ELIZABETHAN POETS ON ELECTRICITY. 369 



But this last is the only new metaphor which Jonson 

 bases on magnetism. He has not devoured Ridley and 

 Barlowe with that insatiate appetite for knowledge which 

 shows its results in his extraordinary mastery of occult 

 subjects in the Alchemist. There was more poetry, per- 

 haps, to be got out of alembics and retorts and receivers, 

 from incineration and calcination and reverberation, than 

 out of a stone. So, saving the two passages before quoted, 

 the magnetic color, so to speak, of his play is factitious, 

 and cheaply gained by giving his characters the technical 

 names of Needle, Compass, Ironside, and so on. 



But how deathless that figure of speech, here again re- 

 curring, which likens personal attractiveness to the draw- 

 ing of the lodestone! It is almost as old as civilization. 

 It never was more of a favorite than during the time of the 

 literary awakening in England, and most of all with Robert 

 Greene, who fairly strews it throughout his now almost 

 forgotten novels and plays. Clarinda is u an adamant ob- 

 ject to draw the wavering eyes of Pharicles." Love is 

 u the adamant which hath virtue to draw,'' and "what 

 adamants are fayre faces!" l Sometimes he deserts the 

 lodestone for the amber attraction: "seeing you sit like 

 Juno ... I was by a strange attractive force drawne as 

 the adamant draweth yron and the jeat the straw;" 2 to 

 withstand the brunt of beauty is as impossible as "for the 

 yron to resist the operation of the adamant or the silie 

 straw the virtue of the sucking jeat." 3 So does Jonson 

 once avail himself of the electrical simile: 



"Your lustre too'll inflame at any distance; 

 Draw courtship to you as a jet doth straws." * 



But Shakespeare never does. Only in Helena's reproach 

 does he use the well-worn figure based upon the magnet 



1 Greene: Mamillia. 1580-3. 



2 Ibid. : Menaphon. 1589. 

 8 The Carde of Fancie. 



* Every Man in his Humor. Act III., Sc. 2. 

 24 





