"Ben Jonson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... greatest developments; the fundamental idea was then generally overlaid with splendid trappings, the dresses and the arrangements were often extremely elaborate, and the introduction of dialogued speech made these "disguises" regular dramatic performances. A notable example is Ben Jonson's "Masque of Christmas."{2} Shakespeare, however, gives us in "Henry VIII."{3} an example of a simpler impromptu form: the king and a party dressed up as shepherds break in upon a ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... 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
... the same safety, steal anything else." Shadwell mentions, however, nothing of 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 ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... have ranked little if at all higher than "Astrophel." Further: save for Sidney and Marlowe, who were both cut off prematurely, and Spenser himself who died at forty-six, the work of all the greater Elizabethan writers—Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, Bacon, Hooker, Raleigh, Middleton, Drayton—lies as much in the time of James as in that of Elizabeth; while a whole group of those to whom the same general title is applied—Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford, Massinger—belong in effect wholly ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... knight took them to the play on the other side of the river, where they saw a comedy of Ben Jonson's. After the play the captain went to see the bear-baiting in the bear-pit hard by, but the two young people preferred a trip on the river as far as Chelsea. This was a very busy and momentous day, for in the evening Master Jeffreys took Morgan down to the "Mermaid Tavern" between ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... it was Elizabethan poetry that Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,' said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet, if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant them to be ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... absinthe or ver- mouth of the last 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. Baudelaire calls laughter the ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... 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
... immense fertility and originality. The poets and prose writers of the time united the freshness of youth with the vigour of manhood. Among these were Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, the Fletchers, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. Among the statesmen of Elizabeth were Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, Howard, and Sir Nicholas Bacon. But perhaps greatest of all were the sailors, who, as Clarendon said, "were a nation by themselves;" and their leaders—Drake, Frobisher, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... "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, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... broadened into a long lake-like expanse spanned by a very beautiful Palladian bridge. This is the home of the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. Their ancestors were an ancient Welsh family and great friends of their compatriots, the Tudor sovereigns. Here, as constant and welcome guests, came Ben Jonson, Edmund Spencer and Philip Massinger, who was a son of one of the Earl's servants. Here As You Like It is said to have been played before James I, with Shakespeare himself as one of the company. Gloriana was a visitor ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... At Dryden's birth Ben Jonson was the only one of the great Elizabethan dramatists still living, and of the lesser stars in the same galaxy, Chapman, Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Heywood all died during his boyhood and youth, while Shirley, the last of his line, lingered till 1667. Of the older writers in prose, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... 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 Thomas ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doubt, that Shakespeare acquired the "small Latin and less Greek" which Ben Jonson accords to him. What was "small" learning in the eyes of such a scholar as Jonson, may yet have been something handsome in itself; and his remark may fairly imply that the Poet had at least the regular free-school ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and in Cromwell's time, with the accession of the Puritans to power, like a hundred other brilliant traits of the old English life from whose abuse had grown riot, it was purged away. Ben Jonson, in The Staple of Newes, puts into the mouth of a sour character a complaint which no doubt was becoming common in that day, and was probably ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Court de Bone Compagnie; by Sir Walter Raleigh's Friday Street, or Bread Street, club; the club at the Mermaid tavern in Bread Street, of which Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Raleigh, Selden, Donne, et al., were members; and "rare" Ben Jonson's Devil tavern club, between Middle Temple ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... if it were poison, with what fierce speed they wrote, how they shook the stage. Then we think of the "Mermaid" in session, with Shakspeare's bland, oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, and Ben Jonson's truculent visage, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together in their beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the drollery, the repartee, the sage sentences, the lightning gleams of wit, the ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... 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. Paul's and Merchant Taylor's schools ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... "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,' ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... from seeking materials in the Annals; but hardly the abominations of Nero or Tiberius could daunt such daring spirits as Webster or Ford. Rather we must impute their silence to the powerful mastery of Tacitus; it was awe that held them from treading in the historian's steps. Ben Jonson ventured on the enchanted ground; but not all the fine old poet's wealth of classical learning, not his observance of the dramatic proprieties nor his masculine intellect, could put life into the ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... if by sleep or fev'rous fit assail'd.] O Rome! thy head Is drown'd in sleep, and all thy body fev'ry. Ben Jonson's Catiline. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 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. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... O rare Ben Jonson, you should see The draught that I may sup: How sweet the drink, her kiss within. ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... 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
... traditions of the 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 ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... Ben Jonson and other playwrights were quick to seize the salient absurdities of such an advertisement. In The Staple of News Jonson proposed a News Trust to collect all the news of the world, corner it, classify it into ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... Ben Jonson's old plays: "When I once take the humor of a thing, I am like your tailor's ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible. See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age was rough and earnest. The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old weapons of the Gregorys and the Clements. But they are impotent as the darts ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... that he was introduced to the wits of the age by Dr. Morley; but the writer of his life relates that he was already among them, when, hearing a noise in the street, and inquiring the cause, they found a son of Ben Jonson under an arrest. This was Morley, whom Waller set free, at the expense of one hundred pounds, took him into the country as director of his studies, and then procured him admission into the company of the friends of literature. Of this fact Clarendon had a nearer knowledge than ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... 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
... popularity; held his ground 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. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... prescience of the early sunset. Then he will know better than I could otherwise tell him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up in the Poets' Corner and read the words, "Oh, rare Ben Jonson!" The good Ben was never so constantly rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well enough from having tried to read him in days when I was willing to try reading any one. But I was meaning then to be rare every moment myself, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... 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
... ancient races. A remnant of the former is found in Wales, while the survivors of the latter are the Irish and Scotch Highlanders. Northern France and Wales have strong Celtic contingents. Byron, "Rare" Ben Jonson, Christopher North, Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Lawrence Sterne and Louis Stevenson were Celts by blood. Scott, Burns, Carlyle and Macaulay were Scots of Celtic extraction. Tom Moore, Brinsley Sheridan and Edmund Burke were Irishmen, as are Balfe ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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
... was familiar with the Abbey, and well remember the 'pavement square of blew marble, 14 inches square, with O Rare Ben Jonson,' which marked the poet's grave. When Buckland was Dean, the spot had to be disturbed for the coffin of Sir Robert Wilson, and the Dean sent his son Frank, now so well known as an agreeable writer on Natural History, to see whether he could observe ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... companion volume, an attempted reconstruction of the literary phase of the same period, is less successful; but these Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (which introduce Shakespeare, Marlowe, Drayton, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and other immortals) are alive and colorful, if somewhat too insistently ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... Ben Jonson, master of dignified declamatory drama, was the greatest of the post-Shakespeare school. We may justly say post-Shakespeare, though Jonson was nearly contemporaneous with the Bard of Avon, because the influence of such a man clearly belongs to an age in which the freedom and romantic magnificence ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... share on either side, was the niece of Dudley and sister of sir Philip Sidney, one of the most accomplished women of her age, celebrated during her life by the wits and poets whom she patronized, and preserved in the memory of posterity by an epitaph from the pen of Ben Jonson which will not be forgotten whilst ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... 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 day of ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... 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, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... part of the Priory attached to the ancient church (still 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 ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Ben Jonson. Love's old songs shall never die, Yet the new shall suffer proof: Love's old drink of Yule brew I Wassail for new love's behoof. Drink the drink I brew, and sing Till the berried branches swing, Till our song make all the Mermaid ring— Yea, from ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... 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 also ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... "great at the midnight hour." The "wit-combats" at his Wednesday-evening parties were waged with scarcely inferior skill and ability to those fought at the old Mermaid tavern between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. Hazlitt, in his delightful essay intituled "Persons One would Wish to have Seen," gives a masterly report of the sayings and doings at one of these parties. It is to be regretted that he did not report the conversation at all of these weekly assemblages of wits, humorists, and good-fellows. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... knowledge as an evil to be lamented, at the same time that it was imputed to want of opportunity. If he was self-centred, it was in his strength, not in his weakness. His eulogists may show the greatness of their faith in him by doubting whether he could have assimilated the learning which obstructs Ben Jonson's Catiline and Sejanus; but we have no proofs that he thought so meanly of himself or of that which he happened not to possess. On the contrary, it may be argued, from the diligent use which he has made of such information as he had, that he would gladly have taken advantage ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... coarse?). Then I also read "Lear" and "Henry VIII," and being delightfully ignorant I had the great interest of reading the same period (Henry VIII) in Holinshed, and in finding Katharine's and Wolsey's speeches there! Then I have tried a little Ben Jonson and Lord Chesterfield's letters. What a worldling, and what a destroyer of a young mind that man was. Can you tell me how the son turned out? I cannot find any information about him. The language is delightful, and I wish I could remember any of his expressions.... Now give ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... outset, and it was nearly his last as well as first misadventure 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 ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... driven down With beer and butter-milk, mingled together. It is against my freehold, my inheritance. Wine is the word that glads the heart of man, And mine's the house of wine. Sack, says my bush, Be merry and drink Sherry, that's my posie. Ben Jonson's ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... passage, perhaps, meaning, knowledge, best expresses the sense. Ledden may have been one of the words which led Ben Jonson to charge Spenser with "affecting the ancients." However, I find it employed by one ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... in the narrative—let me say that my sister was an exemplary wife and, while fate spared her, a devoted mother. I knew my brother-in-law for a great man, incapable of a thought or action less than kingly, and I worshipped him (as Ben Jonson would say) "on this side idolatry"; but if the Constantines have a fault, it is that they demand too much of life, and exact it somewhat too much as a matter of course. I have heard this fault attributed ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... it is a remarkable thing if an author has his pocket picked, or narrowly escapes being in a ship that is wrecked, or takes poison when he is young, even the outline of Borrow's life is attractive. Like Byron, Ben Jonson, and Chaucer, he reminds us that an author is not bound to be a nun with a beard. He depicts himself continually, at all ages, and in all conditions of pathos or pride. Other human beings, with few exceptions, he depicts only in relation to himself. He never follows men and women here and there, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... [795] Ben Jonson wrote Leges Convivales that were 'engraven in marble over the chimney in the Apollo of the Old Devil Tavern, Temple Bar; that being his Club Room.' Jonson's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... old age doing battle against a Philistine reaction, or for Spenser overwhelmed with calamities at the end of a life full of bitter disappointment. But at least we may look upon it with the respectful pity which we entertain for Ben Jonson groaning in the midst of his literary honours under that dura rerum necessitas, which is rarely more a matter of indifference to poets than ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... 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, he was the fit associate ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... 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 of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... be seen half a dozen old monks, stripping a modern professor; on another, there was sad devastation carried into the ranks of modern dramatic writers. Beaumont and Fletcher, side by side, raged round the field like Castor and Pollux, and sturdy Ben Jonson enacted more wonders than when a volunteer with the army in Flanders. As to the dapper little compiler of farragos mentioned some time since, he had arrayed himself in as many patches and colors as harlequin, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... and any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and knew German books more cordially than any other person, she was little read in Shakspeare; and I believe I had the pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite enough to give me the right ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walking through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget the great poet Edmund Spenser, who, a victim to barbarity, died there, in destitution and grief. Ben Jonson's terse record of that calamity says: "The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... music to secure a place in Queen Elizabeth's household." His son Nicholas Lanier — "musician, painter, engraver" — was patronized successively by James I, Charles I, and Charles II, wrote music for the masks of Ben Jonson and Campion and for the lyrics of Herrick, and was the first marshal of a society of musicians organized by Charles I in 1626. He also wrote a cantata called "Hero and Leander". He was the friend of Van Dyck, who painted ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the King James Version of the Bible; Edmund Spenser's graceful Faerie Queene; [Footnote: For its scenery and mechanism, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto furnished the framework; and it similarly shows the influence of Tasso.] the supreme Shakespeare; Ben Jonson and Marlowe; Francis Bacon and Richard Hooker; Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Taylor; and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... "Ben Jonson, who was born 'in Hartshorne-lane, near Charing-cross,' was at one time 'master' of a theatre in Barbican. He appears also to have visited a tavern called the Sun and Moon, in Aldersgate-street; and is known to have frequented with Beaumont and others, the famous one called the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... over the floor, under our feet! Look, I'm standing on Dickens' grave this very minute! And there's 'Oh, Rare Ben Jonson,' right there on the wall; I've always heard of that. And here's Spenser, and Chaucer, and Browning, and Tennyson, very close together. Oh! It's dreadful! I don't want to step on them! Why, everybody who ever was anybody seems to be here!" gasped John, ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... Lamb, I ventured, one evening, to say something that I intended should pass for wit. "Ha! very well; very well, indeed!" said he. "Ben Jonson has said worse things" (I brightened up, but he went stammering on to the end of the sentence)—"and—and—and better!" A pinch of snuff concluded this compliment, which put a stop to my wit for the evening. I related the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... and travel in foreign cities. Vaughan, too, early found his way, in visits, to the metropolis, where he heard at the Globe Tavern the last echoes of that burst of wit and knowledge which had spoken from the tongue and kindled in the eye of Shakspeare, Spenser and Raleigh. Ben Jonson was still alive, and the young poets who flocked to him, as a later age worshipped Dryden, were all "sealed of the tribe of Ben." Randolph and Cartwright were ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... 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
... could become a stone of stumbling. But, when I was nearly sixteen, I made a purchase which brought me into sad trouble, and was the cause of a permanent wound to my self-respect. I had long coveted in the bookshop window a volume in which the poetical works of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were said to be combined. This I bought at length, and I carried it with me to devour as I trod the desolate road that brought me along the edge of the cliff on Saturday afternoons. Of Ben Jonson I could make nothing, but when I turned to 'Hero and Leander', ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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
... him no 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 only adversary whom Dryden had to encounter on this occasion. Thomas Shadwell, a man of some talents for comedy, and who professed to tread in the footsteps of Ben Jonson, had for some time been at variance with Dryden and Otway. He was probably the author of a poem, entitled, "A Lenten Prologue, refused by the Players;" which is marked by Mr Luttrel, 11th April, 1683, and contains the following direct attack on "The Duke ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... noises and my disgust, I did not care to talk, and presently told him as much very curtly. He persisted, how: ever, in pointing out the sights, the Fleet prison, and where the Ludgate stood six years gone; and the Devil's Tavern, of old Ben Jonson's time, and the Mitre and the Cheshire Cheese and the Cock, where Dr. Johnson might be found near the end of the week at his dinner. He showed me the King's Mews above Charing Cross, and the famous theatre in the Haymarket, and we had but ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 their sins. ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... blood is fet] To fet is an obsolete word meaning to fetch. That is, "whose blood is derived," &c. The word is used by Spencer and Ben Jonson.] ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... 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 big words and ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... one of a company of strolling players before he was twenty; he was twenty-two when he had somehow made himself a "gentleman," to be so described on a deed of gift; and when he was twenty-six, he was such an actor that Ben Jonson compared him to Roscius and Cicero, and Thomas Nash wrote that "Not Roscius or Aesope, those tragedians admired before Christ was borne, could ever performe more in action than famous Ned Allen." Perhaps he made his money as an actor-manager; ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the time of Elizabeth. These are the "troops of children, little eyasses" alluded to by Shakespeare in "Hamlet." They sometimes acted in plays written for them by Lyly and others, and sometimes in the popular dramas of the day. Ben Jonson wrote a charming epitaph on Salathiel Pavy, one of these little actors, ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... Menander and the Greek New Comedy through Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, that have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy or otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massinger's Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type, 'with fat capon lined' that has been and will be; and he would be comic, as Panurge is comic, but only a Rabelais could set him moving with real ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into a bedstead. This style, we are 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
... 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 ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... exclusively his own. In addition to this, his thoughts are often in the noblest sense of the word poetical; and passages may be quoted from him that no English poet may attempt to rival, unless it be Milton and Shakespear. Ben Jonson observed of him with great truth and a prophetic spirit: "Donne for not being understood will perish." But this is not all. If Waller and Suckling and Carew sacrificed every thing to the Graces, Donne went into the other extreme. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... of her men. He is more Roman than Plutarch himself, and by divine right of imagination he makes himself a citizen of the Eternal City. While Shakespeare was using Plutarch to such advantage, on the other hand, Ben Jonson seems to have borrowed little or nothing from him in his Roman plays. He got what he wanted out of the Latin authors, and he succeeded in Latinizing his plays,—in giving to his characters the dress, but not the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... a style of princely magnificence. On the king's second visit here, where he was accompanied by his queen, upwards of 15,000l. were expended. The Duchess of Newcastle, in her Life of the Duke, her husband, says, "The Earl employed Ben Jonson in fitting up such scenes and speeches as he could devise; and sent for all the country to come and wait on their Majesties; and, in short, did all that even he could imagine to render it great and worthy of their royal acceptance." It was this nobleman who erected the edifice which is now ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... I have not copied my author servilely: Words and phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding ages; but it is almost a miracle that much of his language remains so pure; and that he who began dramatic poetry amongst us, untaught by any, and as Ben Jonson tells us, without learning, should by the force of his own genius perform so much, that in a manner he has left no praise for any who come after him. The occasion is fair, and the subject would be pleasant to handle ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... metaphor found also in Plato's 'Republic,' symbolizes the sting used by the Athenian jurymen to make the rich disgorge a portion of their gathered honey. The 'Plaideurs' of Racine is an imitation of this play; and the motif of the committal of the dog is borrowed by Ben Jonson in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... the British Poets from Ben Jonson to Beattie. New Edition; with Biographical and Critical Prefaces, and Selections from recent Poets. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... 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 Show-day ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... 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
... with the pure literature of all languages and times, must rank Longfellow among the learned poets. Yet he wears this various knowledge like a shining suit of chain-mail, to adorn and strengthen his gait, like Milton, instead of tripping and clumsily stumbling in it, as Ben Jonson sometimes did. He whips out an exquisitely pointed allusion that flashes like a Damascus rapier and strikes nimbly home, or he recounts some weird tradition, or enriches his line with some gorgeous illustration from hidden stores, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... gave one or two, as their circumstances might permit. Some presented a spoon with the figure of the saint after whom the child was baptized, or to whom it was dedicated. In his "Bartholomew Fair," Ben Jonson has a character to say, "And all this for a couple of apostle-spoons and a cup to eat caudle in." Likewise in the "Noble ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... occupies about half of the south transept of Westminster Abbey. This famous place for the busts and monuments of eminent men includes those of Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Drayton, Ben Jonson, Milton, Butler, Davenant, Cowley, Dryden, Prior, Rowe, Gay, Addison, Thomson, Goldsmith, Gray, Mason, Sheridan, Southey, Campbell, etc. Lord Macaulay and Lord Palmerston were buried here in 1860 and ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... 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 ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... as much as if they were passionate Romeos and high-aspiring Buckinghams, and does for them what he might have desired should be done for himself had he been Dogberry, or Bottom, or Abhorson, or Bardolph, or any of the rest! The low characters, the clowns and vagabonds, of Ben Jonson's plays, excite only contempt or disgust. Shakespeare takes the same materials as Ben, passes them through the medium of his imaginative humor, and changes them into subjects of the most soul-enriching mirth. Their actual prototypes would not be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... he prompted in a practical voice. It was well a practical remark fitted the occasion for the line from old Ben Jonson, which David had only a few hours ago accused him of plagiarizing, rose to the surface of his mind. Such deep wells of eyes he had never looked into in all his life before, and they were as ever, filled to the brim ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... produced a golden goblet of a singular and antique appearance, moulded into the shape of a rampant bear, which the owner regarded with a look of mingled reverence, pride, and delight, that irresistibly reminded Waverley of Ben Jonson's Tom Otter, with his Bull, Horse, and Dog, as that wag wittily denominated his chief carousing cups. But Mr. Bradwardine, turning towards him with complacency, requested him to observe this curious relic ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the present day no introduction or commendation to American readers. Their place is established, and they will hold it permanently, in spite of the wild philosophy, and in spite of characteristics of style which would ruin weaker writings. As Ben Jonson said of a volume of poems, now quite forgotten, by his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... of the "Minde of the Lady Venetia Digby" can be an 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
... 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. I have somewhat expanded the notices of Shakespeare's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Ben Jonson's translation from Philostratus; and Lucian has a conceit upon the same idea, "that you may at once both ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... that Herrick held when he poured out his grumbles and complaints about 'dull Devonshire.' Herrick was a true Cockney, and the earliest part of his life was spent in a house in Cheapside. When he grew up, he had the good luck to come into the brilliant and witty company that gathered round Ben Jonson, so it must be allowed that he had an excuse for sometimes thinking that life in an obscure hamlet, two hundred miles from London, was a dreary exile. But, as Mr R. J. King remarks, in spite of all his grievances, he had in him a sense that responded very readily to the pretty customs ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... [62] Ben Jonson, in his Discourses, gives the following eulogy on this illustrious author:—"No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... Ben Jonson"; "John Ford" (in "Essays and Studies"); and the introductions to "Chapman" and "Middleton" in the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... Arnold's well-known sonnet, which attests the rank allotted to Shakespeare in the literary hierarchy by the professional critic, nearly two and a half centuries after the dramatist's death. There was no narrower qualification in the apostrophe of Shakespeare by Ben Jonson, a ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... Mr. John Addington Symonds to write the life of Ben Jonson for his series of 'English Worthies,' Mr. Lang, no doubt, exercised a wise judgment. Mr. Symonds, like the author of Volpone, is a scholar and a man of letters; his book on Shakspeare's Predecessors showed a marvellous knowledge of the Elizabethan ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... parasite, one Dr. Warner, than whom Plautus, or Ben Jonson, or Hogarth, never painted a better character. In letter after letter he adds fresh strokes to the portrait of himself, and completes a portrait not a little curious to look at now that the man has passed away; all the foul pleasures and gambols in which he revelled, played out; all the rouged faces ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... 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," ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... On the sea her flag was supreme; her merchant marine, going to and from her own possessions was seen in every port of the world; her admirals, Ruyter and Tromp, had won her an illustrious place forever in the annals of naval warfare. These were the days of Milton and Ben Jonson; of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus and Richelieu; of Murillo, Rubens and Van Dyck—days when Holland had within her own borders such men as Barneveld, the great statesman; Grotius, the father of international law; ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... same time artifice is more visible than nature throughout the Epistle, and this is true also of The Elegy, a composition in which Pope's method of treating mournful topics is excellently displayed. The opening lines are suggested by Ben Jonson's Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester, a lady whose death was also lamented by Milton. These we shall not quote, but take in preference a passage which is perhaps as graceful an expression of poetical rhetoric as can be found in ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... erected by the Empress Catherine to the memory of her husband, arrogant as they are, contain the essence of the sublime. And, in like manner, among the most impressive memorials in Westminster Abbey are the words, "O rare Ben Jonson," chiselled beneath the great play-wright's bust, and the name of J. DRYDEN, with the date of his birth and death, and the simple statement, that the tomb was erected, in 1720, by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham. We doubt whether the effect of the latter would have been improved by the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... an unlucky antipathy to the "snug lying in the Abbey"; and as for Captain Bobadil, he never had an opportunity of putting his plan for vanquishing an army into practice. We fear, indeed, that neither his character nor Ben Jonson's knowledge of human nature is properly understood; for it certainly could not be expected that a man whose spirit glowed to encounter a whole host could, without tarnishing his dignity, if closely pressed, condescend ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... the most 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
... this note written by Ben Jonson himself. 'To his loving father, and worthy friend Mr. John Florio: the ayde of his Muses. Ben Jonson seales this ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... divorced Lady Essex, and the proudest of England's nobility vied with each other in doing honour to the two vile persons thus unpropitiously united. The chief-justice, Coke, and the illustrious Bacon, bowed in the general crowd before their ascendancy. It has been maintained that Ben Jonson, in his rough independence, refused to write a masque for the occasion of these wicked nuptials; but this has been denied; and it is said, that the reason why his works contain no avowed reference to the occasion, is because they were not published until Somerset's fall. The event took ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... 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 suggested by one student of Shakespeare that ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... is, was probably produced in his old age, for it was not published, I believe, till 1627, when it formed part of a small folio volume, containing The Battaile of Agincourt and The Miseries of Queene Margarite. Prefixed to this volume was the noble but tardy panegyric of his friend Ben Jonson, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... in his Works, "The English Grammar, made by Ben Jonson, for the Benefit of all Strangers, out of his Observation of the English Language, now spoken and in use:" London, 1634: 8vo, pp. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of the fragrant weed which Raleigh taught our gallants to puff in capacious bowls; which a royal pedant denounced in a famous 'Counterblast,' which his flattering, laureate, Ben Jonson, ridiculed to please his master; which our wives and sisters protest gives rise to the dirtiest and most unsociable habit a man can indulge in; of which some fair flowers declare that they love the smell, and others that they will ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... as much admiration as those giant hammermen at the old St. Dunstan's clock, which are now in Regent's Park. The newspaper offices, too, furnish many curious illustrations of the progress of that great organ of modern civilisation, the press. At the "Devil" we meet Ben Jonson and his club; and at John Murray's old shop we stop to see Byron lunging with his stick at favourite volumes on the shelves, to the bookseller's great but concealed annoyance. Nor do we forget to sketch Dr. Johnson at Temple Bar, bantered by his fellow Jacobite, Goldsmith, about the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of sovereign power; but so do Achilles and Rinaldo, who were subjects and soldiers to Agamemnon and Godfrey of Bulloigne. He talks extravagantly in his passion; but, if I would take the pains to quote an hundred passages of Ben Jonson's Cethegus, I could easily shew you, that the rhodomontades of Almanzor are neither so irrational as his, nor so impossible to be put in execution; for Cethegus threatens to destroy nature, and to raise a new one out of it; to kill all the senate for his part of the action; to look Cato ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Henry VIII. a conduit (of which no trace now exists) was erected in Lothbury. It was supplied with water from the spring of Dame Anne's, the "Clear," mentioned by Ben Jonson in ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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 ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... engravings from Hogarth. But poets, oh, they were there too! poets who might be supposed to have been sufficiently good fellows to be at home with such companions,—Shakspeare, of course, with his placid forehead; Ben Jonson, with his heavy scowl; Burns and Byron cheek by jowl. But the strangest of all these heterogeneous specimens of graphic art was a full-length print of William Pitt!—William Pitt, the austere and imperious. What the deuce did he do there amongst prize-fighters and actors ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the Court they were an important part of almost every festival. At these places were produced academic compositions, either allegorical like the masques, copies of which we find in Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus or Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The last were incomparably the most important. The Elizabethan age, which always thought of literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally attracted to a poet who dealt ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... 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, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection of narrative ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Stuarts. Many fresh words, chiefly from the Latin, then appeared in books, were often received with reprobation and derision, sometimes disappeared again, sometimes established their footing in the language: see The Art of English Poetry (ascribed to Puttenham), Book III. chap. 4, and Ben Jonson's Poetaster, Act. V. sc. I. Good judges did not know whether a word was really called for: even Shakespeare thought 'remuneration' and 'accommodate' ridiculous. But such national exigencies rarely arise; and in our own time great authors ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Mr. Ben Jonson and Mr. Wm. Shakespeare being merry at a tavern, Mr. Jonson having begun this for ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... an entanglement of our globe with a comet may take place any day, with consequences incalculably damaging for the meantime, though not conclusively destructive, and perhaps necessary as a step towards an improved system of things—the bringing in of what Ben Jonson calls 'an age of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... supposed that in other plays of Shakespeare,—in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As you like it, Hamlet, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, and The Merchant of Venice, he performed Launce, Touchstone, the Grave-digger, Justice Shallow, and Launcelot. On the first production of Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, a character[vii:1] was assigned to him; and there is good reason to believe that in Every Man out of his Humour, by the same dramatist, he represented ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... which Wordsworth brought away from Cambridge are such as had already found expression more than once in English literature; for it has been the fortune of that ancient University to receive in her bosom most of that long line of poets who form the peculiar glory of our English speech. Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Marlowe; Dryden, Cowley, and Waller; Milton, George Herbert, and Gray—to mention only the most familiar names—had owed allegiance to that mother who received Wordsworth now, and Coleridge and Byron immediately ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Bishop (or friar), Robin Hood, the 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 evidence to the ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... to hear stories of the littleness of great men. I like to think that Shakespeare was fond of his glass. I even cling to the tale of that disgraceful final orgie with friend Ben Jonson. Possibly the story may not be true, but I hope it was. I like to think of him as poacher, as village ne'er-do-well, denounced by the local grammar-school master, preached at by the local J. P. of the period. I like to reflect that Cromwell had a wart on his ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Lecture I. General character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages II. General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art III. The Troubadours—Boccaccio—Petrarch—Pulci—Chaucer—Spenser IV-VI. Shakspeare (not included in the original text) VII. Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger VIII. 'Don Quixote'. Cervantes IX. On the Distinctions of the Witty, the Droll, the Odd, and the Humorous; the Nature and Constituents of Humour; Rabelais, Swift, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Pembroke's mother," has an honored place,—and though her portrait is not of so "fair" a woman as one might desire to have seen her, it has the look of a woman "wise and good." And here are Shakspeare and Ben Jonson themselves;—the Chandos portrait of Shakspeare, with which all the world is familiar, more interesting from its own fame than from its being either an authentic or a satisfactory likeness of the poet; and Ben Jonson close by, with his strong features ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Hogges-green, now College-green; and probably the entertainment was carried out al fresco. The first playhouse established in Dublin was in Werburgh-street, in 1633. Shirley's plays were performed here soon after, and also those of "rare Ben Jonson." Ogilvy, Shirley's friend, and the promoter of this enterprise, was appointed Master of the Revels in Ireland in 1661; and as his first theatre was ruined during the civil war, he erected a "noble theatre," at a cost of L2,000, immediately after his new appointment, on a portion of the ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... wants too a Family Bible, the 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 authors, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... there are as yet unseen by bibliographer, such as Markham's 'Thyrsis and Daphne,' a poem printed in 1593, and the 1609 and 1612 quartos of Ben Jonson's 'Epicoene or the Silent Woman.' This last was seen by William Gifford a century ago, but neither is now known to exist. Or is a copy extant of Horace's 'Art of Poetry' english'd by Jonson and published so late as 1640. Alas! the list of works by 'rare Ben Jonson' now lost to us, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... "Spectator," its near neighbor Steele; the "Gentleman's Magazine," a long run this, but not complete; rare Ben Jonson, rubbed at the joints; Spenser's "Faerie Queen," with marginal notes in a contemporary hand; the "History of the Valorous and Witty Knight Errant," in sable morocco, with armorial decorations; Tacitus in all his atrocity, Herbert, ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... Dominicans were well pleased when their name was resolved into 'Domini canes'—the Lord's watchdogs; who, as such, allowed no heresy to appear without at once giving the alarm, and seeking to chase it away. When Ben Jonson praises Shakespeare's 'well-filed lines'— ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which the bodies of executed criminals were dragged to be thrown into the river. The word is now obsolete, but was employed by Ben Jonson (Sejanus) and ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... of complement to Dickens' sojourn in Italy, carries us to the year 1846. But before going on with the history of that year, there are one or two points to be taken up in the history of 1845. The first is the performance, on the 21st of September, of Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in his Humour," by a select company of amateur actors, among whom Dickens held chief place. "He was the life and soul of the entire affair," says Forster. "I never seem till then to have known his business ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... 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 Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... plain cravat, and to fasten in it with care the scarf-pin bestowed upon him by old Benson, the little watchmaker on the corner below. Through the buttonhole in the lapel of his coat he drew a spicy-smelling sprig of ground-pine, chanting whimsically as he did so a couplet from Ben Jonson: ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... 30. Ben Jonson, a friend of Shakespeare's, wrote of him, "He was not of an age, but for all time." What ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... "one entire and perfect chrysolite." But this is unreasonable. We have direct evidence of the imperfect character of much that Shakspeare wrote. When told that Shakspeare had never blotted a line, Ben Jonson—no mean critic, and no unfriendly one—wished he had "blotted a thousand." Would rare Ben have uttered such a wish ignorantly and without cause? We believe the existence of such defects in the writings of Shakspeare, as they were left by him. It follows, therefore, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... land was called Oberon—the queen, Titania. The king used to wear a crown of jewels on his head, and he always carried a horn in his hand, which set every body around him to dancing, whenever he blew it. Ben Jonson, a poet who flourished a great many years ago, speaks very respectfully of fairies and elves, in his poems. In describing the haunts of his "Sad Shepherd," ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... 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
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... courage from oozing out at his palms, or not felt such an unlucky antipathy to the "snug lying in the Abbey;" and as for Captain Bobadil, he never had an opportunity of putting his plan, for vanquishing an army, into practice. We fear, indeed, that neither his character, nor Ben Jonson's knowledge of human nature, is properly understood; for it certainly could not be expected that a man, whose spirit glowed to encounter a whole host, could, without tarnishing his dignity, if closely pressed, condescend to fight an individual. But as these remarks on courage may be felt ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... 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
... crowned the lives of Poggius and Leonard Aretin, two of the illustrious revivers of letters. A singular custom formerly prevailed among our own writers, which was an affectionate tribute to our literary veterans by young writers. The former adopted the latter by the title of sons. Ben Jonson had twelve of these poetical sons. Walton the angler adopted Cotton, the translator ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... servile imitators of his thought or style. Following upon Homer there was the school of the Homeridae, or "sons of Homer." A cluster of poets at the beginning of the seventeenth century were styled "the sons of Ben Jonson." There are no doubt "sons of Tennyson" at this present date. With these we have now no concern. They are but satellites, while that for which we are scanning the poetical horizon is a rising star of a magnitude in some degree comparable with the stars which have set with the deaths of Matthew ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... poetry than Newton, later on, expected them to be interested in fluxions. And when we come to the question whether Shakespear missed that assurance which all great men have had from the more capable and susceptible members of their generation that they were great men, Ben Jonson's evidence disposes of so improbable a notion at once and for ever. "I loved the man," says Ben, "this side idolatry, as well as any." Now why in the name of common sense should he have made that qualification unless there had been, not only idolatry, but idolatry fulsome enough to irritate Jonson ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... Professor Gollancz points out the existence of a Pyramus and Thisbe play, discovered by him in a manuscript at the British Museum.[26] This MS. is a Cambridge commonplace book of about 1630, containing poems attributed to Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh and others, though the greater portion of the contents appear to be topical verses and epigrams unsigned. Amongst these is "Tragaedia miserrima Pyrami & Thisbes fata enuncians. Historia ex Publio Ovidio deprompta. Authore N.R." In the margins ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... down, I'll tell you how it was. 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 then dying; and I told ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various |
