Jonson's learning and industry, which were alike exceptional, by no means exhausted themselves in furnishing and elaborating the materials of his dramatic works. His enemies sneered at him as a translator--a title which the preceding generation was inclined to esteem the most honourable in literature. But his classical scholarship shows itself in other directions besides his translations from the Latin poets (the _Ars poetica_ in particular), in addition to which he appears to have written a version of Barclay's _Argenis_; it was likewise the basis of his _English Grammar_, of which nothing but the rough draft remains (the MS. itself having perished in the fire in his library), and in connexion with the subject of which he appears to have pursued other linguistic studies (Howell in 1629 was trying to procure him a Welsh grammar). And its effects are very visible in some of the most pleasing of his non-dramatic poems, which often display that combination of polish and simplicity hardly to be reached--or even to be appreciated--without some measure of classical training.
Exclusively of the few lyrics in Jonson's dramas (which, with the exception of the stately choruses in _Catiline_, charm, and perhaps may surprise, by their lightness of touch), his non-dramatic works are comprised in the following collections. The book of _Epigrams_ (published in the first folio of 1616) contained, in the poet's own words, the "ripest of his studies." His notion of an epigram was the ancient, not the restricted modern one--still less that of the critic (R. C., the author of _The Times' Whistle_) in whose language, according to Jonson, "witty" was "obscene." On the whole, these epigrams excel more in encomiastic than in satiric touches, while the pathos of one or two epitaphs in the collection is of the truest kind. In the lyrics and epistles contained in the _Forest_ (also in the first folio), Jonson shows greater variety in the poetic styles adopted by him; but the subject of love, which Dryden considered conspicuous by its absence in the author's dramas, is similarly eschewed here. The _Underwoods_ (not published collectively till the second and surreptitious folio) are a miscellaneous series, comprising, together with a few religious and a few amatory poems, a large number of epigrams, epitaphs, elegies and "odes," including both the tributes to Shakespeare and several to royal and other patrons and friends, besides the _Execration upon Vulcan_, and the characteristic ode addressed by the poet to himself. To these pieces in verse should be added the _Discoveries--Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matters_, avowedly a commonplace book of aphorisms noted by the poet in his dally readings--thoughts adopted and adapted in more tranquil and perhaps more sober moods than those which gave rise to the outpourings of the _Conversations at Hawthornden_. As to the critical value of these _Conversations_ it is far from being only negative; he knew how to admire as well as how to disdain. For these thoughts, though abounding with biographical as well as general interest, Jonson was almost entirely indebted to ancient writers, or (as has been shown by Professor Spingarn and by Percy Simpson) indebted to the humanists of the Renaissance (see _Modern Language Review_, ii. 3, April 1907).