"Ben Jonson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Oh! Ben Jonson!" said Hildegarde. "He was another great dramatist, you know; a little younger, but of the same time with Shakspeare and Marlowe. He lived to be quite old, and he wrote a very famous poem on Shakspeare, 'all full of quotations,' as somebody said about 'Hamlet.' It ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... sixteenth century and "availed himself of his accomplishments in music to secure a place in Queen Elizabeth's household." His son Nicholas Lanier — "musician, painter, engraver" — was patronized successively by James I, Charles I, and Charles II, wrote music for the masks of Ben Jonson and Campion and for the lyrics of Herrick, and was the first marshal of a society of musicians organized by Charles I in 1626. He also wrote a cantata called "Hero and Leander". He was the friend of Van Dyck, who painted a portrait of Lanier which ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... beggars, whose number was neither more nor less than the poets' nine muses, talked all together about this ripping and unripping; and so loud, that not one heard what the other said: but, at last, one beggar craved audience; and told them that old father Clause, whom Ben Jonson, in his Beggar's Bush, created King of their corporation, was to lodge at an ale-house, called " Catch-her-by-the- way," not far from Waltham Cross, and in the high road towards London; and he therefore desired them to spend no more time about that and such like questions, but refer all to father ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... finish by reciting to you the lines old Ben Jonson addressed to the pretty girls of his time, which form an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, have transmitted to us. To it we owe all those instructive and entertaining collections which the French have made under the title of Ana, affixed to some celebrated name. To it we owe the Table-Talk of Selden[1147], the Conversation between Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, Spence's Anecdotes of Pope[1148], and other valuable remains in our own language. How delighted should we have been, if thus introduced into the company of Shakspeare and of Dryden[1149], ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... 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 ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... doubt," adds Mr. Collier, "that the lines are genuine, as well as many other songs and poems attributed to Ben Jonson, Sir W. Raleigh, H. Constable, Dr. Donne, J. Sylvester, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the stern 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 like thunder, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Mr. Ben Jonson and Mr. Wm. Shakespeare being merry at a tavern, Mr. Jonson having begun this ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... very high degree. He threatens them, and speaks insolently 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 ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. We are amused to read how Ben Jonson engaged, that the dull masks with which the royal family and nobility were to be entertained should be "grounded upon antiquity and solid learning." Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... 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 altogether the taste ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... Archbishop Laud or John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy "Every Man in his Humour" became the standard of action for two whole generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... of force, as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of the tragic [Greek: hubris]. Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious, of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Othello and indeed most of Shakespeare's heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament—the first of Shakespeare's heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute power, in which he has been flattered to ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... 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 ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... the animal painter, painted a sign for this. It is No. 267. Northward, at the corner of Church Street, is the Wheatsheaf, which, says Robins, "has the credit of having frequently entertained honest and learned Ben Jonson." ...
— Mayfair, Belgravia, and Bayswater - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... visible embodiment of a 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
... Wilberforce, among statesmen; of soldiers there are Prince Rupert and Monk; of Indian fame, here are Lord Lawrence and Lord Clyde; of sailors, Blake, Cloudesley Shovel, and Lord Dundonald. Of poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Prior, Addison, Gay, Campbell. Of historians and prose writers, Samuel Johnson, Macaulay, Dickens, Livingston, Isaac Newton. Many others there are to look for, notably the great poet Tennyson, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... Achim von Arnim. If we add to these characteristics the circumstance that, as Arnim's wife and as the mother of their rarely endowed children, she had become the centre of a distinguished and devoted circle in the Mark Brandenburg and in the Prussian capital, the distance separating us from Ben Jonson's attitude in his Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke is no longer very great: ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Shakespeare's power. Heroic himself, he was born into an age of heroes. You see it in his works. Not a play but gives patent evidence that to him all forms of human magnanimity were common and wayside flowers—among the humours of men which he and Ben Jonson used to wander forth together to observe. And thus he could give living action and speech to the ancient noblenesses of Rome and the Middle Age; for he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged in everything but in the dress. Had he known Greek ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... the Maker of all laws, Who hath commanded us we should not kill, And yet we say we must, for Reputation! What honest man can either fear his own, Or else will hurt another's reputation? Fear to do base unworthy things is valour; If they be done to us, to suffer them Is valour too.— BEN JONSON, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... doubt the accuracy of the phrase "employed to write for the court." Certain it is, the question I now raise was pressed then, as it was to satisfy Ben Jonson's want of information Selden wrote on the subject ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... 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 English ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Norgate, Jack Crofts and others. He composed the words for two New Year anthems which were set to music by Henry Lawes, and he was probably personally known both to the King and Queen. Outside the Court he reckoned himself one of Ben Jonson's disciples, "Sons of Ben" as they were called, had friends at the Inns of Court, knew the organist of Westminster Abbey and his pretty daughters, and had every temptation to live an amusing and expensive life. His poems were handed about in manuscript after the fashion of the time, and wherever ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... reign of King Charles the First. The royal family, with the lords and ladies, often took part themselves in the performances, and the cost to prepare costumes and sceneries for one occasion often amounted to ten thousand dollars. During Charles's reign, and preceding his, Ben Jonson wrote the plays, or masques, for Christmas. The court doings were, of course, copied outside by the people, and up to the twelfth night after Christmas, sports and feastings ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... 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 ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... [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 and pleased at ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... made no more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears—there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Celts are 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
... usual English manner may be illustrated by quoting a famous epigram—Ben Jonson's epitaph on a ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... them like criminals personally; makes friends with Mazarin and Powhatan, awards the office of Tax Assessor to Dick Turpin, and makes old Falstaff commander of his Imperial Guard. And just because poor Ben Jonson scribbled off a rhyme for my ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... during the early part of Charles the First's reign. It is true, that Milton descended to upbraid that unfortunate prince, that the chosen companion of his private hours was one William Shakespeare, a player; but Charles admitted less sacred poets to share his partiality. Ben Jonson supplied his court with masques, and his pageants with verses; and, notwithstanding an ill-natured story, shared no inconsiderable portion of his bounty.[8] Donne, a leader among the metaphysical poets, with whom King James had punned and quibbled in person.[9] shared, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... song of "Chevy-Chase" is the favourite ballad of the common people of England, and Ben Jonson used to say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works. Sir Philip Sidney, in his discourse of Poetry, speaks of it in the following words: "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart more moved than with a trumpet; and yet it ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... Unsupported anecdotes represent him as holding horses at the door of the play-house, then as a servant to the company, and at last as general utility man on the stage. As an actor he made no impression, although he continued to appear in subordinate parts, and played in Ben Jonson's "Sejanus" at its production in 1603, when he was forty years old. The first public notice he received was in 1592, in a letter of Robert Greene, a dissolute writer, who accuses Shakespeare and Marlowe of plagiarism, conceit, and ingratitude. Chettle, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of necessity follow such an undertaking, and contented himself with triumphing over me in my opinions of verse, which I will never hereafter dispute with him; but he must pardon me if I have that veneration for Aristotle, Horace, Ben Jonson, and Corneille, that I dare not serve him in such a cause, and against such heroes, but rather fight under their protection, as Homer reports of little Teucer, who shot the Trojans from under the large buckler of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... just as a character may be ineffective through being merely typical, so also a character may be unsignificant through being merely individual. The minor figures in Ben Jonson's Comedies of Humours are mere personifications of exaggerated individual traits. They are caricatures rather than characters. Dickens frequently commits the error of exhibiting figures devoid of ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... bloat-herring, and, after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him, with a pair of bellows! See! they begin to muster again, and draw their forces out against me! The genius of the place defend me!" — Ben Jonson's Masque "Mercury vindicated ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... 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
... 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, by {54} S. C., in which there is a remarkable notice of Cleveland, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... with Une Page d'Amour, and La Joie de Vivre, with the best things in L'Oeuvre, La Debacle, and Le Docteur Pascal. Students of English literature will remember how the doctrine of Furor poeticus was once applied to Ben Jonson by a commentator who, addressing him, pointed out that he was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages. There was always a good deal of furor prosaicus smouldering in Zola, and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames, alas! ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... converted into "copy." In those early days the flow of soul was closely regulated by the flow of liquor, and the most modest of Dinners was food at once to body and to mind. "What things," wrote Beaumont in his Letter to Ben Jonson— ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... belles lettres as the wickedness of sin and folly. Suckling's poems are few in number, and, with rare exceptions, are all brief. The most lengthy is the Sessions of the Poets, a satire upon the poets of his day, from rare Ben Jonson, with Carew and Davenant, down ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and true. Here is no small reward for a truly delightful holiday in country full of the best traditions of rural England. And the intelligent visitor will be one with the great lovers of Shakespeare, living and dead, from Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and Milton down to Matthew Arnold and our own contemporaries, even though his contribution to the poet's praise be no more than a little note in a private diary. His journey will open a fresh field of literary research, if he be not already a student of Elizabethan ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... 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 ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... Elizabethan day. We should recall that every colony of the original thirteen, except Georgia, was founded in the seventeenth century when the energy of that great and versatile period of the Virgin Queen had not yet dissipated itself. The spirit that moved Ben Jonson and Shakespeare to undertake the new and untried in literature was the same spirit that moved John Smith and his cavaliers to invade the Virginia wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to found a commonwealth for freedom's sake on a stern ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... 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, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of English authors in poetry and prose who were touched and kindled by the Horatian flame would amount to a review of the whole course of English literature. It would begin principally with Spenser and Ben Jonson, who in some measure represented in their land what the Pleiad meant in France, and Opitz and his following in Germany. "Steep yourselves in the classics," was Jonson's counsel, and his countrymen did thus steep themselves to such a degree that it is possible for the student ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... 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 ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Instauration of Knowledge, he was in the first rank as a speaker and a writer. Sir Walter Raleigh, contrasting him with Salisbury, who could speak but not write, and Northampton, who could write but not speak, thought Bacon eminent both as a speaker and a writer. Ben Jonson, passing in review the more famous names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir Thomas More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex, and Raleigh, places Bacon without a rival at the head of the company as the man who had "fulfilled all numbers," and "stood as the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... spiritual, reached such a degree of expansion as they had never before reached in the history of the world,— that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list of great names might be continued),—that great age, I say, was regarded by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous in comparison with their ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... old Liverpool; Leigh-street after the Leighs; Cases-street after the Cases. Mr. Rose, who projected many streets at the north end of the town on his extensive property, seems to have adopted the poets' names to distinguish his thoroughfares, as in Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Juvenal, Virgil, Dryden, Milton, Sawney (Alexander) Pope-street, etc. Meadows-street, Scotland-road, was named after Mr. William Meadows, who married six wives. His first wife lived two years. He next married Peggy Robinson, who lived twenty years, and bore him children; after being ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... John Elwes, Esquire, the admired Miser of these latter days. Sir Basil Hopwood was the rather of the same complexion of Entrails with that Signor Volpone whom we have all seen—at least such of us as be old Boys—in Ben Jonson's play of the Fox. He Money-grubbed, and Money-clutched, and Money-wrung, ay, and in a manner Money-stole, that he might live largely, and ruffle it among his brother Cits in surpassing state and splendour. He had been Lord Mayor; and on his Show-day the Equipments ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... 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
... 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 ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... I cannot resist recording my astonishment at finding in Ben Jonson the phrase "to have a good time" used in precisely the sense in which the American girl employs it to-day, or at learning from Macaulay that Bishop Cooper in the time of Queen Elizabeth spoke of a "platform" in its exact modern American ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... 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
... time, literature abounds in allusions to tobacco. The Elizabethan writers constantly refer to it, often in praise though sometimes in condemnation. The incoming of the "Indian weed" created a great furore, and scarcely any other of the New World discoveries was talked about so much. Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Fletcher, Spenser, Dekker, and many other of the poets and dramatists of the time, make frequent reference to it; and no doubt at the Mermaid tavern, pipes and tobacco found a place beside the sack and ale. Singular to say, Shakespeare ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... why the comedies of Ben Jonson, founded upon system, or what the age termed humours,—by which was meant factitious and affected characters, superinduced on that which was common to the rest of their race,—in spite of acute satire, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... Milton, Socrates, or Menu; seem not drawn from any private cistern, but rain-drops out of the pure sky. Whim and conceit are tare and tret. It matters little whether a man whine with Coleridge, or boast with Ben Jonson, or sneer with Byron, or grumble with Carlyle, if every thought is one-sided and warped. The oddity relieves our commonplace, and pricks the dull palate; but we soon tire of exaggeration, and detest the trick. It is egotism, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... of classic inspiration, drawn chiefly from Menander and the Greek New Comedy through Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, that have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy or otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massinger's Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type, 'with fat capon lined' that has been and will be; and he would be comic, as Panurge is comic, but only a Rabelais could set him moving with real animation. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his Faery Queene, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's school—such as Hawes's Passetyme of Pleasure—was the Induction contributed by Thomas Sackville, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Whitsuntide for very many centuries "sports" have been held in all parts of the country. It is said that they are the floralia of the Romans. Included in these sports are many of those amusements of the middle ages of which Ben Jonson sang: ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Ben Jonson. To Fine Grand " Brainhardy " Doctor Empiric " Sir Samuel Fuller On Banks, the Usurer " Chevril the Lawyer Epigrammatic Verses by Samuel Butler Opinion Critics Hypocrisy Polish The Godly Piety Poets Puffing Politicians Fear The Law ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... was William Drummond, a descendant of the Drummonds of Carnock, son of Sir John Drummond of Hawthornden, and author of the "History of the Five James's," Kings of Scotland.[210] The friend of Drayton, and of Ben Jonson, this man of rare virtues presents one of the brightest examples of that class to which he belonged, the Scottish country-gentleman. True-hearted, like the rest of his race, Drummond was never called forth from a retirement over which virtue ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... Ben Jonson never penned a more delicate or classical compliment, albeit it halteth a little. Let us then submit to the better judgment of our brethren, and bow down promiscuously before any brazen calf which their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to Westminster Abbey, where we spent two hours under the guidance of Archdeacon Farrar. I think no part of the Abbey is visited with so much interest as Poets' Corner. We are all familiarly acquainted with it beforehand. We are all ready for "O rare Ben Jonson!" as we stand over the place where he was planted standing upright, as if he had been dropped into a post-hole. We remember too well the foolish and flippant mockery of Gay's "Life is a Jest." If I were dean of the cathedral, I should ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... idiomatic Scottish dialogue in the novels might be possibly disparaged (like Ben Jonson) as 'mere humours and observation.' Novelists of lower rank than Scott—Galt in The Ayrshire Legatees and Annals of the Parish and The Entail—have nearly rivalled Scott in reporting conversation. But the Bailie at any rate has his part to play in the story of Rob Roy—and so has ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... is this that haunts me like my shadow, Frisking and mumming like an elf in moonlight! —BEN JONSON. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... a poet 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 ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be, Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall at last a log, dry, bald, and sear. A lily of a day Is fairer far, in May. BEN JONSON. ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... 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 in 1573 and attempted ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... BEN JONSON.—Ben Jonson, classical, exact, pretty faithful imitator of the writers of antiquity, interested in unusual characters and customs, gifted with a ready and lively imagination in both comedy and tragedy like Shakespeare, succeeded especially in comedy (Every Man in his Humour, The Silent ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... 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 of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... at my old Handel of nights, and delight in the Allegro and Penseroso, full of pomp and fancy. What a pity Handel could not have written music to some great Masque, such as Ben Jonson or Milton would have written, if they had known of such ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... with me from the Court. I was scarce able to keep up with him; could once have done it well enough. Funny thing at the Theatre. Among the discourse in "High Life below Stairs,"[481] one of the ladies' ladies asks who wrote Shakespeare. One says, "Ben Jonson," another, "Finis." "No," said Will Murray, "it is Sir Walter Scott; he confessed it at a public meeting the other day." March 3.—Very severe weather, came home covered with snow. White as a frosted-plum-cake, by jingo! No matter; I am not sorry to find I can stand a brush of weather yet; I ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and knew German books more cordially than any other person, she was little read in Shakspeare; and I believe I had the pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite enough to give me the right to lead her. She fancied that ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... have been rainy, and to-day there is more rain. We find such weather as tolerable here as it would probably be anywhere; but it passes rather heavily with the children,—and for myself, I should prefer sunshine. Though Mr. White's books afford me some entertainment, especially an odd volume of Ben Jonson's plays, containing "Volpone," "The Alchemist," "Bartholomew Fair," and others. "The Alchemist" is certainly a great play. We watch all arrivals and other events from our parlor window,—a stage-coach driving up four times in the twenty-four hours, with its forlorn outsiders, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recorded that Queen Elizabeth, in 1601, then an old woman, witnessed one of these plays, entitled "The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality." This was written by Lodge and Greene, two of the regular dramatists, after Ben Jonson had written "Every Man in his Humour," and while Shakspeare was writing Hamlet. Thus the various progressive forms of the drama overlapped each other, the older retaining its place until the younger gained strength to assert its rights and supersede ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... moment came. It seemed to me, when I read this book, as if life were too rotten for any belief, a nest of sharpers, adulterers, cut-throats, and prostitutes. There was none—as far as I remember—of that amiable weakness, of that better sentiment, which in Ben Jonson or Massinger reconcile us to human nature. If truth be a test of genius, it must be a proof of true poetry, that man is not made uglier than he is. Nay, his very ugliness loses its intensity and palls upon our diseased tastes, for want of some goodness, some purity and honesty to relieve ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Francis Beaumont. John Lyly. John Fletcher. Thomas Kyd. John Webster. Robert Greene. Philip Massinger. Christopher Marlowe. John Ford. William Shakespeare. Thomas Heywood. Ben Jonson. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the only adversary whom Dryden had to encounter on this occasion. Thomas Shadwell, a man of some talents for comedy, and who professed to tread in the footsteps of Ben Jonson, had for some time been at variance with Dryden and Otway. He was probably the author of a poem, entitled, "A Lenten Prologue, refused by the Players;" which is marked by Mr Luttrel, 11th April, 1683, and contains ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... languages) and Mr. Farnaby ... procured me a fair copy from the famous library of St. James's, and a manuscript copy from our herald of learning, Mr. Camden. My dear friend, the patriarch of our poets, Ben Jonson, sent in an ancient manuscript partly written in the Saxon character." Then follow names of less note, Casaubon, Anyan, Price.[368] Dryden tells the same story. He has been permitted to consult the Earl of Lauderdale's manuscript translation of Virgil. "Besides this help, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Trundle, a ballad-printer in Barbican in the seventeenth century [and who seems to have accompanied our author as far as Whetstone on his "Penniless Pilgrimage"—and, certainly up to this point a very "wet" one!] In one of Ben Jonson's plays Nobody is introduced, "attyred in a payre of Breeches, which were made to come up to his neck, with his armes out at his pockets and cap drowning his face." This comedy was "printed for John Trundle and are to be sold at his shop in Barbican at the ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... of his human relationships. He is described as "gentle." Had he been not gentle we should know more of him. Ben Jonson "loved the man," and says that "he was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature." John Webster speaks of his "right happy and copious industry." An actor who wrote more than thirty plays during twenty years of rehearsing, acting, and theatre management, can have ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... visited New York, Boston, Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto. In Winnipeg I found a friend, who was tired of cities. So was I. In Canada the remedy lies close at hand. We took ancient clothes—and I, Ben Jonson and Jane Austen to keep me English—and departed northward for a lodge, reported to exist in a region of lakes and hills and forests and caribou and Indians and a few people. At first the train sauntered through ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... "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 Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... drawing out a private key, unlocked the casket, raised the lid, and produced a golden goblet of a singular and antique appearance, moulded into the shape of a rampant bear, which the owner regarded with a look of mingled reverence, pride, and delight, that irresistibly reminded Waverley of Ben Jonson's Tom Otter, with his Bull, Horse, and Dog, as that wag wittily denominated his chief carousing cups. But Mr. Bradwardine, turning towards him with complacency, requested him to observe this curious relic of ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... popular note grows fainter and 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 place to the ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... time, there were people In Ireland, (there may be so still, for aught I know,) who undertook to charm rats to death, by chanting certain verses which acted as a spell. "Rhyme them to death, as they do rats in Ireland," is a line in one of Ben Jonson's comedies; this will ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... mythology were at that time very popular among people of culture, having been recently brought to notice in the revival of classic learning. In Italy they furnished themes for the painter; in England, for the poet. The English Ben Jonson, living a half a century later than Correggio,[12] but representing in a certain measure the same love of classic allusion, wrote a "Hymn to Diana," which might have been inspired by this picture. The first stanza may be quoted ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... combustible temper, this serious anger for no very serious things, things looked on by most as foreign to the important points of life, as consequentially flows that inheritance of ridicule, which devolves on them, from generation to generation. As soon as they become authors, they become like Ben Jonson's angry boy, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... and "Iscariot" be good rhymes, but must say, as Ben Jonson did to Sylvester, who challenged him ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... throughout his life his readers knew and admitted his worth. The chorus of praise continued from people of all classes. John Weever, the epigrammatist, and Richard Camden, the antiquarian, praised Shakespeare highly, and Michael Drayton, the poet, called him "perfection in a man." Finally, Ben Jonson, his most famous competitor for public applause, crowned our poet's fame with his poem, prefixed to the first collected edition of Shakespeare's famous First Folio of 1623: "To the Memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... 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 ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... free use of his pen, and it has been usually regarded as his best critical work. With ridicule of the affectations of historians whose names and whose books have passed into oblivion, he joins sound doctrine upon sincerity of style. "Nothing is lasting that is feigned," said Ben Jonson; "it will have another face ere long." Long after Lucian's day an artificial dignity, accorded specially to work of the historian, bound him by its conventions to an artificial style. He used, as Johnson said of Dr. Robertson, "too big words ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... one of these the poet chides the zephyr for having stolen its sweetness while playing with the beloved's loose tresses. In another, a youth declares that if he should die and the fragrance of his beloved's locks were wafted over his grave, it would bring him back to life. Ben Jonson's famous lines ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... The freshest of Ben Jonson's lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it is freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his emphatic initiative, and his overbearing and impulsive voice in verse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... 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 ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp |
