"Ben Jonson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not the only adversary whom Dryden had to encounter on this occasion. Thomas Shadwell, a man of some talents for comedy, and who professed to tread in the footsteps of Ben Jonson, had for some time been at variance with Dryden and Otway. He was probably the author of a poem, entitled, "A Lenten Prologue, refused by the Players;" which is marked by Mr Luttrel, 11th April, 1683, and contains ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... the bells of the church of St. Mary le Bow in Cheapside. So far back as Ben Jonson's time (Eastward Ho, I, ii, 36) it was the mark of the unfashionable middle-class citizen to live in this quarter. A "wit" in Queen Anne's day would ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... the British Poets from Ben Jonson to Beattie. New Edition; with Biographical and Critical Prefaces, and Selections from ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... and Rousseau, and any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and knew German books more cordially than any other person, she was little read in Shakspeare; and I believe I had the pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... along. I am jealous of the clergyman I read about the other day, who footed it from Edinburgh to London, as poor Effie Deans did, carrying her shoes in her hand most of the way, and over the ground that rugged Ben Jonson strode, larking it to Scotland, so long ago. I read with longing of the pedestrian feats of college youths, so gay and light-hearted, with their coarse shoes on their feet and their knapsacks on their backs. It would have been ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Mrs Kitty in High Life Below Stairs, to which his Grace my Lord Duke gravely replies: 'Ben Jonson.' 'O no,' quoth my Lady Bab: 'Shakspeare was written by one Mr Finis, for I saw his name at the end of the book!' and this passes off as an excellent joke, and never fails to elicit the applause of the audience; but still ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... John Lilly master of arts." It is clever in construction, but undeniably tedious. It shows that Lyly had learnt much from Udall, Stevenson, and Gascoigne, and perhaps its chief point of interest is that it links these writers to the later realists, Ben Jonson, and that student of London life, who is surely one of the most charming of all the Elizabethan dramatists, whimsical and delightful Thomas Dekker. Mother Bombie was an experiment in the drama of realism, the realism that Nash was employing so successfully in his novels. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... But this is no new form of malice. "Avant nous," says the sagacious but iron-hearted Montluc—"avant nous ces envies ont regne, et regneront encore apres nous, si Dieu ne nous voulait tous refondre." Its worst effect is that which Ben Jonson remarked: "The gentle reader," says he, "rests happy to hear the worthiest works misrepresented, the clearest actions obscured, the innocentest life traduced; and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his laughter? Hence ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... messengers fiery red with haste and charged with the destiny of nations who were made welcome at the gates of Blois. If any man of accomplishment came that way, he was sure of an audience, and something for his pocket. The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson like Drummond of Hawthornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay. They were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic. It might be Pierre, called Dieu d'amours, the juggler; or it might be three high English minstrels; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... degree with the picaresque form itself. Nash, however, pointed out the right road, the road that was to lead to the true novel. He was the first among his compatriots to endeavour to relate in prose a long-sustained story, having for its chief concern: the truth.... No one, Ben Jonson excepted, possessed at that epoch, in so great a degree as himself, a love of the honest truth. With Nash, then, the novel of real life, whose invention in England is generally attributed to Defoe, begins. ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... muses, talked all together about this ripping and unripping; and so loud, that not one heard what the other said: but, at last, one beggar craved audience; and told them that old father Clause, whom Ben Jonson, in his Beggar's Bush, created King of their corporation, was to lodge at an ale-house, called " Catch-her-by-the- way," not far from Waltham Cross, and in the high road towards London; and he therefore desired them to spend no more time about that and such like questions, but refer all to ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... and sister of sir Philip Sidney, one of the most accomplished women of her age, celebrated during her life by the wits and poets whom she patronized, and preserved in the memory of posterity by an epitaph from the pen of Ben Jonson which will not be forgotten whilst English ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... referring to the admirably conceived simile of a bulky galleon at sea attacked by a swifter and more agile vessel (xix. 13), which may perhaps have suggested to Fuller his famous comparison of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in their ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the scarlet mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon. That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible. See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age was rough and earnest. The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old weapons of the Gregorys and the Clements. But they are impotent as the darts of Priam; Luther laughs at them, and burns the Papal ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... in music to secure a place in Queen Elizabeth's household." His son Nicholas Lanier — "musician, painter, engraver" — was patronized successively by James I, Charles I, and Charles II, wrote music for the masks of Ben Jonson and Campion and for the lyrics of Herrick, and was the first marshal of a society of musicians organized by Charles I in 1626. He also wrote a cantata called "Hero and Leander". He was the friend of Van Dyck, who painted a portrait of Lanier which attracted the attention of Charles I and ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... him, &c.] This Fisk was a famous astrologer, who flourished about the time of Subtile and Face, and was equally celebrated by Ben Jonson. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... resist recording my astonishment at finding in Ben Jonson the phrase "to have a good time" used in precisely the sense in which the American girl employs it to-day, or at learning from Macaulay that Bishop Cooper in the time of Queen Elizabeth spoke of a "platform" in its exact ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... have already written, in describing Royal Christ-tides, but there is one, a notice of which must not be omitted, Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, as it was presented at Court ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which the bodies of executed criminals were dragged to be thrown into the river. The word is now obsolete, but was employed by Ben Jonson (Sejanus) and ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... on the coals, like a sausage or a bloat-herring, and, after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him, with a pair of bellows! See! they begin to muster again, and draw their forces out against me! The genius of the place defend me!" — Ben Jonson's Masque "Mercury ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... could not afford a complete set, gave one or two, as their circumstances might permit. Some presented a spoon with the figure of the saint after whom the child was baptized, or to whom it was dedicated. In his "Bartholomew Fair," Ben Jonson has a character to say, "And all this for a couple of apostle-spoons and a cup to eat caudle in." Likewise in the "Noble Gentleman," ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... parallelism between Ben Jonson and Horace, though a little wide of your correspondent's suggestion, is also worthy of notice. I have never before seen it remarked upon. It would, perhaps, be more correct to describe it as a plagiarism than as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... innkeeper. It is not known at what date he began to act, but he certainly gained distinction in his calling while a young man, for in 1586 his name was on the list of the earl of Worcester's players, and he was eventually rated by common consent as the foremost actor of his time. Ben Jonson, a critic little prone to exalt the merits of men of mark among his contemporaries, bestowed unstinted praise on Alleyn's acting (Epigrams, No. 89). Nash expresses in prose, in Pierce Penniless, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Fletcher, of whom I am next to speak, had with the advantage of Shakespeare's wit, which was their precedent, great natural gifts, improved by study; Beaumont especially, being so accurate a judge of plays, that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots. What value he had for him, appears by the verses he writ to him, and therefore ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the day were open to a free-lance like young Herrick, some of whose blithe measures, passing in manuscript from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to light as a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun were not places devoted to worship, unless it were to the worship of "rare Ben Jonson," at whose feet Herrick now sat, with the other blossoming young poets of the season. He was a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed many loving lyrics to the master, of which not the least graceful is His Prayer to ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... inaudible. Poetry leaves the farmyard and the craftsman's bench for the court. The folk-song, fashioned in to a thing of wondrous beauty by the creator of Amiens, Feste and Autolycus, is driven from the stage by Ben Jonson, and its place is taken by a lyric of classic extraction. The popular drama, ennobled and made shapely through contact with Latin drama, passes from the provincial market-place to Bankside, and the rude mechanicals of the trade-guilds yield place to the Lord Chamberlain's players. In the ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... subject in a single paragraph. Ben Jonson, though a jolly good fellow, was opposed to the habit of smoking. But Spenser mentions "divine tobacco." Walton's "Piscator" indulges in a pipe at breakfast, and "Venator" has his tobacco brought from London to insure its purity. Sweet Izaak could have selected ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... his duties were is a matter of surmise. The office was successively held by Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson and Francis Quarles. Ben Jonson's salary (100 nobles per annum) was stopped in 1631 by order of the Court of Aldermen "until he shall have presented to the court some fruits of his labours in that place" (Repertory 46, fo. 8); but it was renewed in 1634 at the intervention ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... General Jackson still swore "by the Eternal," and his illustrious military successor of a more recent period seems, by his own showing, to have been able to sudden impulses of excitement. It might be said of Motley, as it was said of Shakespeare by Ben Jonson, "aliquando sufflaminandus erat." Yet not too much must be made of this concession. Only a determination to make out a case could, as it seems to me, have framed such an indictment as that which the secretary constructed by stringing together a slender list of pretended peccadillos. One instance ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... he throws out the masonic signs of learning in almost every scene, to all who know what they are. And this over and above every kind of direct evidence. First, foremost, and enough, the evidence of Ben Jonson that he had "little Latin and less Greek"; then Shakespeare had as much Greek as Jonson would call some, even when he was depreciating. To have any Greek at all was in those days exceptional. In Shakespeare's youth St. Paul's and Merchant Taylor's schools were ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... I take to be a nation's best guaranteed stock, it may safely be said that there are but two shrines in England whither it is necessary for the literary pilgrim to carry his cockle hat and shoon—London, the birthplace of Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Blake, Keats, and Browning, and Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. Of English poets it may be said generally they are either born in London or remote country places. The large provincial towns ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... 'Herse is the solemne obsequie in funeralles.' Cp. also Ben Jonson's 'Epitaph on ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... cows," he prompted in a practical voice. It was well a practical remark fitted the occasion for the line from old Ben Jonson, which David had only a few hours ago accused him of plagiarizing, rose to the surface of his mind. Such deep wells of eyes he had never looked into in all his life before, and they were as ever, ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and that driven down With beer and butter-milk, mingled together. It is against my freehold, my inheritance. Wine is the word that glads the heart of man, And mine's the house of wine. Sack, says my bush, Be merry and drink Sherry, that's my posie. Ben Jonson's ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the admired Miser of these latter days. Sir Basil Hopwood was the rather of the same complexion of Entrails with that Signor Volpone whom we have all seen—at least such of us as be old Boys—in Ben Jonson's play of the Fox. He Money-grubbed, and Money-clutched, and Money-wrung, ay, and in a manner Money-stole, that he might live largely, and ruffle it among his brother Cits in surpassing state and splendour. He had been ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. We are amused to read how Ben Jonson engaged, that the dull masks with which the royal family and nobility were to be entertained should be "grounded upon antiquity and solid learning." Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... night of it" with those rollicking bachelors, Beaumont and Fletcher, at the "Mermaid," or going with them to the Globe Theatre to see two Warwickshire brothers, Edmund and Will Shakspeare, who are on the boards there,—the latter taking the part of Old Knowell, in Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in his Humour." His friends say ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... arisen among our stock actors and supes of the Globe. Nicholas Bottom, whom you brought from the Parish workhouse in Stratford, is in ill humor with thee in especial. He says when he played with you in Ben Jonson's comedy, "Every Man in his Humor," he was by far the better actor and did receive the plaudits of all; despite which he now receives but 6 shillings each week, while you are become a man of great wealth, having gotten, as he verily believes, ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... select a very plain cravat, and to fasten in it with care the scarf-pin bestowed upon him by old Benson, the little watchmaker on the corner below. Through the buttonhole in the lapel of his coat he drew a spicy-smelling sprig of ground-pine, chanting whimsically as he did so a couplet from Ben Jonson: ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... human relationships. He is described as "gentle." Had he been not gentle we should know more of him. Ben Jonson "loved the man," and says that "he was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature." John Webster speaks of his "right happy and copious industry." An actor who wrote more than thirty plays during twenty years of rehearsing, acting, and theatre management, can have had little time ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... legislation" that they have acquired an infamy which unfits them for publication in a decent family newspaper; and Shakspere himself, reposing in Elysium on his bed of asphodel and moly, omits them when reading his complete works to the shades of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, for their sins. ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... things which really exist not, if they are founded on popular belief. Of this nature are fairies, pigmies, and the extraordinary effects of magic; for it is still an imitation, though of other men's fancies: and thus are Shakespeare's "Tempest," his "Midsummer Night's Dream," and Ben Jonson's "Masque of Witches" to be defended. For immaterial substances, we are authorised by Scripture in their description: and herein the text accommodates itself to vulgar apprehension, in giving angels the likeness of beautiful young men. Thus, after the pagan divinity, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... of ye rooms in ye which Master Will Shakspeare lodged in Clink Streete, and which is told to us to be in ye same state as when left by himself, as stated over ye door in ye room, and on the walls were many printed verses, also a portraiture of Ben Jonson with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... assert that of all his works, with the doubtful exception of his Memoirs, it is the one best worth reprinting. It is in no spirit of irony that I say of him who in his own day was looked on almost as Bacon's equal, who was the friend of Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Ben Jonson, Cromwell, and all the great spirits of his time, the intimate of kings, and the special friend of queens, that his memory should be revived for his skill in making drinks, and his interest in his own and other folks' kitchens. If to the magnificent and protean Sir Kenelm ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touched it? Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the snow, Before the soil hath smutch'd it? BEN JONSON. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... chiefly from the Latin, then appeared in books, were often received with reprobation and derision, sometimes disappeared again, sometimes established their footing in the language: see The Art of English Poetry (ascribed to Puttenham), Book III. chap. 4, and Ben Jonson's Poetaster, Act. V. sc. I. Good judges did not know whether a word was really called for: even Shakespeare thought 'remuneration' and 'accommodate' ridiculous. But such national exigencies rarely arise; and in our own time great authors distinguish ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... have cheated a common horse-jockey; but by such legends our ancestors were amused and interested, till their belief respecting the demons of the Holy Land seems to have been not very far different from that expressed in the title of Ben Jonson's play, "The Devil is ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... by sleep or fev'rous fit assail'd.] O Rome! thy head Is drown'd in sleep, and all thy body fev'ry. Ben Jonson's Catiline. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... so do Achilles and Rinaldo, who were subjects and soldiers to Agamemnon and Godfrey of Bulloigne. He talks extravagantly in his passion; but, if I would take the pains to quote an hundred passages of Ben Jonson's Cethegus, I could easily shew you, that the rhodomontades of Almanzor are neither so irrational as his, nor so impossible to be put in execution; for Cethegus threatens to destroy nature, and to raise ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... perspicuous people in past times had made the grossest blunders when they judged their own age. Let them remember the insensibility of Montaigne to the merits of all his contemporaries. In the next age, and in their own country, Ben Jonson took occasion at the very moment when Shakespeare was producing his masterpieces, to lament the total decay of poetry in England. We could not see the trees for the wood behind them, but we ought to be confident they ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... chiefly from Menander and the Greek New Comedy through Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, that have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy or otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massinger's Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type, 'with fat capon lined' that has been and will be; and he would be comic, as Panurge is comic, but only a Rabelais could set him moving with real animation. Probably Justice Greedy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... worthy enough as far as type and paper could make it worthy. But this is only to be found in second-hand book-shops. Why are two rival London houses now publishing editions of Scott, the better illustrated with silly pictures "out of the artists' heads"? Where is the final edition of Ben Jonson? ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... appeared. It is recorded that Queen Elizabeth, in 1601, then an old woman, witnessed one of these plays, entitled "The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality." This was written by Lodge and Greene, two of the regular dramatists, after Ben Jonson had written "Every Man in his Humour," and while Shakspeare was writing Hamlet. Thus the various progressive forms of the drama overlapped each other, the older retaining its place until the younger gained strength to assert its rights and supersede ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Will Shakespeare, who had come up to London and began, by holding horses outside of the theater, and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock testimony—Ben Jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays themselves, the actors who had published them—but he refused to accept any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that Shakespeare had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, Bobadil is styled a Paul's man; and Falstaff tells us that he bought Bardolph in Paul's. King Henry ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... our fireplace, in which, some of the hearth-bricks are rather irregularly disposed; and we said to ourself, perhaps the brick-layer who built this noble fireplace worked like Ben Jonson, with a trowel in one hand and a copy of Horace in the other. That suggested to us that we had not read any Ben Jonson for a very long time: so we turned to "Every Man in His Humour" and "The Alchemist." Part of Jonson's notice "To the Reader" preceding ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... last passage, perhaps, meaning, knowledge, best expresses the sense. Ledden may have been one of the words which led Ben Jonson to charge Spenser with "affecting the ancients." However, I find it employed by one ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... Davenant, who had succeeded Ben Jonson as Poet Laureate, secured from King Charles a royal patent under the Great Seal of England to erect a playhouse in Fleet Street, to be used not only for regular plays, but also for "musical entertainments" and "scenic representations." ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... temper, this serious anger for no very serious things, things looked on by most as foreign to the important points of life, as consequentially flows that inheritance of ridicule, which devolves on them, from generation to generation. As soon as they become authors, they become like Ben Jonson's angry boy, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... through a medium over which he has but slight control; he must depend wholly on the actors of his play, and too often he is leaning on a reed. Colman accused John Kemble of having been the cause of the original failure of The Iron Chest, and Ben Jonson published his New Inn as a comedy "never acted, but most negligently played by some of the king's servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the king's subjects, 1629; and now, at last, set at liberty to the readers, His Majesty's servants and subjects, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... that Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,' said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet, if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... metaphor found also in Plato's 'Republic,' symbolizes the sting used by the Athenian jurymen to make the rich disgorge a portion of their gathered honey. The 'Plaideurs' of Racine is an imitation of this play; and the motif of the committal of the dog is borrowed by Ben Jonson ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy "Every Man in his Humour" became the standard of action for two whole generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, Morton of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner and ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the offer of "half a share." Gamaliel Ratsey, in that rare tract, Ratseis Ghost, 1606, knights the principal performer of a company by the title of "Sir Three Shares and a Half;" and Tucca, in Ben Jonson's Poetaster, addressing Histrio, observes, "Commend me to Seven shares and a half," as if some individual at that period had engrossed as large a proportion. Shakspeare, in Hamlet, speaks of "a whole ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... Both kinds were usual enough on the English stage in the days of Elizabeth, but we can recall the ever-memorable example of Beaumont and Fletcher, while we forget the chance associations of Marston, Dekker, Chapman and Ben Jonson. And in contemporary literature we have before us the French tales of MM. Erckmann-Chatrian and the English novels of Messrs. Besant and Rice. The fact that such a union endures is proof that it is advantageous. A long-lasting collaboration like this of MM. Meilhac ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... is that by the Elizabethan, John Florio (1550-1625), a contemporary of Montaigne. His translation appeared in 1603, and may now be obtained complete in the handy "Temple" classics. There is a copy of Florio's Montaigne with Ben Jonson's autograph, and also one that has what many believe to be ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Treasury; that my Lord had some great place conferred on him, and they say Master of the Wardrobe; and the two Dukes do haunt the Park much, and that they were at a play, Madam Epicene, [Epicene, or the Silent Woman, a Comedy by Ben Jonson.] the other day; that Sir Ant. Cooper, [Afterwards Chancellor, and created Earl of Shaftesbury.] Mr. Hollis, and Mr. Annesly, late Presidents of the Council of State, are made Privy Councillors ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... observations of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very "sphere of humanity," he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Instauration of Knowledge, he was in the first rank as a speaker and a writer. Sir Walter Raleigh, contrasting him with Salisbury, who could speak but not write, and Northampton, who could write but not speak, thought Bacon eminent both as a speaker and a writer. Ben Jonson, passing in review the more famous names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir Thomas More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex, and Raleigh, places Bacon without a rival at the head of the company ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... chapter in the story of Elizabethan witchcraft and exorcism. It is hardly too much to say that it was the first chapter in the literary exploitation of witchcraft. Out of the Declaration Shakespeare and Ben Jonson mined those ores which when fused and refined by imagination and fancy were shaped into the shining forms of art. Shakespearean scholars have pointed out the connection between the dramatist and the exposer of exorcism. It has indeed been suggested ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... His powers of memory were so great as to astonish even those eminently gifted in the same manner. In reading, he involuntarily committed to memory, whether of prose or poetry. He seemed to have memorized the Bible, Shakspeare, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Byron, and many others of the modern poets. The whole range of literature was at his command: to read once, was always to remember. This capacity to acquire was so great that he would in a month master as much as most men could ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... been popular among the band of dramatists he now joined, and it is probable that his insulting manners were not sustained by corresponding courage. Ben Jonson had many quarrels with him, both literary and personal, and mentions one occasion on which he beat him, and took away his pistol. His temper was Italian rather than English, and one would conceive of him as quicker with the stiletto than the fist. His connection ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... manner was aped in the days of Elizabeth and James I. by such as affected scholar-like habits, and is frequently alluded to by the satirists of the time. BEN JONSON, in his "Every Man in his Humour," delineates the "country gull," Master Stephen, as affecting "to be mightily given to melancholy," and receiving the assurance, "It's your only fine humour, sir; your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... comedy for which Ben Jonson left us, because we would not put it on, has been taken up by the Burbages on Will Shakspere's say-so, and is running ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... as an instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no "ought" about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... a reason why the comedies of Ben Jonson, founded upon system, or what the age termed humours,—by which was meant factitious and affected characters, superinduced on that which was common to the rest of their race,—in spite of acute satire, deep scholarship, and strong sense, do not now afford general ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... long since more than time that the worthless and impudent imposture called The Passionate Pilgrim should be exposed and expelled from its station at the far end of Shakespeare's poems. What Coleridge said of Ben Jonson's epithet for "turtle-footed peace," we may say of the label affixed to this rag-picker's bag of stolen goods: The Passionate Pilgrim is a pretty title, a very pretty title; pray what may it mean? In all the larcenous little bundle of verse there is neither a poem ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... him must be; but by G-d, though he is your brother, Mr. Garrick, he is one of the shabbiest, meanest, most pitiful hounds I ever saw in the whole course of my life.' Abel Drugger is a character in Ben Jonson's Alchemist. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Edward Norgate, Jack Crofts and others. He composed the words for two New Year anthems which were set to music by Henry Lawes, and he was probably personally known both to the King and Queen. Outside the Court he reckoned himself one of Ben Jonson's disciples, "Sons of Ben" as they were called, had friends at the Inns of Court, knew the organist of Westminster Abbey and his pretty daughters, and had every temptation to live an amusing and expensive life. ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Spain; Hyanisbe is Queen Elizabeth; Mergania, by an easy anagram, is Germany; Usinulca, by another, is Calvin. The book is of historical importance in the development of 17th century romance, including especially Fenelon's Telemaque. Ben Jonson appears, from an entry at Stationers' Hall on the 2nd of October 1623, to have intended to make a translation. Barclay's shorter poems, in two books, were printed in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (Amsterdam, 1637, i. pp. 76-136). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... scarcely appears in the narrative—let me say that my sister was an exemplary wife and, while fate spared her, a devoted mother. I knew my brother-in-law for a great man, incapable of a thought or action less than kingly, and I worshipped him (as Ben Jonson would say) "on this side idolatry"; but if the Constantines have a fault, it is that they demand too much of life, and exact it somewhat too much as a matter of course. I have heard this fault attributed ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... And yet, curiously enough, in the collection of critical monographs so well known under the generic title of "English Men of Letters"—a series, by the way, which includes Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria Edgeworth—no room or place has hitherto been found for Smollett any more than for Ben Jonson, both of them, surely, considerable Men of Letters in the very strictest and most representative sense of the term. Both Jonson and Smollett were to an unusual extent centres of the literary life of their time; and if the great Ben ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... lettres as the wickedness of sin and folly. Suckling's poems are few in number, and, with rare exceptions, are all brief. The most lengthy is the Sessions of the Poets, a satire upon the poets of his day, from rare Ben Jonson, with Carew and Davenant, down to those of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Whitsuntide for very many centuries "sports" have been held in all parts of the country. It is said that they are the floralia of the Romans. Included in these sports are many of those amusements of the middle ages of which Ben Jonson sang: ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... avowed disciples, still less servile imitators of his thought or style. Following upon Homer there was the school of the Homeridae, or "sons of Homer." A cluster of poets at the beginning of the seventeenth century were styled "the sons of Ben Jonson." There are no doubt "sons of Tennyson" at this present date. With these we have now no concern. They are but satellites, while that for which we are scanning the poetical horizon is a rising star of a magnitude in some degree comparable with the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... They grow in my garden, where they flourish exceedingly, except Butterwoort, which groweth in our English squally wet grounds,"—('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it nearly: "Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"—and note farther that the word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... by becoming a social rebel,—persecutes conventional politeness into submission to rude veracity,—establishes an autocracy of man over the gentleman,—and practises a kind of "Come-Outerism," while insisting on enjoying all the advantages of Go-Interism. Ben Jonson in the age of Elizabeth, Samuel Johnson in the last century, Carlyle and Brougham in the present, are prominent examples of this somewhat insolent manhood in the presence of social forms. It is, however, one of the rarest, as it is one of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... emancipation of thought, and of immense fertility and originality. The poets and prose writers of the time united the freshness of youth with the vigour of manhood. Among these were Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, the Fletchers, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. Among the statesmen of Elizabeth were Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, Howard, and Sir Nicholas Bacon. But perhaps greatest of all were the sailors, who, as Clarendon said, "were a nation by themselves;" and their leaders—Drake, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Chatham, Fox and Wilberforce, among statesmen; of soldiers there are Prince Rupert and Monk; of Indian fame, here are Lord Lawrence and Lord Clyde; of sailors, Blake, Cloudesley Shovel, and Lord Dundonald. Of poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Prior, Addison, Gay, Campbell. Of historians and prose writers, Samuel Johnson, Macaulay, Dickens, Livingston, Isaac Newton. Many others there are to look for, notably the great poet Tennyson, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... her own possessions was seen in every port of the world; her admirals, Ruyter and Tromp, had won her an illustrious place forever in the annals of naval warfare. These were the days of Milton and Ben Jonson; of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus and Richelieu; of Murillo, Rubens and Van Dyck—days when Holland had within her own borders such men as Barneveld, the great statesman; Grotius, the father of international law; Spinoza, the philosopher and ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... illustrious revivers of letters. A singular custom formerly prevailed among our own writers, which was an affectionate tribute to our literary veterans by young writers. The former adopted the latter by the title of sons. Ben Jonson had twelve of these poetical sons. Walton the angler adopted Cotton, the translator ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... it may be said that Shakspere, of all men, is able to speak for himself without aid or comment. His works appeal to all, young and old, in every time, every nation. It is true; he can be understood. He is, to use again Ben Jonson's oft-quoted words, "Not of an age, but for all time." Yet he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit and opinions of his era, that without a certain comprehension of the men of the Elizabethan period he cannot be understood fully. Indeed, his greatness ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... time, there were people In Ireland, (there may be so still, for aught I know,) who undertook to charm rats to death, by chanting certain verses which acted as a spell. "Rhyme them to death, as they do rats in Ireland," is a line in one of Ben Jonson's comedies; this ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... chiefly, in the fact that it is associated with names of the first rank in literature, with Theocritus and Vergil, with Petrarch, Politian, and Tasso, with Cervantes and Lope de Vega, with Ronsard and Marot, with Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Milton; nor yet that works such as the Idyls, the Aminta, the Faithful Shepherdess, and Lycidas contain some of the most graceful and perfect verse to be found in any language. Rather is its importance to be sought in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... chorus of praise continued from people of all classes. John Weever, the epigrammatist, and Richard Camden, the antiquarian, praised Shakespeare highly, and Michael Drayton, the poet, called him "perfection in a man." Finally, Ben Jonson, his most famous competitor for public applause, crowned our poet's fame with his poem, prefixed to the first collected edition of Shakespeare's famous First Folio of 1623: "To the Memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Shakespeare—to mention one only—must have possessed a Plutarch, a Stowe, a Montaigne, and a Bible, and probably half a dozen other books of less moment. And yet, with this poor show, he was as genuine a book-lover as Ben Jonson or my Lord Verulam. Lord Burleigh, Grotius, and Bonaparte are said to have carried their libraries in their pockets, and doubtless Shakespeare could have carried his under ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... getting paralysed alike by debt and by indecision. 'As for tidings here,' writes John Bocking, 'I certify you all that is nought, or will be nought. The king borroweth his expenses.'" Henry anticipated what Ben Jonson discovered in a later ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Clout" would have ranked little if at all higher than "Astrophel." Further: save for Sidney and Marlowe, who were both cut off prematurely, and Spenser himself who died at forty-six, the work of all the greater Elizabethan writers—Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, Bacon, Hooker, Raleigh, Middleton, Drayton—lies as much in the time of James as in that of Elizabeth; while a whole group of those to whom the same general title is applied—Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford, Massinger—belong in effect wholly ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Ben Jonson's "Discoveries" are, as he says in the few Latin words prefixed to them, "A wood—Sylva—of things and thoughts, in Greek "[Greek text]" [which has for its first meaning material, but is also applied peculiarly to ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... 30. Ben Jonson, a friend of Shakespeare's, wrote of him, "He was not of an age, but for all time." What did ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... the casket, raised the lid, and produced a golden goblet of a singular and antique appearance, moulded into the shape of a rampant bear, which the owner regarded with a look of mingled reverence, pride, and delight, that irresistibly reminded Waverley of Ben Jonson's Tom Otter, with his Bull, Horse, and Dog, as that wag wittily denominated his chief carousing cups. But Mr. Bradwardine, turning towards him with complacency, requested him to observe this curious relic of the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the rich idiomatic Scottish dialogue in the novels might be possibly disparaged (like Ben Jonson) as 'mere humours and observation.' Novelists of lower rank than Scott—Galt in The Ayrshire Legatees and Annals of the Parish and The Entail—have nearly rivalled Scott in reporting conversation. But the Bailie at any rate has his part to play in the story of ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... Noble Nature" is from the volume of Ben Jonson's poems in The Canterbury Poets, edited by William Sharp (published by the Walter Scott Publishing Company, London ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... learning into a bricklayer, and would have come with a better grace from Ben Jonson than from Sam. But however that may be, under such an architect, ghosts would naturally be enrolled in the company. Dr. Farmer may say what he pleases, but I firmly believe Shakspeare had Latin enough to talk to his own ghosts; though I doubt whether I can express the same ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... old age, for it was not published, I believe, till 1627, when it formed part of a small folio volume, containing The Battaile of Agincourt and The Miseries of Queene Margarite. Prefixed to this volume was the noble but tardy panegyric of his friend Ben Jonson, entitled ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... told Drummond that "S. J. Davies played in ane Epigrame on Draton's, who in a sonnet concluded his mistress might been the Ninth [sic] Worthy; and said he used a phrase like Dametas in Arcadia, who said, For wit his Mistresse might be a Gyant."—Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with Drummond, p. 15. (ed. ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... when it is a remarkable thing if an author has his pocket picked, or narrowly escapes being in a ship that is wrecked, or takes poison when he is young, even the outline of Borrow's life is attractive. Like Byron, Ben Jonson, and Chaucer, he reminds us that an author is not bound to be a nun with a beard. He depicts himself continually, at all ages, and in all conditions of pathos or pride. Other human beings, with few exceptions, he depicts only in relation to himself. He ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... antipathy to the "snug lying in the Abbey;" and as for Captain Bobadil, he never had an opportunity of putting his plan, for vanquishing an army, into practice. We fear, indeed, that neither his character, nor Ben Jonson's knowledge of human nature, is properly understood; for it certainly could not be expected that a man, whose spirit glowed to encounter a whole host, could, without tarnishing his dignity, if closely pressed, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... to-day comprises two of the four great Inns of Court, —Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, Inner Temple, Middle Temple,—which, taken collectively, constitute the backbone of the legal polity of England. Ben Jonson described them as "the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom." They are all of great age and the recipients of rich revenues. The income of the Middle Temple alone (not the richest of the four) from the single item ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... that Donne writes, whether in verse or prose, is exclusively his own. In addition to this, his thoughts are often in the noblest sense of the word poetical; and passages may be quoted from him that no English poet may attempt to rival, unless it be Milton and Shakespear. Ben Jonson observed of him with great truth and a prophetic spirit: "Donne for not being understood will perish." But this is not all. If Waller and Suckling and Carew sacrificed every thing to the Graces, Donne went into the other extreme. With a few splendid and admirable exceptions, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... guests there. The hospitality of this seat has been renowned. The Queen of James I. and the Prince Henry, on their way to London, in 1603, were welcomed there in an entertainment, memorable for a masque from the vigorous muse of Ben Jonson (Ben Jonson's Works, vol. vi. p. 475). Charles I. was at Althorp, in 1647, when he received the first intelligence of the approach of those pursuers from whom he never escaped until his life had been laid down upon the scaffold. In ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... "forsaken." The reason why the primrose was said to "die unmarried," is, according to Warton, because it grows in the shade uncherished or unseen by the sun, who was supposed to be in love with certain sorts of flowers. Ben Jonson, however, describes the primrose as a wedded lady—"the Spring's own Spouse"—though she is certainly more commonly regarded as the daughter of Spring not the wife. J Fletcher ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... letter from Mrs. Montagu to Garrick, which shows the ridiculous way in which Shakespeare was often patronised last century, and 'brought into notice.' She says:—'Mrs. Montagu is a little jealous for poor Shakespeare, for if Mr. Garrick often acts Kitely, Ben Jonson will eclipse his fame.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... spent his nights on board; and mad, roystering nights they were, such as rare Ben Jonson would have delighted in. For company over the cabin-table, he would have four or five whiskered sea-captains, who kept the steward drawing corks and filling glasses all the time. And once, the whole company were found under the table at four o'clock in the morning, and were put to ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the "humours" of mankind. Shakspere sketched with his fellows. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" his painting of manners was suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty which formed an effective protest against the hard though vigorous character-painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in "Every Man in his Humour" brought at the time into fashion. But quick on these lighter comedies followed two in which his genius started fully into life. His poetic power, held in reserve till now, showed itself with a splendid profusion in the brilliant fancies of the "Midsummer ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... BEN JONSON Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke The Picture of the Body To Penshurst To the Memory of my beloved Master, William Shakspeare, and what he hath left us ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... status of the page became impaired, until in the reign of Elizabeth we find him a pampered domestic, whose pert air and gaudy dress represented all that was left of a formidable troop armed with sword and buckler. Ben Jonson deplores and ridicules the transformation in lines with which the present volume may well close. The host in the play has refused his son as page to Lord Lovel, saying that he would hang him sooner than "damn him to ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... "Oh! Ben Jonson!" said Hildegarde. "He was another great dramatist, you know; a little younger, but of the same time with Shakspeare and Marlowe. He lived to be quite old, and he wrote a very famous poem on Shakspeare, 'all full of quotations,' as somebody said about 'Hamlet.' It ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... oracle of scholars than the organ of a party. Compared with its adversary across the Tweed, it was like a ponderous knight, cased in complete steel, attacking an agile, light-armed Moorish cavalier; or, to use Ben Jonson's illustration, like a Spanish great galleon opposed to the facile manoeuvres of a British man-of-war. For such an enemy there were needed other weapons. Well might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... not kill, And yet we say we must, for Reputation! What honest man can either fear his own, Or else will hurt another's reputation? Fear to do base unworthy things is valour; If they be done to us, to suffer them Is valour too.— BEN JONSON, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... inclined to doubt the accuracy of the phrase "employed to write for the court." Certain it is, the question I now raise was pressed then, as it was to satisfy Ben Jonson's want of information Selden wrote on the subject in his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... truly representative of the taste of the century, as has sometimes been implied, it has to be explained how they were not so popular as the latter. "Our taste has gone back a whole century," says the strolling player in the Vicar of Wakefield,(7) "Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and all the plays of Shakespeare are the only things that go down." The whole passage is a satire on Garrick(8) and a gibe at Drury Lane: "The public go only to be amused, and find themselves happy when they can enjoy a pantomime ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... foundation 1524. It is said that G. Morland, the animal painter, painted a sign for this. It is No. 267. Northward, at the corner of Church Street, is the Wheatsheaf, which, says Robins, "has the credit of having frequently entertained honest and learned Ben Jonson." ...
— Mayfair, Belgravia, and Bayswater - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... discretion Ben Jonson owed his first introduction to dramatic fame. The young poet had presented "Every Man in his Humour," to one of the leading players of the company to which Shakespeare belonged, and the comedian upon reading it, determined to refuse it. Jonson's fate ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange |
