BEN JONSON. (See Imagination and Fancy,” p. 140.) THE greatest portion of Ben Jonson's comic writing is in prose; but the reader is here presented with a striking specimen in verse, —indeed, the best scene of his best production. Ben Jonson's famous humor is as pampered, jovial, and dictatorial as he was in his own person. He always gives one the idea of a man sitting at the head of a table and a coterie. He carves up a subject as he would a dish; talks all the while to show off both the dish and himself; and woe betide difference of opinion, or his "favorite aversion," envy. He was not an envious man himself, provided you allowed him his claims. He praised his contemporaries all round, chiefly in return for praises. He had too much hearty blood in his veins to withhold eulogy where it was not denied him; but he was somewhat too willing to cancel it on offence. He complains that he had given heaps of praises undeserved; tells Drayton that it had been doubted whether he was a friend to anybody (owing, doubtless, partly to this caprice) and in the collection of epigrams printed under his own care, there are three consecutive copies of verse, two of them addressed to Lord Salisbury in the highest style of panegyric, and the third to the writer's muse, consisting of a recantation, apparently of the same panegyric, and worth repeating here for its scorn and spleen : TO MY MUSE. Away, and leave me, thou thing most abhorr'd, Made me commit most fièrce idolatry To a great image through thy luxury. Be thy next master's more unlucky Muse, And, as thou'st mine, his hours and youth abuse. Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill will, Make him lose all his friends; and, which is worse, (This is melancholy.) With me thou leav'st an happier Muse than thee, This is ingenious and true; but from a lord so "worthless," it hardly became the poet to withdraw the alms of his panegyric. He should have left posterity to do him justice; or have reposed on the magnanimity of a silent disdain. Lord Salisbury was the famous Robert Cecil, son of Burleigh. Ben Jonson had probably found his panegyric treated with neglect, perhaps contempt; and it was bold in him to return it; but it was proclaiming his own gratuitous flattery. It has been objected to Ben Jonson's humors, and with truth, that they are too exclusive of other qualities; that the characters are too much absorbed in the peculiarity, so as to become personifications of an abstraction. They have also, I think, an amount of turbulence which hurts their entire reality; gives them an air of conscious falsehood and pretension, as if they were rather acting the thing than being it. But this, as before intimated, arose from the character of the author, and his own wil. ful and flustered temperament. If they are not thoroughly what they might be, or such as Shakspeare would have made them, they are admirable Jonsonian presentations, and overflowing with wit, fancy, and scholarship. THE FOX. SCENE. A Room in VOLPONE's House. Enter VOLPONE and Mosca. Volp. Good morning to the day: and next, my gold !— Open the shrine, that I may see my saint. [Mosca withdraws the curtain, and discovers piles of gold, plate, jewels, &c.] Hail the world's soul, and mine! more glad than is The teeming earth to see the long'd-for sun Of sacred treasure in this blessed room. Well did wise poets, by thy glorious name, Title that age which they would have the best; Or any other waking dream on earth. Thy looks when they to Venus did ascribe, They should have given her twenty thousand Cupids: He shall be noble, valiant, honest, wise— Mos. And what he will, sir. Riches are in fortune A greater good than wisdom is in nature. Volp. True, my beloved Mosca. Yet I glory Soft prodigals. You shall have some will swallow Will pills of butter; Tear forth the fathers of poor families Out of their beds, and coffin them alive In some kind clasping prison, where their bones And besides, sir. You are not like the thresher that doth stand You will lie not in straw, whilst moths and worms You know the use of riches, and dare give now From that bright heap, to me, your poor observer. Volp. (Gives him money.) Take of my hand; thou strik'st on truth in all, And they are envious term thee parasite. I have no wife, no parent, child, ally, To give my substance to; but whom I make Must be my heir: and this makes men observe me: This draws new clients daily to my house, Women and men of every sex and age, That bring me presents, send me plate, coin, jewels, My furs and night-caps; say, my couch is changing. And let him entertain himself awhile, Without i' the gallery. (Exit MOSCA.) Now, now, my clients And arms engraven. Volp. Good! and not a fox Stretch'd on the earth, with fine delusive sleights, Mocking a gaping crow? ha, Mosca ! Mos. Sharp, sir. Volp. Give me my furs. (Puts on his sick dress.) Why dost thou laugh so, man? Mos. I cannot choose, sir, when I apprehend What thoughts he has without now, as he walks: O, no: rich Implies it. Hood an ass with reverend purple, |