ABSTRACT
Long before the French had illuminated all Europe with the true rules of the drama our Jonson knew and practised them to a greater perfection than the most distinguishing academician ever wrote of them in speculation. Jonson, at a time when critical learning was as strange in France as in Barbary, did what no Frenchman ever was able to do. He produced regular plays of five acts, complete in the unities of place and characters, and so complete in the unity of time that they are acted upon the stage in the same time which the same story would have taken up in real life. Where then is the merit of the French critical discoveries when an Englishman has so much the start of their academy, and such advantages in the execution?
