by Mr. Robert Ross, and a prefatory essay on the author by Mr. Vincent O'Sullivan, in which he makes the odd suggestion that Shake- speare may have gathered from Jonson's character some of the qualities of Falstaff.
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