"Jonson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was mercilessly satirized by his rivals, Ben Jonson and others,[81] about his coat of arms; but it was the recognition of his descent that secured him so universally the attribute of "gentle." As Davies, addressing Shakespeare ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... first part of this volume was obviously collected by a Scotchman, and it includes pieces by Ben Jonson, Wither, Dr. Donne, &c. It must have been made in the latter part of the reign of Charles I. The second portion of the volume is a later production; a humourous poem, called a Whig's Supplication, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... "Oh! Ben Jonson!" said Hildegarde. "He was another great dramatist, you know; a little younger, but of the same time with Shakspeare and Marlowe. He lived to be quite old, and he wrote a very famous poem on Shakspeare, 'all full of quotations,' as somebody said about 'Hamlet.' It is in that that he says ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... was 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 ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... upon me any verses of his own." Tennyson would have found more to admire if he had pressed for a sight of the verses. Neither he nor Mr Matthew Arnold was very encouraging to young poets: they had no sons in Apollo, like Ben Jonson. But both were kept in a perpetual state of apprehension by the army of versifiers who send volumes by post, to whom that can only be said what Tennyson did say to one of them, "As an amusement to yourself and your friends, the writing it" (verse) "is all very ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... subjects: the conditions under which 'Love's Labour's Lost' and the 'Merchant of Venice' were written; the references in Shakespeare's plays to his native town and county; his father's applications to the Heralds' College for coat-armour; his relations with Ben Jonson and the boy actors in 1601; the favour extended to his work by James I and his Court; the circumstances which led to the publication of the First Folio, and the history of the dramatist's portraits. I have somewhat expanded the notices of Shakespeare's financial affairs ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... as his best critical work. With ridicule of the affectations of historians whose names and whose books have passed into oblivion, he joins sound doctrine upon sincerity of style. "Nothing is lasting that is feigned," said Ben Jonson; "it will have another face ere long." Long after Lucian's day an artificial dignity, accorded specially to work of the historian, bound him by its conventions to an artificial style. He used, as Johnson said of Dr. Robertson, "too big words and too many of them." But that was ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... based on events that happened a millennium and a half before Jonson wrote it. Jonson added 247 scholarly footnotes to this play; all were in Latin (except for a scattering of Greek). They, and the Greek quotation which forms Tiberius Caesar's tag line in Scene II, ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... think, and people go to the play, if they go at all, to feast their eyes and ears, not their minds; can any sensible person believe that if 'The School for Scandal,' teeming as it does with wit, satire, and character, finer and truer than in any play produced since the days of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Marlowe, were set on the boards of the Haymarket at this day, as a new piece by an author of no very high celebrity, it would draw away a single admirer from the flummery in Oxford Street, the squeaking ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... A horse famous for playing tricks, the property of one Banks. It is mentioned in Sir Walter Raleigh's Hist. of the World, p. 178; also by Sir Kenelm Digby and Ben Jonson. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... prevailing foot is iambic, but the first foot is trochaic. In the following beautiful lines by Ben Jonson, there is ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... we 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... dead, then will I fetch her again With aqua vita, out of an old hogshead! While there are lees of wine, or dregs of beer, I'll never want her! Coin her out of cobwebs, Dust, but I'll have her! raise wool upon egg-shells, Sir, and make grass grow out of marrow-bones, To make her come! B. Jonson. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... was displayed in front of the door is likely. Malone writes: "The original sign hung out at this playhouse (as Mr. Steevens has observed) was the painting of a curtain striped."[116] Aubrey records that Ben Jonson "acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtain, a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse somewhere in the suburbs, I think towards Shoreditch or Clerkenwell."[117] By "at the Green Curtain" Aubrey means, of course, ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... civil than he excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." His partner Burbage spoke of him after death as a "worthy friend and fellow"; and Jonson handed down the general tradition of his time when he described him as "indeed honest, and of an open and ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... 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
... was awake, to return to Lempriere in London. When the ladies went, later in the forenoon, to arrange the chamber in which he had passed the night, they found that the bed had not been used during Le Gallais' occupation. A copy of Ben Jonson's Poems lay on the table; by the side of which were pen and ink, and a burnt-out candle. On opening the book, Mdlle. de St. Martin found some lines written on the fly-leaf, ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... any flesh-and-blood maiden, though, by the way, it would read extremely similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman—not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so—and the pursuit is much the same in one case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet— ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the bragging "tobacconist" is pictured for us in Ben Jonson's "Bobadil." Bobadil may perhaps be somewhat of an exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... 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 desperate course ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... one of Ben Jonson's old plays: "When I once take the humor of a thing, I am like your tailor's needle—I ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... 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 greatest ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... its dependents. Nor was this distinction in general one of place alone: in most of the wealthy and noble houses of the period, it portended a corresponding distinction in the quality of the food. Hence in the homely times in which Ben Jonson has apostrophized Penshurst, it is mentioned as an honorable instance of the hospitality of its ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... of considerable merit, a native of Fife, born at Kinaldie, who made his fortune by a Latin panegyric to King James I. on his accession; was on friendly terms with the eminent literary men of his time, Ben Jonson in particular; his poems are written in pure and even elegant English, some in Latin, and have only recently been collected ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... for ballad poetry (Spectators 70, 74, 85) was not a sheer novelty. He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that Moliere's Misanthrope was on his side. The modern or broadside version ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... 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 of the trade-guilds yield ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... next to youthful love and family affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration. And what would literature or art be without such associations? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all admirers, met ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Festus, p. 166, as 'Mostellaria'; pp. 162 and 305, as 'Phasma.' According to Ritschl, the Phasma of Philemon was Plautus' model. The reference to unguenta exotica (l. 42) points to a late date, when Asiatic luxury was growing common. The play is imitated in Ben Jonson's Alchemist. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... condensed into one moment. It is all wild and rapturous. It has nothing of a rational cast. A casual glance from an unknown beauty often affords the subject of a poem. The poets whom Dr. Johnson has denominated metaphysical, such as Donne, Jonson, and Cowley, bear a strong resemblance to the Persians ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... together without regard to any system of classification. He had a habit of mixing his books around with fishing-tackle, and his charming biographer tells us it was no uncommon thing to find the "Wealth of Nations," "Boxiana," the "Faerie Queen," Jeremy Taylor, and Ben Jonson occupying close quarters with fishing-rods, boxing-gloves, and tins ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... 1579 would have 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 up" for managers the stock-plays in their repertory. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Lady Maclaughlan, as she twirled her victim round and round; "I suppose you think yourself vastly smart and well dressed. Yes, you are very neat, very neat indeed; one would suppose Ben Jonson had you in his eye when he composed that song." Then in a voice ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... house, with the words 'Wine Shades 'in a blaze of wind-fluttered gas above the door, and painted placards in the window: 'Wines from the Wood. Fine old Sherry, 10d., 8d., and 6d. per dock glass.' He had never tasted sherry. Sherry surely was the drink of many heroes. Shakespeare and Jonson drank it at the Mermaid. He entered the place, called for his wine—'Your best,' he said, as he threw his shilling on the counter—and sat down on a high stool to drink it. Before his glass was empty he had flashed back into high spirits again. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... 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. Chettle, the publisher, soon afterward printed a retraction ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... shaped far better! A great broad Brobdignag grin of true humour is in this Skrymir; mirth resting on earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right valiant heart is capable of that. It is the grim humour of our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for one catches tones of it, under a still other shape, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... scholar, if a man may trust The liberal voice of Fame, in her report. Myself was once a student, and indeed Fed with the self-same humour he is now." —Ben Jonson.—Every ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fostering wing of a monarch who united in himself taste to feel, spirit to undertake, and munificence to reward. Architecture, painting, and poetry were by turns the objects of his paternal care. Shakspeare was his "closet companion," Jonson his poet, and in conjunction with Inigo Jones, his favoured architect, produced those magnificent ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... messengers fiery red with haste and charged with the destiny of nations who were made welcome at the gates of Blois. If any man of accomplishment came that way, he was sure of an audience, and something for his pocket. The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson like Drummond of Hawthornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay. They were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic. It might be Pierre, called Dieu d'amours, the juggler; or it might be three high English minstrels; or the two men, players of ghitterns, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... driven down With beer and butter-milk, mingled together. It is against my freehold, my inheritance. Wine is the word that glads the heart of man, And mine's the house of wine. Sack, says my bush, Be merry and drink Sherry, that's my posie. Ben Jonson's New Inn. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... woman's nature and sphere, and how it has gone on developing itself in the poetry which is its truest expression, till we have got its different stages from the ideal of the school which really had a gloss of elevation and fine sentiment about it—the woman of Herrick and Ben Jonson, and later on of Lovelace and Montrose, to the woman of Owen Meredith and Swinburne, who, instead of inspiring men to die for her honor, makes them rather wish her to live to be the instrument of their pleasure? It was not a bad idea, and I think I could have traced ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... 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
... old inn in Bread Street, Cheapside. Tradition says that the literary club there was established by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603. In any case it was, in Shakespeare's time, frequented by the chief writers of the day, amongst them Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Carew, Donne, and Shakespeare himself. Beaumont, in a poetical epistle to ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... 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 Charis ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... 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 the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Markham "making a night of it" with those rollicking bachelors, Beaumont and Fletcher, at the "Mermaid," or going with them to the Globe Theatre to see two Warwickshire brothers, Edmund and Will Shakspeare, who are on the boards there,—the latter taking the part of Old Knowell, in Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in his Humour." His friends say ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... though somewhat tedious, comedy was published anonymously in 1606. There is no known dramatic writer of that date to whom it could be assigned with any great degree of probability. The comic portion shows clearly the influence of Ben Jonson, and there is much to remind one of Lyly's court-comedies. In the serious scenes the philosophising and moralising, at one time expressed in language of inarticulate obscurity and at another attaining clear and dignified utterance, suggest a study of Chapman. The ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... prevent them from being ardent book-lovers. Shakespeare—to mention one only—must have possessed a Plutarch, a Stowe, a Montaigne, and a Bible, and probably half a dozen other books of less moment. And yet, with this poor show, he was as genuine a book-lover as Ben Jonson or my Lord Verulam. Lord Burleigh, Grotius, and Bonaparte are said to have carried their libraries in their pockets, and doubtless Shakespeare could have carried his ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... Providence, 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... old age, for it was not published, I believe, till 1627, when it formed part of a small folio volume, containing The Battaile of Agincourt and The Miseries of Queene Margarite. Prefixed to this volume was the noble but tardy panegyric of his friend Ben Jonson, entitled The Vision, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... let Hymen oft appear In saffron robe, with taper clear, And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry; Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild. And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs Married to immortal verse, Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes, with many ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... themselves, and would not suffer the town to be imposed upon by scribblers. In the pit, they exerted themselves with great spirit and vivacity; called out for the tunes of obscene songs, talked loudly at intervals of Shakespeare and Jonson, played on their catcalls a short prelude of terrour, clamoured vehemently for a prologue, and clapped with great dexterity at the first entrance of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... 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 Massinger ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... 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, can ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... a man's poem. It was in the English of the hearty times of Ben Jonson and of Kit Marlowe—and every swinging line ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... original. The difference between poets in these matters is no doubt considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a difference of less and more. It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote fluently, for Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says so; and for anything we can tell he may also have constructed with unusual readiness. But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for instance in Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet); it is almost impossible ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... distributed, there is scarcely a corner of the English-speaking world to-day which he does not illuminate, or a cottage which he does not enrich. His bounty is like the sea, which, though often unacknowledged, is everywhere felt. As his friend, Ben Jonson, wrote of him, "He was not of an age but for all time." He ever kept the highroad of human life whereon all travel. He did not pick out by-paths of feeling and sentiment. In his creations we have no moral highwaymen, sentimental thieves, interesting villains, and amiable, ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... both very 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, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... more than the title of the play to Ben Jonson. Acutus, overflowing with bitter and tedious moralising, is evidently modelled on Macilente in Every Man Out of His Humour. The very dog—Getica's dog—was suggested by Puntarvolo's dog. Indeed, throughout the play we are constantly ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... gather the history of the term from the Oxford Dictionary. Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by sublimation strange," and Ben Jonson in Cynthia's Revels spoke of a being "sublimated and refined"; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same seventeenth century, referred to religion as "sublimating" human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a little ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... 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 of adults rather than by the free and easy ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... men it claims as pupils are, Sir Philip Sydney and Ben Jonson, Camden and South, Bolingbroke and Locke, Canning and Sir Robert Peel, whom Oxford rejected. The front is in Aldate's-street, for which consult Mr. Spier's pretty guide card, the entrance under the lofty clock tower, whence, at ten minutes past ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... and "Iscariot" be good rhymes, but must say, as Ben Jonson did to Sylvester, who ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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 feeling in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... letter from Mrs. Montagu to Garrick, which shows the ridiculous way in which Shakespeare was often patronised last century, and 'brought into notice.' She says:—'Mrs. Montagu is a little jealous for poor Shakespeare, for if Mr. Garrick often acts Kitely, Ben Jonson will eclipse ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and, happily, he found a newly made one. Youth she had, for she was only twenty; beauty she must have had in a remarkable degree, for she was afterwards one of the lovely girls selected to act with the Queen of James I. in Ben Jonson's Masque of Beauty; and wealth she had in the ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... reputation during the century after his death is a familiar episode in English criticism. Bentley has demonstrated the dominant position of Jonson up to the end of the century.[9] But Jonson's reputation and authority worked for Shakespeare and helped to shape, a critical attitude toward the plays. His official praise in the first Folio had declared ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... is sometimes got in the most unexpected places. I was particularly struck with a children's glee-party in Jura (a rough island known chiefly for its sterile Paps). The bairns admirably rendered Ben Jonson's delightful ditty, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," and the Shakespearian song, "Where the bee sucks, there suck I." In such islands a musical teacher is a valuable asset. Let me add that all the libraries have been ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... 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 it is to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... 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 never marry an indulger (which, by the way, they ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... 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. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... translation put forward by the Prefaces are an intelligent exposition of progressive contemporary notions of the art. The belief in literal translation which characterizes Jonson and Marvell in the earlier years of the century had been displaced by the more liberal concept of "imitation." Roscommon is a representative of this freer attitude, while Dryden's more severe theory of "paraphrase," whatever his practice may have been, stands somewhere between the two positions. ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... O rare Ben Jonson, you should see The draught that I may sup: How sweet the drink, her kiss within. The ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... drama Donne, John his poetry Dotheboys Hall (do-the-boys) Drama, in Elizabethan Age origin, periods of, miracle and mystery plays, interludes, classical influence on, unities, the English, types of, decline of. See also Elizabethan Age, Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, etc. Dramatic unities Dramatists, methods of See Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc. Drapier's Letters Drayton, Michael Dream of Gerontius, The (j[)e]-r[)o]n'sh[)i]-us) Dryden life, works, influence, criticism of Canterbury Tales ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... indeed. Nobody will say that the best letters of Junius are more decidedly superior to the acknowledged works of Francis than three or four of Corneille's tragedies to the rest, than three or four of Ben Jonson's comedies to the rest, than the Pilgrim's Progress to the other works of Bunyan, than Don Quixote to the other works of Cervantes. Nay, it is certain that Junius, whoever he may have been, was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... me a look, give me a face, That makes simplicity a grace; Robes loosely flowing, hair as free! Such sweet neglect more taketh me, Than all the adulteries of art; That strike mine eyes, but not my heart. —BEN JONSON. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... previous century. And the view from Ramsay's shop—from which by this time the wigs had entirely disappeared, and which was now a refined and cultured bookseller's, adorned outside with medallions of two poets, Scotch and English, Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden—was bounded by the gate of the Netherbow with its picturesque tower, and glimpses through the open roadway, of the Canongate beyond, and the cross lines of busy traffic leading to Leith. It was thus a wide space between the lines ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... way, tout au contraire [Fr.]. Adv. contrarily &c adj.; contra, contrariwise, per contra, on the contrary, nay rather; vice versa; on the other hand &c (in compensation) 30. Phr. all concord's born of contraries [B. Jonson]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 'Herse is the solemne obsequie in funeralles.' Cp. also Ben Jonson's 'Epitaph on the Countess ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... seized with illness on his way to Kenilworth, and died at his house at Cornbury, in Oxfordshire, on the 4th of September 1588. The suddenness of his death gave rise to a suspicion that it was caused by poison; and Ben Jonson tells a story that he had given his wife 'a bottle of liquor which he willed her to use in any faintness, which she, not knowing it was poison, gave him, and so he died.' He was ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... probably when the chin became naked and close shaven, affording no longer a handle for insult." In the reign of James II., William Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire, paid L30,000 for offering this insult to a person at Court. An earlier instance of pulling the nose may be found in Ben Jonson's Epicaene, or the Silent Woman, Act iv. ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... will finish by reciting to you the lines old Ben Jonson addressed to the pretty girls of his time, which form an appropriate ending ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... 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 her so. She ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... period of sudden emancipation of thought, and of immense fertility and originality. The poets and prose writers of the time united the freshness of youth with the vigour of manhood. Among these were Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, the Fletchers, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. Among the statesmen of Elizabeth were Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, Howard, and Sir Nicholas Bacon. But perhaps greatest of all were the sailors, who, as Clarendon said, "were a nation by themselves;" and their leaders—Drake, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Tillotson, and Dr. Johnson were all distinguished for having great strength of memory. Sir W. Hamilton observed that Grotius, Pascal, Leibnitz, and Euler were not less celebrated for their intelligence than for their memory. Ben Jonson could repeat all that he had written and whole books he had read. Themistocles could call by name the 20,000 citizens of Athens. Cyrus is said to have known the name of every soldier in his army. Hortensius, a great Roman ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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 International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Folio, give a most satisfactory account of the somewhat crucial point—how they came by the manuscripts, with all the amendments and corrections, and pass lightly over the fact that those manuscripts had disappeared. 'Rare Ben Jonson' in the witness-box is a masterpiece of dramatic invention; he demolishes Bacon's advocate with magnificent vitality. John Selden makes a stately witness, and Francis Meres a very useful one. Generally ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... master to instruct me in it—an art which had been better praised than studied here in England; wherein Shakespeare, who created the stage among us, had rather written happily than knowingly and justly; and Jonson, who, by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the rules, yet seemed to envy to posterity that knowledge, and, like an inventor of some useful art, to make a monopoly of his learning— when thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone or knowledge of the ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... all, tight sleeves and very tight gloves must be condemned. Next, relaxation and repose are to be cultivated. A beautiful hand that fidgets continually is not to be admired for anything beyond its ceaseless efforts to be doing. Ben Jonson once said: "A busy woman is a fearful nuisance," and it's more than likely that he had in mind some fussy dame whose nervous fingers were everlastingly picking at things and continually on ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... and Engl. Dict.) ed. 1598, in v.—"A petty oath, a cant exclamation, generally expressive, among the Italian populace, who have it constantly in their mouth, of defiance or contempt." Gifford's note on Jonson's ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... Jonson came, instructed from the school, To please in method, and invent by rule; 10 His studious patience and laborious art, By regular approach essay'd the heart: Cold Approbation gave the lingering bays, For those who durst not censure, scarce could praise; A ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... 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
... front was wrongly attributed to Inigo Jones. The house had been repaired or rebuilt in many places, so that there was not much that was ancient left in its later days. By the side of Northumberland House formerly ran Hartshorn Lane, now entirely obliterated. Ben Jonson was born here, and lived here ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... as foreign to the important points of life, as consequentially flows that inheritance of ridicule, which devolves on them, from generation to generation. As soon as they become authors, they become like Ben Jonson's angry boy, and learn the ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... the great theatre of life and animated exertion, took a place in the coach, which was to set out for London, on Monday, November 22; but I resolved that we should make a little circuit, as I would by no means lose the pleasure of seeing Sam Johnson at the very spot where Ben Jonson visited the learned and poetical Drummond. Accordingly, we drove on the Saturday to Roslin Castle, surveyed the romantic scene around it, and the beautiful Gothic chapel. After that we proceeded to Hawthornden and viewed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... 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
... seen that the text of Shakespeare's plays gives no evidence tending to show any greater familiarity with precious stones than could be gathered from the poetry of his day, and from his intercourse with classical scholars, such as Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and others of those who formed the unique assemblage wont to meet together at the old Mermaid Tavern in London. That a diamond could cost 2000 ducats ($5000), a very large sum in Shakespeare's time, is noted in one ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... 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 ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... like to fancy a symposium of the great men talking over their books, in the room where Ben Jonson was king, ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... woman was set forth no longer as the weakling and the temptress, but as the guide and the inspirer of man. Whatever traces of the old foul leaven may be found in Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, or Ben Jonson, such books as Sidney's 'Arcadia,' Lyly's 'Euphues,' Spenser's 'Fairy Queen,' and last, but not least, Shakespeare's Plays, place the conception of woman and of the rights of woman on a vantage-ground from which I believe it can never ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... shaming the trash nowadays passed off for dramas, containing "The Jew of Malta," "Old Fortunatus," "The City Madam." "Volpone," "The Alchymist," and other glorious old dramas of the age of Marlow and Jonson, and that literary Damon and Pythias, the magnificent, mellow old Beaumont and Fletcher, who have sent the long shadow of their reputation, side by side with Shakspeare's, far down the endless vale of posterity. And may that shadow never be less! but as for St. Shakspeare may his never be more, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... before and was useless. That last faint hope was gone. On the night of December 23d the King slept, a prisoner surrounded with hostile guards, in the noble castle which in the days of his youth had rung with Jonson's lyrics and ribaldry; and the "Gipsy of the Masque" had prophesied that his "name in peace or wars, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... 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 ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... conduct 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-talking about the authorship of the play, and wondering how far Shakespeare was responsible for what we had heard. Everybody knows that Colley Cibber improved upon the text of the old folios and quartos: for what was listened to with delight by Ben Jonson could not satisfy Congreve, and William III. needed better verses than those applauded by Queen Elizabeth. None of us knew how great or how many these improvements were. I doubt whether many of the audience that crowded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Literature. Translations of the Bible: Hooker, Andrews, Donne. Hall, Taylor, Baxter; other Prose Writers: Fuller, Cudworth, Bacon, Hobbes, Raleigh, Milton, Sidney, Selden, Burton, Browne, and Cowley. Dramatic Poetry: Marlowe and Greene, Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and others; Massinger, Ford, and Shirley; Decline of the Drama. Non-dramatic Poetry: Spenser and the Minor Poets. Lyrical Poets: Donne, Cowley, Denham, Waller, Milton.—3. The Age of the Restoration and Revolution (1660-1702). Prose: Leighton, Tillotson, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... tavern of 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 literature, societies were held to which Steele, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... form with examples from life, the anatomist of human passions, instincts, and impulses in all their gamut, the commentator on his own age; he was weak as the artist, often unnecessarily and by choice, in the repulsive form,—in the awkward, the obscure, the ugly. He belongs with Jonson, with Dryden, with the heirs of the masculine intellect, the men of power not unvisited by grace, but in whom mind is predominant. Upon the work of such poets time hesitates, conscious of their mental greatness, but also of their imperfect art, their heterogeneous ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning |
