James Thomson

“ BEN JONSON 147 "It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be ; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear : A lily of a day, Is fairer far, in May, Although it fall and die that night ; It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauties see ; And in short measures life may perfect be." ”

“ Their fate is only in their hearers' ears ; If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad. But do him right ; He meant to please you : for he sent things fit, In all the members both of sense and wit, If they have not miscarried ! if they have, All that his faint and faltering tongue doth crave Is that you not impute it to his brain, That's yet unhurt, although set round with pain, It cannot long hold out. All strength must yield ; Yet judgment would the last be in the field With a true poet," This must have disarmed any generous enemy ”

“ If they love lees, and leave the lusty wine, Envy them not, their palate's with the swine. Leave things so prostitute. And take the Alcaic lute ; Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre ; Warm thee by Pindar's fire : And though thy nerves be shrunk and blood be cold Ere years have made thee old. Strike that disdainful heat Throughout, to their defeat, As curious fools, and envious of thy strain. May, blushing, swear no palsy's in thy brain." The spirit of this ode is that which breathes through much of the latest book of Robert Browning, "Pacchiarotto, and other Poems." ”

“ The Muse not peeps out, one of hundred days : BEN JONSON 131 But lies blocked up and straitened, narrowed in, Fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win Health, or scarce breath, as she had never been ; Unless some saving honour of the crown, Dare think it, to relieve, no less renown, A bed-rid wit, than a besieged town. ”

“ But first let me quote the beginning of the fine passage in which the poet, under the name of Asper, announces and vindicates the purpose of his comedy : — " Who is so patient of this impious world, That he can check his spirit, or rein his tongue ? Or who hath such a dead unfeeling sense. That heaven's horrid thunders cannot wake ? To see the earth cracked with the weight of sin, Hell gaping under us, and o'er our heads Black, ravenous ruin, with her sail-stretched wings, Ready to sink us down, and cover us. ”

“ As the poem " My Picture left in Scotland " is not only very beautiful, but of special interest for its brave uncompromising self-portraiture, I quote it in Drummond's version, which appears rather superior than inferior to that in the text, " Underwoods," ' I doubt that Love is rather deaf than blind, For else it could not be That she Whom I adore so much should so slight me, And cast my suit behind : I'm sure my language to her is as sweet, And all my closes meet In numbers of as subtile feet As makes the youngest he That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree. ”

“ BEN JONSON 167 Beginning with the first published play, "Every Man in his Humour," who is the great smoker therein ? Who but Captain Bobadill ? — the renowned, the valiant, the modest, the veracious, the irresistible swordsman, who with nineteen other blades as good, or nearly as good as his own, will settle for you an army of forty thousand. ”

“ BEN JONSON 151 " ' The Alchemist,' a play for strength of wit, And true art, made to shame what hath been writ In former ages ; I except no worth Of what or Greeks or Latins have brought forth ; Is now to be presented to your ear, For which I would each man were a Muse here To know, and in his soul be fit to be Judge of this master-piece of comedy ; Which, though some men that never reached him may Decry, that love all folly in a play ”

“ It is indeed very beau- tiful in parts, and one gladly welcomes such a sunset succeeding the overcast afternoon, as showing that the great light which had been clouded was by no means extinguished, that the genius of the brave old poet could still triumph ere it sank into the night of death; but I can hardly concur in the measureless praise of Gifford, who was perhaps less qualified to judge a purely poetical drama than one abounding in keen observation, satirical humour, and masculine eloquence. ”

“ Have you none of your pretty impudent boys now, to bring stools, fill tobacco, fetch ale, and beg money, as they have at other houses?" BEN JONSON 225 And now we must bid farewell to this vigorous and multifarious comedy, abounding in the keenest observation and humour, leaving the ultimate destinies of the principal characters in the day's proceedings at the fair to be learnt from the play itself, which ranks only just below " The 'Fox,' the 'Alchemist,' and 'Silent Woman,' Done by Ben Jonson, and outdone by no man." ”

“ That this great liberal art hath no longer special professors BEN JONSON 173 is doubtless owing to the fact that nearly every one now is both professor and practiser, being able easily to master the art himself. Finally, we have that admirable scamp Shift, the Cavalier Shift, one of whose chief exercises is taking tobacco, this being his sole innocent and laudable employment. Coming to the play itself, we find almost every act odorous with those rich fumes that cheer but not inebriate. ”

“ The style has a freedom and ease which are somewhat deficient in his later dramas; both form and substance come nearer to those of his best contemporaries; romance and passion are not slain outright by the keen, cold, intellectual analysis of humours and affectations and charlatanisms. On the whole, I am inclined to regret with Gifford that Jonson "did not rather labour to perfect his early style than to exchange it altogether for that more severe and masculine mode of composition which he subsequently adopted." ”

“ Thus fell that incomparable BEN JONSON 123 young man, in the four-and-thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the business of Ufe, that the oldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enter not into the world with more innocence; and whosoever leads such a life needs not care upon how short warning it be taken from him. ”

“ The spirit of playmates with the spirit of wine; the pleasant emotions and the brilliant saws and dreams of society, like wine- lilies naturally rock upon the cup, and dip their spirity roots into the beakers. ”

“ I ask where, even now, when the supremacy has long been unchallenged, which was then challenged freely, and by many as wise in their great generation as the wisest in ours, which is so much smaller — where even now shall we find a tribute to that supremacy more ample, more magnificent, or rendered with more loyal free will ? ”

“ I never heard any man read well but my husband, and I have heard him say that he never heard any man read well but Ben Jonson, and yet he hath heard many in his time ; " as well he might, his house for half-a-century being open to every man of genius or learning. ”

“ Gifford gives a drawing of an ancient pipe, in which he discerns pretty nearly the true form of a woodcock's head. Tobacco is mentioned on other occasions in " Every Man out of His Humour," but the allusions are scarcely of sufficient importance to be noted here. One remark must be made in closing. The objects of ridicule in this play are not things or customs themselves, but the affectations or exaggerations of them. Courtliness or courtesy, wit, learning, swords- manship, and tobacco are all good, though the mere pretension to them, or the fantastic abuse of them, is comically contemptible. ”

“ You takers of strong waters and tobacco, Mark this." BEN JONSON 227 This is the second foohsh justice we have had con- demning tobacco. The censure of some people is the best praise they can give, and the weed is truly honoured when denounced by the devil himself, who is the Father of Lies, and by a lawyer whose name is Eitherside, and who is so poor at that, as our cousins have it, that he is solemnly taken in by a very gull counterfeiting demoniac possession. The Induction to the "Staple of News" (1625, set 52) introduces us to the poet in person, "rolling him- self up and down like a tun." ”

“ Jonson had an excellent library, having begun very early to collect the best editions of the classics and all sorts of rare and valuable works. Thus, as cited by Gifford, Selden, whose sole testimony on this point is more than sufficient, writes to him in 1615 : "With regard to what the Greeks and Latins have of Andargatis, Deresto, Atargata, Derce (all one name) , &c., you best know, being more conversant in the recondite parts of human learning." ”

“ They do act like so many wrens or pismires — not the fifth part of a good face amongst them all. And then their music is abominable — able to stretch a man's ears worse than ten — pillories, and their ditties — [these dashes doubtless represent whiffs] most lamentable things, like the pitiful fellows that make them — poets. By this vapour, an 'twere not for tobacco — I think — the very stench of 'em would poison me, I should not dare to come in at their gates. A man were better to visit fifteen jails — or a dozen or two of hospitals — than once adventure to come near them. ”

“ Juniper was, more- over, burnt in Jonson's time to sweeten the air of chambers. Thus, in the character of the persons prefixed to *' Every Man out of his Humour," Deliro is described as " a good doting citizen, ... a fellow sincerely besotted on his own wife, and so rapt with a conceit of her perfections, that he simply holds him- self unworthy of her. . . . He doth sacrifice twopence in juniper to her every morning before she rises, and wakes her with villainous out-of-tune music, which she, out of her contempt (though not out of her judg- ment) , is sure to dislike." ”

“ When one reads of such small advances, even allowing for the greater value of money at that time, one understands why some of the dramatists were so exceedingly prolific ; for a man could not have sustained life on slow, careful, play-writing, unless eked out by acting or a share in a theatre ; and one agrees with GifFord that Jonson must have written much more than has come down to us with his name, and mended many plays, in order to support his family. ”

“ All quiet smokers, who have the leisure and take the trouble to read beyond their Bible and the precious leaves of their Tobacco Plant, must remem- ber how fiercely Milton denounced those sons of Belial, and how Swift tomahawked the Mohawks. How bumptious is Kastril, because he, too, can take tobacco ! In our age he would have smoked when ten years younger. ”

“ Even so the Elizabethans repre- sent an age of Tobacco, the Queen Anne's men an age of Coffee, the late George III.'s men an age of Revolutions, the Victorians an age of Cant. And as among the brazen multitudes we have still a few men of iron, of silver, and even of gold; so among the canting multitudes we have still some men of revolu- tion, of coffee, and even a few men of genius inspired by tobacco. It has, too, been often remarked that Shakespeare never mentions or alludes to tobacco, though he may have smoked many a good pipe with Raleigh himself at the " Mermaid." ”

“ The old poets, when they introduce a miser, make him address his gold as his mistress ; as something to be seen, felt, and hugged ; as capable of satisfying two of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying medium in the place of the good old tangible metal has made avarice quite a Platonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching, and hand- ling pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A banknote can no more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion than Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the shades. See the ' Cave of Mammon,' in Spenser ”