"Jonson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the display of such qualities is the romantic drama, which Massinger took from the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher, and endowed with greater dignity and less poetic fervour. For the vigorous comedy of real life, as Jonson understood it, he has simply no capacity; and in his rare attempts at humour, succeeds only in being at once dull and dirty. His stage is generally occupied with dignified lords and ladies, professing the most chivalrous sentiments, which are occasionally too high-flown and overstrained ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Shakspere is that he has given us his masterpieces. Perhaps it is just as well that we know so little about the facts in his life. We have all the more time to study his works. About their quality there is little of disagreement. Three hundred years ago Ben Jonson wrote ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... number was neither more nor less than 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 ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... against criticism and opposition. He was no mere journeyman dauber. From the first he had taken distinct rank as an artist. Lustrous names adorn the muster-roll of scene-painters. Inigo Jones planned machinery and painted scenes for the masques, written by Ben Jonson, for performance before Anne of Denmark and the Court of James the First. Evelyn lauds the 'very glorious scenes and perspectives, the work of Mr. Streeter,' serjeant-painter to King Charles the Second. In February 1664, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... impregnated with the spirit of restful antiquity.' (Extract from one of Aunt Celia's letters.) Among the great men who have studied here are the Prince of Wales, Duke of Wellington, Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Philip Sidney, William Penn, John Locke, the two Wesleys, Ruskin, Ben Jonson, and ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Johnson was changed to Jonson in the passage: "Beaumont fondly lets his thoughts wander in ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... English poetry, that description, as Boileau conceived it, was cultivated as a distinct art. The Cooper's Hill (1642) of Sir John Denham may be contrasted with the less ambitious Penshurst of Ben Jonson, and the one represents the new no less completely than the other does the old generation. If, however, we examine Cooper's Hill carefully, we perceive that its aim is after all rather philosophical than topographical. The Thames is described indeed, but not very minutely, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... New York, Boston, Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto. In Winnipeg I found a friend, who was tired of cities. So was I. In Canada the remedy lies close at hand. We took ancient clothes—and I, Ben Jonson and Jane Austen to keep me English—and departed northward for a lodge, reported to exist in a region of lakes and hills and forests and caribou and Indians and a few people. At first the train sauntered through ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the testimony of Ben Jonson and others, Alleyn was the first actor of his time, and of course played leading characters in the plays of Shakspeare and Jonson. He was probably the Kemble of his day, for his biographers tell us ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... greatness as a miracle. But if one seeks him in his home, transplants oneself to the soil of his country, and to the atmosphere of the century in which he lived; further, if one studies his contemporaries, and his immediate successors, and inhales the force wafted to us from Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare still, indeed, appears a being of the most exalted magnitude; but still, one arrives at the conviction that many of the wonders of his genius are, in some measure, accessible, and that much is due ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... fainter, till at last it becomes 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 ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... the 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 ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... period Sir Thomas Pope Blount's remarkable Censura Celebrium Authorum (1690). That popular bibliographical dictionary of criticism (reprinted 1694, 1710 and 1718) is only remembered now for its omission of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton from its list of "celebrated authors." Neither that volume nor the same author's De Re Poetica (1694) finds a proper place in a list of periodicals. They should be grouped with such works as Phillips' Theatrum Poetarum (1675) and Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatic ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... called the "universal solvent" which would turn every substance into gold. These men were sometimes legitimate investigators, but often cheats who made money out of foolish people. At one time they became so numerous in London that laws were passed against them, but it took Jonson's play "The Alchemist" ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... drawing out a private key, unlocked 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 ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 by one student ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... 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, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... the old walls and transforming a house of 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 ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... have been the custom formerly, in England, to make new year's presents with oranges stuck full with cloves. We read in one of Ben Jonson's pieces,—the "Christmas Masque,"—"He has an orange and rosemary, but not a clove ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... hypocrisy, than when from vanity; for to discover any one to be the exact reverse of what he affects, is more surprizing, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he desires the reputation of. I might observe that our Ben Jonson, who of all men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used the ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... any 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 ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... the garden rosemary was called Rosmarinus coronarium, because the women made crowns and garlands of it. Ben Jonson says that it was customary for the bridesmaids to present the bridegroom next morning with a bunch of rosemary. And Brand says that as late as 1698 the custom still prevailed in England of decking the bridal bed with ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... ventured even to suspect that the crowning glory of Elizabeth's reign was to be the work of playwrights; yet before she died the genius of Marlowe had blazed and been quenched, Hamlet had appeared on the boards, Jonson's "learned sock" had achieved fame; the men whose names we are wont to associate with the "Mermaid" had most of them already begun their career, even if they had not yet passed the stage of merely adapting, doctoring, and "writing ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... knew Ben Jonson: But my Lord of Winton knew him very well; and says, he was in the 6th, that is, the uppermost fforme in Westminster scole, at which time his father dyed, and his mother married a brickelayer, who made him (much against his will) help him in his trade; ...
— Waltoniana - Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton • Isaak Walton
... (14) Do you like Jonson's 'loathed stage'? Verses 2, 3, and 4 are so bad, also the last line. But there is a fine movement and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Yet the chastening power of classical models may be easily overrated. And we cannot but notice that it was precisely where the classical influence was strongest that the force of imagination was the least under control. Jonson apart, there were no more ardent disciples of the ancients than Marlowe and Chapman. And no poets of that age are so open to the charge of extravagance as they. It is with Milton that the chastening influence of the ancients first makes itself definitely felt. But Milton was no less alive to the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... hand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tombmaker and the passing-bell in Webster's sombre tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror. As a foil to his Masque of Queens (1609) Ben Jonson introduced twelve loathly witches with Ate as their leader, and embellished his description of their profane rites, with details culled from James I.'s treatise on Demonology ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... 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 ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... propose to consider six dramatists who were more immediately the contemporaries of Shakespeare and Jonson, and who have the precedence in time, and three of them, if we may believe some critics, not altogether without claim to the precedence in merit, of Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. These are Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Webster, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... danger-loving blood of the Elizabethan 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 ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... 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 ridiculous and degrading. And such a systematic ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... think for all time. Here is the chair in which he sat while presiding at the club, forming habits of drink which killed him at the last, his own life ending in a tragedy as terrible as any he ever wrote. Exeunt wine-bibbers, topers, grogshop keepers, Drayton, Ben Jonson and William Shakspeare. Here also is the letter which Richard Quyney sent to Shakspeare, asking to borrow thirty pounds. I hope he did not loan it; for if he did, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... in dire distress and prostrated by the hardships which he had suffered. There on January 16, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster, the great poet died broken-hearted and in poverty. Drummond of Hawthornden states that Ben Jonson told him that Spenser "died for lack of bread in King Street, and refused 20 pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, and said He was sorrie he had no time to spend them." The story is probably a bit of exaggerated gossip. He was buried close to the tomb of Chaucer ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... musical comedy. The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything. Analysts with their problems, and teachers with their systems, are soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopœia of Galen, — look at Ibsen and the Germans — but the best plays of Ben Jonson and Molière can no more go out of fashion than the black- berries on the hedges. Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... 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
... employment at the theatre. Unsupported anecdotes represent him as holding horses at the 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, and ingratitude. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... general a popularity. Its learning and gravity made it better suited to be the 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... tragic composition Greene versified a portion of 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... 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." ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... "rare," as given to Ben Jonson, might with equal propriety be applied to Senator Vance. Deeply read in classic lore, a profound lawyer, and an indefatigable student from the beginning in all that pertained to human government, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... 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
... 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
... private war died down, so the 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 that ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... and in all 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 drug clerk. Demosthenes was the son of a cutler, Verdi the son of a baker, Blackstone ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ("Description of the restless state of a 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... 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
... their Tutors. Zenobia and Longinus. Countess of Pembroke and Daniel. Princess Elizabeth and Descartes. Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz. Lady Jane Grey and Elmer. Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton. Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier. Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer. Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson. Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson. Countess Ranelagh and Milton. Duchess of Queensbury and Gay. Relations with Women, of Sophocles, Virgil, Frauenlob, Bernadin St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Jean Paul Richter. Rahel Levin and her Friendships ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... interpreter of a life that never changes, far more vital and true. Here 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 fresh field ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... above. The best translation in English of the Essais 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
... with the usual English manner may be illustrated by quoting a famous epigram—Ben Jonson's ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... self-conceit to be pierced by the puncture of no man's pen. It was bad enough while theorists of this breed confined themselves to the suggestion of a possible partnership with Fletcher, a possible interpolation by Jonson; but in the descent from these to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton and Rowley we have surely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainable by the utmost alacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to the bastard brood of Scriblerus. ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... However by the time "Jonson's learned sock" was on, her mechanical repetition had become animated, and she had restored herself to equanimity. When the clock struck nine, her auditor added his thanks, "In case we should not meet again thus, let me beg of my kind visitor to wear this ring in memory ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... second; but Swinburne, with his usual discernment, observed that English taste in that eventuality would be in the same state as it was at the end of the seventeenth century, which firmly believed that Fletcher and Jonson were ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... plots are taken from the "Palace of Pleasure" or its followers. A striking instance is mentioned by Charles Lamb of the tyranny of this convention. In the first draught of his Every Man in his Humour Ben Jonson gave Italian names to all his dramatis personae. Mistress Kitely appeared as Biancha, Master Stephen as Stephano, and even the immortal Captain Bobabil as Bobadilla. Imagine Dame Quickly as Putana, and Sir John as Corporoso, and we can see what a profound ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... and a great variety of banners. Among the most noticeable, wuz a company uv solgers uv the late war, each with a leg off, dressed in the gray uniforms into wich they hed been mustered out, with this motto: "We are willin to go the other leg for A. Jonson." Another company uv solgers, who hed each lost an arm, carried this inscription: "What we didn't get by bullets, we ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... the world. If only we had space here to assign to the Erasmus of the Colloquies his just and lofty place in that brilliant constellation of sixteenth-century followers of Democritus: Rabelais, Ariosto, Montaigne, Cervantes, and Ben Jonson! ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... deadly herbs, such as that of the nightshade or monkshood; and to add to the potency of these baleful draughts they considered it necessary to add as many as seven or nine of the most poisonous plants they could obtain, such, for instance, as those enumerated by one of the witches in Ben Jonson's "Masque of Queens," ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... 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 ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... down since that famous house-warming, when the colours were fresh from the painter's brush, and when the third Lord Fareham's friend and gossip, King James, deigned to witness the representation of Jonson's "Time Vindicated," enacted by ladies and gentlemen of quality, in the great saloon, a performance which—with the banquet and confectionery brought from Paris, and "the sweet waters which came down the room like a shower from heaven," as one wrote who was present at that splendid entertainment, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... 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" ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... standing long, an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear. A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night— It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be. —BEN JONSON ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... 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 ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... home; that, like the widow's cruse, is divinely replenished from within, and affords us a miraculous delight. He asks why it should seem altogether impossible that Heaven's latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct and fair? And Jonson, he tells us, was very learned, as Samson was very strong, to his own hurt. Blind to the nature of tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it. Is this "care's incumbent cloud," or "the frozen obstructions of age?" In this letter Pope ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... tolerable here as it would probably be anywhere; but it passes rather heavily with the children,—and for myself, I should prefer sunshine. Though Mr. White's books afford me some entertainment, especially an odd volume of Ben Jonson's plays, containing "Volpone," "The Alchemist," "Bartholomew Fair," and others. "The Alchemist" is certainly a great play. We watch all arrivals and other events from our parlor window,—a stage-coach driving ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "Iscariot" be good rhymes, but must say, as Ben Jonson did to Sylvester, who challenged ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... our way towards Oxford. This industry in Banbury is a very old one, for the cakes are known to have been made there as far back as 1602, when the old Cross was pulled down, and are mentioned by Ben Jonson, a great dramatist, and the friend of Shakespeare. He was Poet Laureate from 1619, and had the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey. In his comedy Bartholomew Fair, published in 1614, he mentions ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... potent. Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his Faery Queene, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's school—such as Hawes's Passetyme of Pleasure—was the Induction contributed by Thomas Sackville, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... had sufficient provocation to rail at the public, as Ben Jonson did at the audience in the Prologues to his plays, I think I should do it in good set terms, nearly as follows:—There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. From ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... —Sagen Sie ja nicht, dass er auch dieses zu nutzen gesucht, wie sein 'Cato' es beweise. Denn eben dieses, dass er den Addisonschen 'Cato' fr das beste englische Trauerspiel hlt,[5] zeiget deutlich, dass er hier nur mit den Augen der Franzosen gesehen und damals keinen Shakespeare, keinen Jonson, keinen Beaumont und Fletcher u.s.w. gekannt hat, die er hernach aus Stolz auch nicht hat wollen ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... reach of Greece; with native fires Mounting aloft, he wings his daring flight, Whilst Sophocles below stands trembling at his height. 220 Why should we then abroad for judges roam, When abler judges we may find at home? Happy in tragic and in comic powers, Have we not Shakspeare?—Is not Jonson ours? For them, your natural judges, Britons, vote; They'll judge like Britons, who like Britons wrote. He said, and conquer'd—Sense resumed her sway, And disappointed pedants stalk'd away. Shakspeare and Jonson, with deserved applause, Joint-judges were ordain'd to try the ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... end of the eighteenth century Shakespeare not only failed to gain any special fame in England, but was valued less than his contemporary dramatists: Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and others. His fame originated in Germany, and thence was transferred to England. This happened for the ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... faculties, in their whole range, both intellectual and spiritual, reached such a degree of expansion as they had never before reached in the history of the world,— that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list of great names might be continued),—that great age, I say, was regarded by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous in comparison with their own. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... child was named. On Lord Mayor's Day in London, which came in November and is still celebrated, though shorn of much of its ancient splendour, the Lord Mayor's fool, as part of the festivities, jumped into a great bowl of custard, and this is what Ben Jonson had in mind when ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... alluding to a forgotten custom is very obscure: the putter out must be a traveller, else how could he give this account? the five for one is money to be received by him at his return, Mr. Theobald has well illustrated this passage by a quotation from Jonson. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan Literature; and almost all the faults to be found in it are due merely to occasional deficiency of information, not to error of judgment. He is a little paradoxical on Jonson; but not many critics could furnish a happier contrast than his enthusiastic praise of certain passages of Beaumont and Fletcher, and his cool toning down of Lamb's extravagant eulogy on Ford. He is a little unfair to the Caroline poets; but here the great disturbing influence comes in. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Tragedie of Marian, the Faire Queene of 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., ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... borrowing from The Misanthrope and The Forced Marriage. The preface was, besides political difference, the chief cause of the quarrel between Shadwell and Dryden; for in it the former defends Ben Jonson against the latter, and mentions that—"I have known some of late so insolent to say that Ben Jonson wrote his best playes without wit, imagining that all the wit playes consisted in bringing two persons upon the stage to break jest, and to bob one another, which they call ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... reading? Not to this day, in 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
... seems to have made no complaint, 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, Gibbon and ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... BEN JONSON.—Ben Jonson, classical, exact, pretty faithful imitator of the writers of antiquity, interested in unusual characters and customs, gifted with a ready and lively imagination in both comedy and tragedy like Shakespeare, succeeded ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... that he had ever heard or read or written seemed to pass before his mind as oratorical weapons, and standing there he had but to reach forth his hand and "seize the weapons as they went smoking by." Ben Jonson could repeat all he had written. Scaliger memorized the Iliad in three weeks. Locke says: "Without memory, man is a perpetual infant." Quintilian and Aristotle regarded it as a ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the event. Nothing less can possibly console or satisfy us for such a most unaccountable, not to say unnatural and unwarrantable, a dispensation. The poets have ministered largely to this vanity on the part of mankind. Shakspere is constantly at it, and Ben Jonson, and all the dramatists. Not a butcher, in the whole long line of the butchering Caesars, from Augustus down, but, according to them, died in a sort of gloom glory, resulting from the explosion of innumerable ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... low streets of all our sea-port towns; and Bristol, as one of the great starting-points of West Indian adventure, was probably, during the seventeenth century, as bad as any city in England. According to Ben Jonson, and the playwriters of his time, the beggars become a regular fourth- estate, with their own laws, and even their own language—of which we may remark, that the thieves' Latin of those days is full of German words, indicating that its inventors had been employed in the Continental ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... takes occasion in this place to commend the great care of our author to preserve the metre of blank verse, in which Shakspeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, were so notoriously negligent; and the moderns, in imitation of ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... robber who was a poet,—Delany, and he was an Irishman. This 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 ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of his celebrated countrymen; inquisitive in a morbid degree about their pecuniary affairs: 'What have you got in that pocket which bulges out so prominently?' 'What did your father do with that hundred guineas which he received on Monday from Jacob Jonson?' And, as his 'swallow' was enormous—as the Doctor would believe more fables in an hour than an able-bodied liar would invent in a week—naturally there was no limit to the slanders with which his 'Lives ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Eliza's age, When rare Ben Jonson ruled the humorous stage, No play without its Prologue might appear To earn applause or ward the critic's sneer; And surely now old customs should not sleep When merry Christmas revelries we keep. He loves old ways, old faces, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... 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
... that we should have ever forgotten it. And this that we most essentially are rational beings, lovers of goodness, children of hope,—how directly Duerer appeals to it: "Nature has implanted in us the desire of knowing all things." It reminds one of Ben Jonson's:— ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... "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 comes the ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... been tould that theare growethe in the land bothe tulipes and narsisus. By a Brabander I was tould it, thoug by his name I should rather think him a Holander. His name is Jonson, and hathe a house at Archangell. He may be eyther, for he [is] always ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... give the impression which the Paris of Henri Quatre made on an English traveller, a friend of Ben Jonson and author of Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' Travell. The first objects that met Coryat's eye are characteristic. As he travelled along the St. Denis road he passed "seven[130] faire pillars of freestone at equal distances, each with an image of St. Denis and his two ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... age, too, not only of brave deeds but of high thoughts. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson were making English literature the noblest of all literatures. Furthermore, Shakespeare had no equal as a teacher of English history. His historical plays appealed then, as they do now, to every heart. At his touch the dullest and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Clout, one of the 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... it is here used, is not to be met with in our common dictionaries: it signifies a soldier's loose outward coat, and is taken in that acceptation by the writers of Jonson's times. Thus Shakspeare, in All's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... characteristic note, in reference to this passage, appears, in Mr. Gifford's hand-writing, on the copy of the above letter:—"It is a pity that Lord B. was ignorant of Jonson. The old poet has a Satire on the Court Pucelle that would have supplied him with some pleasantry ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... finish by reciting to you the lines old Ben Jonson addressed to the pretty girls of his time, which form an appropriate ending to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... 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, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 to ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... begun yet," she said, as she got out and walked slowly across the pavement, warmly wrapped up in a marvellous black sable coat. "Have you got your card, Jonson?" ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... thus alluded to in the epilogue to Ben Jonson's Masque of the Metamorphosed Gipsies, when it was performed at Windsor ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... had foolishly 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 gaze ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... them—Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher: a few of their plays. But I can't stand most of the Elizabethans; I can't stand Ben Jonson at all." ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... not like to hear our past chief magistrates spoken of as Jack Adams or Jim Madison, and it would have been only as a political partisan that I should have reconciled myself to "Tom" Jefferson. So, in spite of "Ben" Jonson, "Tom" Moore, and "Jack" Sheppard, I prefer to speak of a fellow-citizen already venerable by his years, entitled to respect by useful services to his country, and recognized by many as the prophet of a new poetical dispensation, with the customary title ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... autograph. I have reason to think that he is right from discovering another MS. written in the same hand as the above, and containing two poems without date or signature, neither of which (I believe) are Ben Jonson's. I enclose the shorter of the two, and should feel obliged if any of your correspondents could tell me the author of it, as this would throw some light upon the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... were startled at eight o'clock or thereabouts by a knocking on the front door. Miss Quiney looked up from her tambour-work, with hand and needle suspended in mid-air, and gazed across at Ruth, who, seated at the harpsichord, had been singing softly—murmuring rather—the notes of Ben Jonson's ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... place, it is said that Ben Jonson once walked all the way from London to visit the poet in this retreat; and a tree is still shown on the grounds under which they are said to have met. It seems that Ben's habits were rather too noisy and convivial to meet altogether the taste of his fastidious and ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... unintelligible in discourse and uncomeatable in business. But he, having no understanding in his polite way, brought in upon us, to get in his money, ladder-dancers, rope-dancers, jugglers, and mountebanks, to strut in the place of Shakespeare's heroes and Jonson's humorists.] ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... "Fetch me Ben Jonson's scull, and fill't with sack, Rich as the same he drank, when the whole pack Of jolly sisters pledged, and did agree It was no sin to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 of ghitterns, from ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... 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, his own idea of masterly work on the one hand and ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... lessen Sat before Mrs. Palmer, the King's mistress, and filled my eyes So the children and I rose and dined by ourselves Sorry in some respect, glad in my expectations in another respect The Alchymist,—Comedy by Ben Jonson The Lords taxed themselves for the poor—an earl, 1s. This week made a vow to myself to drink no wine this week Those absent from prayers were to pay a forfeit To be so much in love of plays Woman with a rod in her hand ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger
... pointed out Ben Jonson's exquisite "Drink to me only with thine eyes" is a verse-paraphrase or ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... not sad stuff? only one must not say so"—I am strongly of opinion that 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. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... certainly know to have been in the poet's library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased with a view of protecting the Shakespeare autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... 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
... of Shakspeare's admirable 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 ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... 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 themselves by the plastic ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions. Unhappily the later poem differs from the earlier in being uglier in its theme and of inordinate length. Browning, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson when he wrote The Alchemist, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted the subject to the dregs. The writer's zeal from first to last knows no abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the dissecting-table, with its sick ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... 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 suggests ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... ornaments of the ancient House of Drummond was 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 letters cast their charms, except ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... note about town hath or had its club. The Mermaid Tavern is immortalized as the house resorted to by Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and Beaumont; the Devil—which, Pennant informs us, stood on the site of Child's-place, Temple Bar—was the scene of many a merry meeting of the choice spirits in old days; at Will's Coffee-house, in the Augustan age of English ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... take his place now that he is gone—not any 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 ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... title-page bears the portrait of the poet by Droeshout. The dedicatory epistle is in large italic type, and is followed by a second epistle, 'To the Readers,' in Roman. The verses in praise of the author, by Ben Jonson and others, are printed in a second fount of italic, and the Contents in a still smaller fount of the same letter. The text, printed in double columns, is in Roman and Italic, each page being enclosed within printer's rules. Of these various types, the best is ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... 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 ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... This solemnity of 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 ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... register of the reverend Charles Burney; take up the voluminous Some account of the reverend John Genest; examine the mass of commendatory verses in the twenty-one-volume editions of Shakspere; examine also the commendatory verses in the nine-volume edition of Ben. Jonson. Here is the result: Langbaine calls attention to the prologue in question as an excellent prologue, and Genest repeats what had been said one hundred and forty years before by Langbaine. There is not the slightest hint on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... 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, and theatre management, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield |
