"Ben Jonson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... published by the Wiltshire Topographical Society in 1845, I drew attention to this passage, which shews that although the above famous epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke is almost always attributed to Ben Jonson, it was, in fact, written by William Browne. That such is really the case does not rest only on the authority of Aubrey and Evelyn; for we find this very epitaph in a volume of Poems written by Browne, and ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... music-hall, bears date of 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
... phoenix; lay you an old courtier 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 vindicated ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... 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 ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... spite of his level of common sense, the artlessness of his passion, and the broad simplicity of a great imagination, that causeth its sun to shine on the evil and the good. It was easy reading to Ben Jonson, to Milton, and to Chapman; it took "Eliza and our James"; it had more theatrical success than the scholarly plays of Jonson: but two or three centuries have exhausted neither his commentators nor the subtile ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... do I write thee as to the contention which hath 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, as much as L100. Vainly did I oppose ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... pieces may be traced in earlier collections; some few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton, with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... door of the play-house, then as a servant to the company, and at last as general utility man on the stage. As an actor he made no impression, although he continued to appear in subordinate parts, and played in Ben Jonson's "Sejanus" at its production in 1603, when he was forty years old. The first public notice he received was in 1592, in a letter of Robert Greene, a dissolute writer, who accuses Shakespeare and Marlowe of plagiarism, conceit, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... 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 a ruff ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... told by Professor Thorpe, has been officially indorsed by the poetry committee of the Chicago Literary Club. A second design, in royal octavo white pine, and omitting the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Herrick, is quoted at a hundred ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... 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 to have masters learned in ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... built. I could wish he would have declined that envy which must of necessity follow such an undertaking, and contented himself with triumphing over me in my opinions of verse, which I will never hereafter dispute with him; but he must pardon me if I have that veneration for Aristotle, Horace, Ben Jonson, and Corneille, that I dare not serve him in such a cause, and against such heroes, but rather fight under their protection, as Homer reports of little Teucer, who shot the Trojans from under the large buckler ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... has wandered in and out like a golden thread in a dull tapestry, sometimes hidden, but never wholly lost. It behooves us to keep well and reverently such Christmas as we have, else we shall share old Ben Jonson's lament in The Mask of Father Christmas, which was presented before the English Court nearly ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... borrowed. In a copy of verses, entitled the Time Poets, preserved in a miscellany called Choice Drollery, 1656, are these lines: Sent by Ben Jonson, as some authors say, Broom went before, and kindly swept ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... lover"), "as novises newly sprung out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch" (Puttenham's Art of Poesie, 1589, pp. 48-50); and later again, Daniel ("To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford"), Ben Jonson, and Milton (Psalms ii., vi.) afford specimens of terza rima. There was, too, one among Byron's contemporaries who had already made trial of the metre in his Prince Athanase (1817) and The Woodman and the Nightingale (1818), and who, shortly, in his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Ignatius Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke, and General Butler, and Mr. Atkinson, who writes in 'The Spiritualist,' and Mrs. Gallup, and Judge Webb, Mr. Smith rested, first, on Shakespeare's lack of education, and on the wide learning of the author of the poems and plays. Now, Ben Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon, averred that the former had 'small Latin and less Greek,' doubtless with truth. It was necessary, therefore, to prove that the author of the plays had plenty of Latin and Greek. Here Mr. John Churton Collins ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... more correct form would be unwroken.] So in Ben Jonson's "Every Man out of his Humour," act ii. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... in rhyme; and he who has it will avoid errors in both kinds. Latin verse was as great a confinement to the imagination as rhyme; yet Ovid's fancy was not limited by it, and Virgil needed it not to bind his. In our own language, Ben Jonson confined himself to what ought to be said, even in the liberty of blank verse; and Corneille, the most judicious of the French poets, is still varying the same sense a hundred ways, and dwelling eternally on the same ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... me again into the Magazine, but I feel the spirit of the thing in my own mind quite gone. "Some brains" (I think Ben Jonson says it) "will endure but one skimming." We are about to have an inundation of poetry from the Lakes, Wordsworth and Southey are coming up strong from the North. The she Coleridges have taken flight, to my regret. With Sara's own-made ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... established, and owed its origin to Sir Walter Raleigh, who had here instituted a meeting of men of wit and genius, previously to his engagement with the unfortunate Cobham. This society comprised all that the age held most distinguished for learning and talent, numbering amongst its members Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Selden, Sir Walter Raleigh, Donne, Cotton, Carew, Martin, and many others. There it was that the "wit-combats" took place between Shakspeare and Ben Johson, to which, probably, Beaumont alludes with so much affection ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... favourite sports at Christmas in old times; and the wardrobes at halls and manor-houses were often laid under contribution to furnish dresses and fantastic disguisings. I strongly suspect Master Simon to have taken the idea of his from Ben Jonson's ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... be considered as one of the "Coadjutors." "I may venture to say, that whoever was the fool of the company before he entered (or the fool of the piece, in his own diction) he was certainly so after he engaged in that work; for, as Ben Jonson observes, 'he that thinks himself the Master-Wit is commonly ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has produced; but his mind had no balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of diction, and now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of profound poetic depth. Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent workman, whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen of that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • 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 ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... more than that there are exquisitely amusing plays among the comedies; but as the staple interest of the comedies is dirt, so the staple interest of the tragedies is crime. Revenge, hatred, villany, incest, and murder upon murder are their constant themes, and (with the exception of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger) they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience, and of displaying their own power of delineation in a way ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... religion into one for the pleasure of the Dukes that were to come of his family. In 1619, King James paid a visit to Welbeck, and Charles I. was entertained there, when "there was such excess in feasting as had scarcely ever been known in England," and Ben Jonson was present at the invitation of the Duke to enliven the festivities with ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... biographer says, "The truth is his end was not writing, even while he wrote, but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in words or opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, and he wrote his novel Rosalind, on which Shakespeare based As You Like ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... 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, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... poisoned by that which was prepared for others (some say by his wife at Cornbury Lodge before mentioned), though Baker in his Chronicle would have it at Killingworth; anno 1588." [Ashmole's Antiquities of Berkshire, vol.i., p.149. The tradition as to Leicester's death was thus communicated by Ben Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden:—"The Earl of Leicester gave a bottle of liquor to his Lady, which he willed her to use in any faintness, which she, after his returne from court, not knowing it was poison, gave him, and so he died."—BEN JONSON'S ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... they savor not of Milton, Socrates, or Menu; seem not drawn from any private cistern, but rain-drops out of the pure sky. Whim and conceit are tare and tret. It matters little whether a man whine with Coleridge, or boast with Ben Jonson, or sneer with Byron, or grumble with Carlyle, if every thought is one-sided and warped. The oddity relieves our commonplace, and pricks the dull palate; but we soon tire of exaggeration, and detest the trick. It is egotism, self-sickness, jaundice, adulteration ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... And the view from Ramsay's shop—from which by this time the wigs had entirely disappeared, and which was now a refined and cultured bookseller's, adorned outside with medallions of two poets, Scotch and English, Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden—was bounded by the gate of the Netherbow with its picturesque tower, and glimpses through the open roadway, of the Canongate beyond, and the cross lines of busy traffic leading to Leith. It was ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration. And what would literature or art be without such associations? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Reynolds, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be, Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall at last a log, dry, bald, and sear. A lily of a day Is fairer far, in May. BEN JONSON. ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... pen to paper, did attempt English prose, and not seldom achieved it. But take up any elaborate History of English Literature and read, and, as you read, ask yourselves, 'How can one of the rarest delights of life be converted into this? What has happened to merry Chaucer, rare Ben Jonson, gay Steele and Prior, to Goldsmith, Jane ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... after the Cases. Mr. Rose, who projected many streets at the north end of the town on his extensive property, seems to have adopted the poets' names to distinguish his thoroughfares, as in Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Juvenal, Virgil, Dryden, Milton, Sawney (Alexander) Pope-street, etc. Meadows-street, Scotland-road, was named after Mr. William Meadows, who married six wives. His first wife lived two years. He next married Peggy Robinson, who lived twenty years, and bore him ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... day. We should recall that every colony of the original thirteen, except Georgia, was founded in the seventeenth century when the energy of that great and versatile period of the Virgin Queen had not yet dissipated itself. The spirit that moved Ben Jonson and Shakespeare to undertake the new and untried in literature was the same spirit that moved John Smith and his cavaliers to invade the Virginia wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to found a commonwealth for freedom's sake on a stern and rock-bound coast. It was the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... in conclusion, that Dr. Rimbault is better read in Jack Wilson than Ben Jonson, or we should never have seen Mr. Shakspeare's 'Rime' at the 'Mitre,' in Fleet Street, seriously referred to as a genuine composition. It is a mere clumsy adaptation, from Ben's interesting epigram 'Inviting a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... regarded as his best critical work. With ridicule of the affectations of historians whose names and whose books have passed into oblivion, he joins sound doctrine upon sincerity of style. "Nothing is lasting that is feigned," said Ben Jonson; "it will have another face ere long." Long after Lucian's day an artificial dignity, accorded specially to work of the historian, bound him by its conventions to an artificial style. He used, as Johnson said of Dr. Robertson, "too ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... barrenness, I have shown, is not attributable to the poverty of the soil, but to the want of due cultivation. Materials are at hand in abundance, but there have been few operators. Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson have all dealt largely in this jargon, but not lyrically; and one of the earliest and best specimens of a canting-song occurs in Brome's "Jovial Crew;" and in the "Adventures of Bamfylde Moore Carew" there is a solitary ode, addressed by the mendicant fraternity ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Ben Jonson's translation from Philostratus; and Lucian has a conceit upon the same idea, "that you may at once ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... be found, after all, in the dictionary. It is not, however, from the secluded scholar that the sharpest cry of pain is wrung by the indignities of his position, but rather from genius in the act of earning a full meed of popular applause. Both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson wrote for the stage, both were blown by the favouring breath of their plebeian patrons into reputation and a competence. Each of them passed through the thick of the fight, and well knew that ugly corner where the artist is exposed to cross fires, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... the broad-minded Moliere. So also Calderon, whom the polemic Schlegel wisht to promote to an equality with the very greatest of dramatic poets, is too careless of form and too medieval in spirit. Promotion must also be denied, for one reason or another, to Ben Jonson, to Corneille and Racine, to Schiller, to Alfieri, and to Victor Hugo. However ardently their claims may be urged by their compatriots, the international tribunal would refuse to admit any one of ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... reign, fifty dramatic poets appeared, many of the first order. Some were distinctly irreligious, as were many of the people whose lives they touched. Such men as Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, Webster, Beaumont, and Fletcher stand like a chorus around Shakespeare and Ben Jonson as leaders. As Taine puts it: "They sing the same piece together, and at times the chorus is equal to the solo; but only at times."[1] Cultured people to-day know the names of most of these writers, but not much else, and it does not heavily serve our argument to say that they felt the Puritan ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... Set down the coffee, Mrs Jones, and just look in upon the patient, will you? Sugar and cream? You know my weakness for the dead wall in Lincoln's Inn Fields.' (Jack never refuses a beggar backed by that wall, for the love of Ben Jonson, who, he devoutly believes, had a hand in building it.) 'Well, I met with her there on Monday last. She asked for nothing, but held out her hand, and as she did so the tears streamed from her eyes on the pavement. The poor creature, it was plain enough, was ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... Potter or Beggar, Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian. Robin Hood and Little John carry bows of length befitting the size of each. The window, too, shown in the frontispiece is proof that the Morris-dancers were attended by other characters. The following, from Ben Jonson's "The Metamorphosed Gipsies," supplies further ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Was rais'd by 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Jewry, and a few years later the 'noble ladie Diana Primrose' wrote A Chain of Pearl, which is a panegyric on the 'peerless graces' of Gloriana. Mary Morpeth, the friend and admirer of Drummond of Hawthornden; Lady Mary Wroth, to whom Ben Jonson dedicated The Alchemist; and the Princess Elizabeth, the sister of Charles I., should ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... known of his 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, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the last 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 ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... William Drummond, a descendant of the Drummonds of Carnock, son of Sir John Drummond of Hawthornden, and author of the "History of the Five James's," Kings of Scotland.[210] The friend of Drayton, and of Ben Jonson, this man of rare virtues presents one of the brightest examples of that class to which he belonged, the Scottish country-gentleman. True-hearted, like the rest of his race, Drummond was never called forth from a retirement over which virtue and ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... that Shakspeare was honored by the especial notice of Queen Elizabeth, as well as by that of James I. At one time we were disposed to question the truth of this tradition; but that was for want of having read attentively the lines of Ben Jonson to the memory of Shakspeare, those generous lines which have so absurdly been taxed with faint praise. Jonson could make no mistake on this point; he, as one of Shakspeare's familiar companions, must have witnessed at the very time, and accompanied ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of Nance was Benjamin Johnson,[A] who achieved curiously enough some of his greatest successes in the plays of his namesake, the other Ben Jonson. He began life as a scene painter, but afterwards turned his attention to the front, rather than the back, of the stage—or, as he would humorously explain, "left the saint's occupation to take that of a sinner." Johnson seems to have been ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed on each other. Thus, the Works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they belong. He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries; and what with so many occasional poems, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that no great man is born into the world without another man being born about the same time, who understands and can interpret him, and Shakespeare was of necessity singularly fortunate in his interpreter. Ben Jonson was big enough to see him fairly, and to give excellent-true testimony concerning him. Jonson's view of Shakespeare is astonishingly accurate and trustworthy so far as it goes; even his attitude of superiority to Shakespeare ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... 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 in the 'Staple ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... part of this volume was obviously collected by a Scotchman, and it includes pieces by Ben Jonson, Wither, Dr. Donne, &c. It must have been made in the latter part of the reign of Charles I. The second portion of the volume is a later production; a humourous poem, called a Whig's Supplication, by {54} S. C., in which there is a remarkable notice of Cleveland, Donne, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... 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 a new ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... branches have, as a rule, risen from the ranks of the poor and lowly. Shakespeare held horses for a few pennies a night in front of a London theater, and later did menial service back of the scenes. Disraeli was an office boy, Carlyle a stone-mason's attendant, and Ben Jonson was a bricklayer. Morrison and Carey were shoemakers, Franklin was a printer's apprentice, Burns a country plowman, Stephenson a collier, Faraday a bookbinder, Arkwright a barber, and Sir Humphrey Davy a ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... for an epitaph on Mary Sidney, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, but not inscribed upon any monumental stone? They are almost universally attributed to Ben Jonson, and are included amongst his poems. But this is not conclusive evidence, as we also there find the epitaph on Drayton, which was written by Quarles. In Aubrey's MS. Memoires of Naturall Remarques in Wilts, these verses are said ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... is no small reward for a truly delightful holiday in country full of the best traditions of rural England. And the intelligent visitor will be one with the great lovers of Shakespeare, living and dead, from Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and Milton down to Matthew Arnold and our own contemporaries, even though his contribution to the poet's praise be no more than a little note in a private diary. His journey will open a ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... Black Forest, according to Ploss and Bartels, a pregnant woman may go freely into other people's gardens and take fruit, provided she eats it on the spot, and very similar privileges are accorded to her elsewhere. Old English opinion, as reflected, for instance, in Ben Jonson's plays (as Dr. Harriet C.B. Alexander has pointed out), regards the pregnant woman as not responsible for her longings, and Kiernan remarks ("Kleptomania and Collectivism," Alienist and Neurologist, November, 1902) that this is in "a most natural and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... who figures in the Robin Hood ballads and in Ivanhoe. Scarlet and Little John are mentioned in one of Master Silence's snatches of song in 2 Hen. IV. v. 3. 107: "And Robin, Scarlet, and John." Scathelocke is a brother of Scarlet in Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd, which is a "Tale of Robin Hood," and Mutch is a bailiff in ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... the 'Orlando Furioso,' and Marlowe devoted one of his most brilliant studies to the villanies of a Maltese Jew. Of Shakspere's plays five are incontestably Italian: several of the rest are furnished with Italian names to suit the popular taste. Ben Jonson laid the scene of his most subtle comedy of manners, 'Volpone,' in Venice, and sketched the first cast of 'Every Man in his Humour' for Italian characters. Tourneur, Ford, and Webster were so dazzled by the tragic lustre of the wickedness of Italy that their finest dramas, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... good fortune of all walkers, and feel like joining myself to every tramp that comes 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 a good draught of the rugged cup to have walked with Wilson the ornithologist, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... contemporaries thought of his 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 as the man who had "fulfilled all numbers," and "stood as the mark and [Greek: ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... during the reign of King Charles the First. The royal family, with the lords and ladies, often took part themselves in the performances, and the cost to prepare costumes and sceneries for one occasion often amounted to ten thousand dollars. During Charles's reign, and preceding his, Ben Jonson wrote the plays, or masques, for Christmas. The court doings were, of course, copied outside by the people, and up to the twelfth night after Christmas, sports and feastings ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... Gale Fairy Songs William Shakespeare Queen Mab Ben Jonson The Elf and the Dormouse Oliver Herford "Oh! Where Do Fairies Hide Their Heads?" Thomas Haynes Bayly Fairy Song Leigh Hunt Dream Song Richard Middleton Fairy Song John Keats Queen Mab Thomas Hood The Fairies ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... in this miscellany is by the author of that treatise which is, with the exceptions, perhaps, of George Puttenham's Art of English Poesie and Ben Jonson's Discoveries, the most precious contribution to criticism made in the Elizabethan age; but, indeed, the Defence of Poesie stands alone: alone in originality, alone in inspiring eloquence. The letter we print is taken from Arthur Collins's Sydney Papers, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judges are insensible. That the language was established is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words and low; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Dry to be grated! 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 New Inn. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... myself with 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
... in one of Ben Jonson's old plays: "When I once take the humor of a thing, I am like your tailor's needle—I ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... of Aristaenetus, in rendering his flowery prose into verse, might have found a precedent and model for their task in Ben Jonson, whose popular song, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," is, as Mr. Cumberland first remarked, but a piece of fanciful mosaic, collected out of the love-letters of the sophist Philostratus. But many of the narrations in Aristaenetus are incapable ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... famed Greek Mythus shaped far better! A great broad Brobdignag grin of true humour is in this Skrymir; mirth resting on earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right valiant heart is capable of that. It is the grim humour of our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for one catches tones of it, under a still other shape, out ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... probable that the scene "An Ale-house Room" in Goldsmith's comedy She Stoops to Conquer is the "Three Pigeons" at Brentford, as this remarkable hostel dates its origin from the days of Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. It is frequently mentioned by the early dramatists, and appears at one time to have been in some repute, having had for its landlord the celebrated tragedian, John Lowin, cotemporary of Shakspeare, and one of the original ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... the poets' nine 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 ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... 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 enough to give me the right to lead her. She fancied that her sympathy and taste had ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Maker of all laws, Who hath commanded us we should 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
... mention of English authors in poetry and prose who were touched and kindled by the Horatian flame would amount to a review of the whole course of English literature. It would begin principally with Spenser and Ben Jonson, who in some measure represented in their land what the Pleiad meant in France, and Opitz and his following in Germany. "Steep yourselves in the classics," was Jonson's counsel, and his countrymen did thus steep themselves to such a degree that it is possible for the student to ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... later, thro' the thick brown fog, A link-boy, dropping flakes of crimson fire, Flared to the door and, through its glowing frame, Ben Jonson and Kit Marlowe, arm in arm, Swaggered into the Mermaid Inn and called For red-deer pies. There, as they supped, I caught Scraps of ambrosial talk concerning Will, His Venus and Adonis. "Gabriel thought 'Twas wrong to change the old writers and create A cold Adonis." —"Laws were ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... marks the dramatic career of M. Eugene Labiche, for instance. 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... scruples about teaching the Latin grammar, because the names of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo occurred in it. The fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn peal of the organ was superstitious. The light music of Ben Jonson's masques was dissolute. Half the fine paintings in England were idolatrous, and the other half indecent. The extreme Puritan was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the upturned white of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... supposed that twire meant twinkle) and in Ben Jonson, Sad Shepherd, II. 1, 'Which maids will twire at, 'tween their fingers'. The verb is still in dialectal use: E.D.D. explains it 'to ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... the general entrance, Poet's Corner. I hardly stopped to look at the elaborate exterior of Henry VIIth's Chapel, but passed on to the door. On entering, the first thing that met my eyes were the words, "OH RARE BEN JONSON," under his bust. Near by stood the monuments of Spenser and Gay, and a few paces further looked down the sublime countenance of Milton. Never was a spot so full of intense interest. The light was just dim enough to give it a solemn, religious appearance, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... 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
... together without regard to any system of classification. He had a habit of mixing his books around with fishing-tackle, and his charming biographer tells us it was no uncommon thing to find the "Wealth of Nations," "Boxiana," the "Faerie Queen," Jeremy Taylor, and Ben Jonson occupying close quarters with fishing-rods, boxing-gloves, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... dramatists, which is like drinking usquebaugh and then proving a fountain. Yet after all, I suppose that you do not mean that spirits is a nobler element than a clear spring bubbling in the sun? and this I take to be the difference between the Greeks and those turbid mountebanks—always excepting Ben Jonson, who was a scholar and a classic. Or, take up a translation of Alfieri, and try the interest, &c. of these my new attempts in the old line, by him in English; and then tell me fairly your opinion. But don't measure me by YOUR OWN old or new tailors' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... 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 vindicated ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... as a character may be ineffective through being merely typical, so also a character may be unsignificant through being merely individual. The minor figures in Ben Jonson's Comedies of Humours are mere personifications of exaggerated individual traits. They are caricatures rather than characters. Dickens frequently commits the error of exhibiting figures devoid of representative ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... intent of the Hawaiian, even when pointed out, will, no doubt, seem an inconsequential thing and the demonstration of it an impertinence, if not a fiction to the imagination. Its euphemisms in reality have no baser intent than the euphuisms of Lyly, Ben Jonson, or Shakespeare. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... ——'s saying that Shakespeare, if he had lived now, would have been thought nothing of, and this rather as a compliment to the age than not! But, if you remember, he printed amended words to the air of "Drink to me only." Ah, dear me, I suspect that both William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson will survive him; don't you? Nevertheless he is better than might be ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else is Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair? What else is Schiller's Wallensteins Lager? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's Die Weber and Gorky's Nachtasyl are perhaps the best examples of the type. The drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... characters, rejects with some indignation 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 share" as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... of York and Duke of Gloucester.]—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, Mr. Hollis, and Mr. Annesly,& late President of the Council of State, are made Privy Councillors to the King. At night very busy sending Mr. Donne away to London, and wrote to my father for a coat to be made ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... intimately acquainted with Cambridge life and thought; and this was another bond between us. His Radicalism was not very formidable; it amounted to little more, indeed, than a turn for humorous paradox. Our discussion reminded me of Fuller's description of the wit-combats between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare at the "Mermaid." I was the Spanish galleon, my Fascinating Friend was the English man-of-war, ready "to take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." An hour sped away delightfully, the only thing I did not ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... heard in "the halls of 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 ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... man's poem. It was in the English of the hearty times of Ben Jonson and of Kit Marlowe—and every swinging line ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Ben Jonson's Alchemist having taken gold from Abel Drugger, the Tobacco Man, for the device of a sign—'a good lucky one, a thriving sign'—will give him nothing so commonplace as a sign copied from the constellation he was born ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Corner are literally covered with memorials of men of letters. Many of these are but names to us at the present day, but some are familiar; others, such as "Rare Ben Jonson," Butler, the author of "Hudibras," Thomas Gray, Spenser, and Goldsmith, are household words throughout the Empire. Beneath our feet lie Sheridan and ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Fletcher more compassion: for the first had a more masculine, a bolder, and more fiery genius; the second, a more soft and womanish. In the mechanic beauties of the plot, which are the observation of the three unities, time, place, and action, they are both deficient; but Shakespeare most. Ben Jonson reformed those errors in his comedies, yet one of Shakespeare's was regular before him; which is, "The Merry Wives of Windsor." For what remains concerning the design, you are to be referred to our English critic. That method which he has prescribed to raise it, from mistake, or ignorance ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Newton, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, and many others, including Kings and Queens of England for centuries. In the Poets' Corner are monuments to Coleridge, Southey, Shakespeare, Burns, Tennyson, Milton, Gray, Spencer, and others, and one bearing the inscription "O Rare Ben Jonson." There is also a bust of Longfellow, the only foreigner accorded a memorial in the Abbey. The grave of David Livingstone, the African explorer and missionary, is covered with a black stone of some kind, which forms a part of the floor or pavement, and contains an inscription in brass letters, ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... if a man may trust The liberal voice of Fame, in her report. Myself was once a student, and indeed Fed with the self-same humour he is now." —Ben Jonson.—Every Man in ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... completion; but we have only to turn over the pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... denunciations of the man which have made him odious to all after-ages, so that modern poets have made him a stock character, and have dramatized him as a fiend. Voltaire has described him as calling upon his fellow-conspirators to murder Cicero and Cato, and to burn the city. Ben Jonson makes Catiline kill a slave and mix his blood, to be drained by his friends. "There cannot be a fitter drink to make this sanction in." The friends of Catiline will say that this shows no evidence against the man. None, certainly; but it is a continued expression of the feeling that has prevailed ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... larger the better; but second-handed, for he does not choose to give above ten shillings for the book. I want likewise for myself, as you can pick them up, second-handed or cheap, copies of Otway's Dramatic Works, Ben Jonson's, Dryden's, Congreve's, Wycherley's, Vanbrugh's, Cibber's, or any dramatic works of the more modern, Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... described as classical. Nor is the work of their English disciples, Spenser and Sidney; while the entire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an occasional exception, like Ben Jonson) is romantic. Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and Fletcher are romantic. If we agree to regard medieval literature, then, as comprising all the early literature of Europe which drew its inspiration from other than Greek-Latin sources, we shall do no great violence ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Cressage, Eyton-upon-Severn is seen on the right, and on an eminence close by is the "Old Hall," built by Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley. It was the birthplace of Lord Herbert of Chirbury, of whom Ben Jonson wrote:— ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... taking office. 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 ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... flourishing) of St. John's. Towards the end of the sixteenth and through the first quarter of the seventeenth century, this Priory had been in the occupation of Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary, the friend of Ben Jonson, of Coke, of Selden, etc., and advantageously known as one of those who applied his legal and historical knowledge to the bending back into constitutional moulds of those despotic twists which new interests and false counsels had developed in the Tudor and Stuart dynasties. It was ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... book-lovers. 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 ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... "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 ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... looking at. Prince Henry of Wales, tall, comely, open-faced, and well-built, a noble lad of eighteen who called to men's minds, so "rare Ben Jonson" says, the memory of the hero of Agincourt, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... 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
... either servile or sycophantic. If it were only for his dedication to the Queen and Prince-Consort, he would have repaid a thousand times over the value of all the bottles of sherry and the annual stipends the poet-laureates have received since the days of Ben Jonson.' ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... 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 the fact that the form ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... booby boasting of the numerous acres he enjoyed, Ben Jonson peevishly told him, "For every acre you have of land, I have an acre of wit." The other, filling his glass, said, "My service to ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... copy; and secondly, because Caldecott's colleague in his frustrate enterprise was Crowe, Rogers's Miltonic friend, hereafter mentioned. Rogers's own feeling for Shakespeare was cold and hypercritical; and he was in the habit of endorsing with emphasis Ben Jonson's aspiration that the master had blotted a good many of his too-facile lines. Nevertheless, it is possible to pick out a few exceptional volumes from Mr. Christie's record. Among the earliest comes a copy of Garth's Dispensary, 1703, which certainly boasts an illustrious pedigree. Pope, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... Elwes, Esquire, 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 Lord Mayor; and on his ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... courtiers; or whether it is of later growth, and derived from professional dances upon the stage. The former is the general opinion, but the court entertainments of Italy and France were masques or masks which included declamation and song, like those of Ben Jonson with Inigo Jones for the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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
... whom Davenant succeeded was Rare 'Ben Jonson,' who I believe was the first regular Laureat with the appointment of L100 a year and a Butt of Sack or Canary—so add that to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... presented to the imagination in connection with what is attractive will itself become attractive. There is undoubtedly a great deal of indelicate writing in Fletcher and Massinger, and more than might be wished even in Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, who are comparatively pure. But it is impossible to trace in their plays any systematic attempt to associate vice with those things which men value most and desire most, and virtue with everything ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... poverty of imagination compared with the accumulated horrors with which the Jesuit, fresh, it may be, from Bodin and Delrio, made his "fire burn and cauldron bubble." With respect to this old story of the magical use made of the corpses of infants, Ben Jonson, in ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... water, scattered bricks, torn roadways, and walls blackened and scarred by bomb and shell, completed a scene of mournfulness and desolation. We passed one corner house on the shutters of which some "infanteers" had chalked the inviting saucy sign, "Ben Jonson's Cafe." Then we struck across a fast-ripening wheat-field and put up a mother partridge who was agonised with fear lest we should discover her young ones. "It will be a pity if these crops can't be gathered ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... of the kind: his difficulty in Pickwick, as he once told me, having always been, not the running short, but the running over: not the whip, but the drag, that was wanted. Sufflaminandus erat, as Ben Jonson said of Shakspeare. And in future works, with such marvelous nicety could he do always what he had planned, strictly within the space available, that only another similar instance is remembered by me. The third number introduced the school; and "I remain dissatisfied until you ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Tate, Cibber, and Thompson under his name), not one in fifty plays of our dramatists is ever acted, however much they may be read. Only one of Massinger—none of Ford—none of Marlowe, one of Ben Jonson—none of Webster, none of Heywood: and, even in Comedy, Congreve is rarely acted, and that in only one of his plays. Neither is Joanna Baillie. I am far from attempting to raise myself to a level ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman—not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so—and the pursuit is much the same in one case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet— ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Elizabeth to the throne of England. The lordly banqueting-hall, in which the politics of three centuries ago were discussed at Penshurst, is still standing. You may still sit upon the wooden benches where Burleigh, Spenser, Ben Jonson, James I., and his son Prince Charles have sat, and where, a little later, the victim of Prince Charles's cruel son, Algernon Sidney, dreamed of noble manhood and went forth a noble man; while in those shady avenues of beech ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... few novelists who observe plot less than Peacock, there are few also who are more regular in the particular fashion in which they disdain plot. Peacock is in fiction what the dramatists of the school of Ben Jonson down to Shadwell are in comedy—he works in "humours." It ought not to be, but perhaps is, necessary to remind the reader that this is by no means the same thing in essence, though accidentally it very often is the same, as being a ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... 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; or the two men, players ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of history, and make so many things possible,—among the rest our English language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a colonel; and from AEschylus, who fought at Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A man's education seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a less aesthetic distance than Goethe. It raises our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... speak an outlandish jargon, more like Welsh than Irish, supposed to be the Ulster dialect: anything more unlike it would be difficult to conceive. The early conventional stage Irishman, tracing him from Captain. Macmorris in Henry V.,through Ben Jonson's Irish Masque and New Inn, Dekker's Bryan, Ford's Mayor of Cork, Shadwell's O'Divelly (probably Farquhar's model for Foigard), is truly a wondrous savage, chiefly distinguished by his use of the expletives 'Dear Joy!' and 'By Creesh!' This character naturally ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... School of Shakespeare in the reign of James the First. They all tried to shape themselves in the same mould; they served apprentices to one another in constructing and composing the drama; Cartwright strove to write like his instructor, Ben Jonson; Massinger like his master, Shakespeare; Shakespeare, too, like Marston and Robert Green (for Marston taught him how to write tragedy, and Green taught him how to write comedy): they believed that they eminently succeeded in catching each other's manner, and to such a nicety, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... subjects: the conditions under which 'Love's Labour's Lost' and the 'Merchant of Venice' were written; the references in Shakespeare's plays to his native town and county; his father's applications to the Heralds' College for coat-armour; his relations with Ben Jonson and the boy actors in 1601; the favour extended to his work by James I and his Court; the circumstances which led to the publication of the First Folio, and the history of the dramatist's portraits. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... however, the Bibliotaph coveted the 'hand of write' of the man who was now more or less conspicuously in the public eye. This autograph must be written in a representative work of the author in question. The Bibliotaph would not have crossed the street to secure a line from Ben Jonson's pen, but he mourned because the autograph of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson was not forthcoming, nor likely to be. His conception of happiness was this: to own a copy of the first edition of Alice in Wonderland, ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... prizes Godwin had carried off, he remarked fervently, in each instance, 'I can see how very interesting that is! So thorough, so thorough!' Even Charlotte was at length annoyed, when Mr. Cusse had exclaimed upon the 'thoroughness' of Ben Jonson's works; she asked an abrupt question about some town affair, and so gave her brother an opportunity of taking the books away. There was no flagrant offence in the man. He spoke with passable accent, and manifested a high ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... but to have taken his full share in the rough-and-tumble sports of his comrades in a school which has given many distinguished men to the literature and public life of England: as, for instance, the younger Vane—whom Milton extolled—Ben Jonson and Dryden, Prior and Locke, Cowper and Southey, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... (G.) Mr. Warton might have found a happier illustration of his argument in Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... author was unknown, Yet what he wrote was all his own; He melted not the ancient gold, Nor with Ben Jonson did make bold To plunder all the Roman stores Of poets and of orators; Horace's wit and Virgil's state He did not steal, but emulate! And when he would like them appear, Their garb, but not their ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... the injury of our sturdy old English legislation. To be killed by a poet is now an unusual fate, but the St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, register (1598) mentions how "Gabriel Spencer, being slayne, was buried." Gabriel was "slayne" by Rare Ben Jonson, in Hoxton Fields. ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... Collection; two Mary Queen of Scots, by Messrs. Warren and Cooper.——From pictures of the old and modern Masters, are capital Portraits of celebrated characters of former and present times; of Mrs. Siddons, of Cicero, M. Angelo, Parmigiano, Fenelon, Raleigh, A. Durer, Erasmus, Cromwell, Ben Jonson, Selden, Swift, Gay, Sterne, Garrick, &c. of Byron, Bonaparte, West, Kenible, young Napoleon, of nearly all the English Royal Family, and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various |
