"Jonson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... herself as "very sorry to leave," she drove to Roslin Chapel, where twenty "barons bold" of the house of St. Clair wear shirts of mail for shrouds, then went on to storied Hawthornden—a wooded nest hung high over the water, where the poet Drummond entertained his English brother-of-the-pen, Ben Jonson. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... Purple Island (1633). But on the whole it was not until French influences had made themselves felt on English poetry, that description, as Boileau conceived it, was cultivated as a distinct art. The Cooper's Hill (1642) of Sir John Denham may be contrasted with the less ambitious Penshurst of Ben Jonson, and the one represents the new no less completely than the other does the old generation. If, however, we examine Cooper's Hill carefully, we perceive that its aim is after all rather philosophical than topographical. The Thames is described indeed, but not very minutely, and the poet ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... well worth looking at. Prince Henry of Wales, tall, comely, open-faced, and well-built, a noble lad of eighteen who called to men's minds, so "rare Ben Jonson" says, the memory of the ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... 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
... 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
... 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
... Ben Jonson? He was first a brick-layer, or mason! What was he in after years? 'Tis needless ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... became excessive, and in Cromwell's time, with the accession of the Puritans to power, like a hundred other brilliant traits of the old English life from whose abuse had grown riot, it was purged away. Ben Jonson, in The Staple of Newes, puts into the mouth of a sour character a complaint which no doubt was becoming common in that day, and was probably well ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... 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.
... "meadows trim with daisies pied," the sly intent of the Hawaiian, even when pointed out, will, no doubt, seem an inconsequential thing and the demonstration of it an impertinence, if not a fiction to the imagination. Its euphemisms in reality have no baser intent than the euphuisms of Lyly, Ben Jonson, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... "Jonson, dear boy," the Queen said. "Really a remarkable man—and such a good friend to poor Will. Why, did you ever hear the story of how he actually paid Will's rent in London once upon a time? That was while Will and that Anne ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... that it is associated with names of the first rank in literature, with Theocritus and Vergil, with Petrarch, Politian, and Tasso, with Cervantes and Lope de Vega, with Ronsard and Marot, with Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Milton; nor yet that works such as the Idyls, the Aminta, the Faithful Shepherdess, and Lycidas contain some of the most graceful and perfect verse to be found in any language. Rather is its importance to be sought in the fact that the form is the expression of instincts and impulses ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Mounting aloft, he wings his daring flight, Whilst Sophocles below stands trembling at his height. 220 Why should we then abroad for judges roam, When abler judges we may find at home? Happy in tragic and in comic powers, Have we not Shakspeare?—Is not Jonson ours? For them, your natural judges, Britons, vote; They'll judge like Britons, who like Britons wrote. He said, and conquer'd—Sense resumed her sway, And disappointed pedants stalk'd away. Shakspeare and ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Arlington Robinson: "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford," in his Man Against ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... been tould that theare growethe in the land bothe tulipes and narsisus. By a Brabander I was tould it, thoug by his name I should rather think him a Holander. His name is Jonson, and hathe a house at Archangell. He may be eyther, for he [is] always dr[u]ke once in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... Westminster Abbey, close to the resting-place of Ben Jonson, rest the remains of John Hunter (1728-1793), famous in the annals of medicine as among the greatest physiologists and surgeons that the world has ever produced: a man whose discoveries and inventions are ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... flourished their staves, and drove us towards the grand entrance like a flock of sheep. Lingering through one of the aisles, I happened to look down, and found my foot upon a stone inscribed with this familiar exclamation, "O rare Ben Jonson!" and remembered the story of stout old Ben's burial in that spot, standing upright,—not, I presume, on account of any unseemly reluctance on his part to lie down in the dust, like other men, but because ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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, the publisher, soon afterward printed a ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Lady Venetia Digby" can be an autograph. I have reason to think that he is right from discovering another MS. written in the same hand as the above, and containing two poems without date or signature, neither of which (I believe) are Ben Jonson's. I enclose the shorter of the two, and should feel obliged if any of your correspondents could tell me the author of it, as this would throw some light upon the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... Train, let me embrace thee!" Later on Calista says to Mrs. Pix, the fat tailoress, "I cannot but remind you, Madam ... I read Aristotle in his own language"; and of a certain tirade in a play of Ben Jonson she insists: "I know it so well, as to have turn'd it into Latin." Mrs. Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she "can go no further than the eight parts of speech." This brings down upon her an icy reproof from Calista: "Then I cannot but take the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... flourish exceedingly, except Butterwoort, which groweth in our English squally wet grounds,"—('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it nearly: "Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"—and note farther that the word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... order. Some were distinctly irreligious, as were many of the people whose lives they touched. Such men as Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, Webster, Beaumont, and Fletcher stand like a chorus around Shakespeare and Ben Jonson as leaders. As Taine puts it: "They sing the same piece together, and at times the chorus is equal to the solo; but only at times."[1] Cultured people to-day know the names of most of these writers, but not ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... 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, and Pope, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes sarcastically, soon after the Faery Queen appeared, of ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... 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, deep scholarship, and strong sense, do not now afford general pleasure, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... 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
... considerable eminence in his day, born at Tavistock, in the year 1590. He was noticed by Selden, Drayton, Brooke, Glanville, and Ben Jonson. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... shall I say 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 ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... doubt lost; a loss to be borne with less equanimity than that of Cicero's treatise De Gloria, once possessed by Petrarch. The passage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and reminds one of the long-breathed periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, "he [Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's 'Calendar,' about wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and Piers).[285] These verses are in this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having the approval of dear old Ben, the best critic of the day, and because they ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... with thine eyes, And I will pledge thee mine; Or leave a kiss within the cup, And I'll not look for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine; But might I of Jove's nectar sip, I would not change from thine. —Ben Jonson. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... perceshen and a great variety of banners. Among the most noticeable, wuz a company uv solgers uv the late war, each with a leg off, dressed in the gray uniforms into wich they hed been mustered out, with this motto: "We are willin to go the other leg for A. Jonson." Another company uv solgers, who hed each lost an arm, carried this inscription: "What we didn't get by bullets, we ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... courtier on the coals, like a sausage or a bloat-herring, and, after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him, with a pair of bellows! See! they begin to muster again, and draw their forces out against me! The genius of the place defend me!" — Ben Jonson's Masque ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... and Radirobanes are the names of the king of Spain; Hyanisbe is Queen Elizabeth; Mergania, by an easy anagram, is Germany; Usinulca, by another, is Calvin. The book is of historical importance in the development of 17th century romance, including especially Fenelon's Telemaque. Ben Jonson appears, from an entry at Stationers' Hall on the 2nd of October 1623, to have intended to make a translation. Barclay's shorter poems, in two books, were printed in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (Amsterdam, 1637, i. pp. 76-136). In the dedication, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... hours of convivial relaxation, between the family of the lord and 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... favour as Blackmore and Quarles, they showed themselves to be as uncouth and unpolished as the animal to which he likens them. But the principal motive of this inquiry is to ascertain whether there exist in their writings any record of the indignation supposed to have been expressed by Jonson and Dennis at the favour shown by majesty to their ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... the present day no introduction or commendation to American readers. Their place is established, and they will hold it permanently, in spite of the wild philosophy, and in spite of characteristics of style which would ruin weaker writings. As Ben Jonson said of a volume of poems, now quite forgotten, by his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Drayton's Dedication 3 Upon the Battaile of Agincourt, by I. Vaughan 5 Sonnet to Michael Drayton, By John Reynolds 7 The Vision of Ben Jonson on the Muses of his Friend M. Drayton 9 The Battaile of Agincourt 13 To my Frinds the Camber-Britans and theyr Harp ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... record of almost universal gloom. The names of Spenser, of Butler, and of Otway, are enough to remind us that even warm contemporary recognition was not enough to raise an author above the fear of dying in want of necessaries. The two great dictators of literature, Ben Jonson in the earlier and Dryden in the later part of the century, only kept their heads above water by help of the laureate's pittance, though reckless imprudence, encouraged by the precarious life, was the cause of much of their sufferings. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the 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 and too many of them." But that was said by Johnson ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... who was a poet,—Delany, and he was an Irishman. This barrenness, I have shown, is not attributable to the poverty of the soil, but to the want of due cultivation. Materials are at hand in abundance, but there have been few operators. Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson have all dealt largely in this jargon, but not lyrically; and one of the earliest and best specimens of a canting-song occurs in Brome's "Jovial Crew;" and in the "Adventures of Bamfylde Moore Carew" there is a solitary ode, addressed by the mendicant fraternity ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... scene, Clout, one of the characters, rejects with some indignation the offer of "half a share." Gamaliel Ratsey, in that rare tract, Ratseis Ghost, 1606, knights the principal performer of a company by the title of "Sir Three Shares and a Half;" and Tucca, in Ben Jonson's Poetaster, addressing Histrio, observes, "Commend me to Seven shares and a half," as if some individual at that period had engrossed as large a proportion. Shakspeare, in Hamlet, speaks of "a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... 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 ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... the original thirteen, except Georgia, was founded in the seventeenth century when the energy of that great and versatile period of the Virgin Queen had not yet dissipated itself. The spirit that moved Ben Jonson and Shakespeare to undertake the new and untried in literature was the same spirit that moved John Smith and his cavaliers to invade the Virginia wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to found a commonwealth for freedom's sake on a stern and rock-bound coast. It was ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... forgotten custom is very obscure: the putter out must be a traveller, else how could he give this account? the five for one is money to be received by him at his return, Mr. Theobald has well illustrated this passage by a quotation from Jonson. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... age, too, not only of brave deeds but of high thoughts. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson were making English literature the noblest of all literatures. Furthermore, Shakespeare had no equal as a teacher of English history. His historical plays appealed then, as they do now, to every heart. ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... 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, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... monument 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 ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... And I am not thinking of the mechanical difficulty of composition in verse: I am thinking of the simple product in thought. Could Bacon have extemporized at the pace of talking, one of his Essays? Or does not Ben Jonson sum up just those characteristics which extempore composition (even the best) entirely wants, when he tells us of Bacon that 'no man ever wrote more neatly, more pressly; nor suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in that he uttered?' I take it for granted, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... 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, fuming towards him with complacency, requested him to observe this curious ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... ignorant of the great names which illuminate the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do not know whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would be puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin or Ben Jonson who invented lightning—think it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether they lived before or after Christ, and indeed never have thought that anything happened before the time of Christ; do not know who ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... console or satisfy us for such a most unaccountable, not to say unnatural and unwarrantable, a dispensation. The poets have ministered largely to this vanity on the part of mankind. Shakspere is constantly at it, and Ben Jonson, and all the dramatists. Not a butcher, in the whole long line of the butchering Caesars, from Augustus down, but, according to them, died in a sort of gloom glory, resulting from the explosion of innumerable stars and rockets, and the apparitions of as many comets! "Gorgons, and ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... 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 ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... again into the Magazine, but I feel the spirit of the thing in my own mind quite gone. "Some brains" (I think Ben Jonson says it) "will endure but one skimming." We are about to have an inundation of poetry from the Lakes, Wordsworth and Southey are coming up strong from the North. The she Coleridges have taken flight, to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... acquired an infamy which unfits them for publication in a decent family newspaper; and Shakspere himself, reposing in Elysium on his bed of asphodel and moly, omits them when reading his complete works to the shades of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, for their sins. ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... but by such legends our ancestors were amused and interested, till their belief respecting the demons of the Holy Land seems to have been not very far different from that expressed in the title of Ben Jonson's play, "The Devil is ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... English history,—but not a whit less considerable because it was cheap and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field: Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... speech during these readings. He would sometimes bend his brows and shut his eyes, endeavoring to recall a favorite passage, as if he were at his own library table. One day, after searching thus in vain for a passage from Ben Jonson, he said: "It is all the more provoking as I do not doubt many a friend here might ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... paper could make it worthy. But this is only to be found in second-hand book-shops. Why are two rival London houses now publishing editions of Scott, the better illustrated with silly pictures "out of the artists' heads"? Where is the final edition of Ben Jonson? ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... appearance, with towers at the corners built of brown stone; in it the Earl of Newcastle, who subsequently inherited it, spent on one occasion $75,000 in entertaining King Charles I., the entire country round being invited to come and attend the king: Ben Jonson performed a play for his amusement. Lord Clarendon speaks of the occasion as "such an excess of feasting as had scarce ever been known in England before." It now belongs to the Duke of Portland, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... 'Wardlaw whipped before him,' 'Ransome whipped before it;'" but the Princess in Love's Labour's Lost is guilty of saying, "Whip to our tents, as roes run o'er the land," and the word occurs in the same sense in Ben Jonson and Steele, to search no further. The simple fact is that Mr. Tucker has not happened to note the intransitive sense of "to fling" and "to whip," which has been current in the best authors for centuries. He is ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... debates where critics bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson's art, Of Shakspeare's nature, and of Cowley's wit; How Beaumont's judgment checked what Fletcher writ; How Shadwell hasty, Wycherley was slow; But for the passions, Southerne, sure, and Rowe! These, only these, support the crowded stage, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the man which have made him odious to all after-ages, so that modern poets have made him a stock character, and have dramatized him as a fiend. Voltaire has described him as calling upon his fellow-conspirators to murder Cicero and Cato, and to burn the city. Ben Jonson makes Catiline kill a slave and mix his blood, to be drained by his friends. "There cannot be a fitter drink to make this sanction in." The friends of Catiline will say that this shows no evidence against the man. None, certainly; but it is a continued expression of the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... the persons and proceedings of their juntoes and cabals? How would their weekly writers have been calling out for prosecution and punishment? We remember when a poor nickname,[3] borrowed from an old play of Ben Jonson, and mentioned in a sermon without any particular application, was made use of as a motive to spur an impeachment. But after all, it must be confessed, they had reasons to be thus severe, which their successors have not: their faults would never endure ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... 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 Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... unbuttoned after dinner—I bid you turn the pages with a slow thumb, not to miss the slightest tang of their humor. You will of course go first, because of its broad fame, to the page on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and their wet-combats at the Mermaid. But before the night is too far gone and while yet you can hold yourself from nodding, you will please read about Captain John Smith of Virginia and his "strange performances, the scene whereof is laid at such a distance, ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... 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, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... he advanced. He never suppressed a flash of indignant sarcasm for fear of startling the "genteel" classes and Mrs. Grundy. He never aped aristocracy in his household. He would go to a tavern for his oysters and a glass of punches simply as they did in Ben Jonson's days; and I have heard of his doing so from a sensation of boredom at a very great house indeed,—a house for the sake of an admission to which, half Bayswater would sell their grandmothers' bones to a surgeon. This kind of thing stamped him in our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... by Barrow a rascally delight. But this is no new form of malice. "Avant nous," says the sagacious but iron-hearted Montluc—"avant nous ces envies ont regne, et regneront encore apres nous, si Dieu ne nous voulait tous refondre." Its worst effect is that which Ben Jonson remarked: "The gentle reader," says he, "rests happy to hear the worthiest works misrepresented, the clearest actions obscured, the innocentest life traduced; and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... who object my frequent use of drums and trumpets, and my representations of battles, I answer, I introduced them not on the English stage: Shakespeare used them frequently; and though Jonson shews no battle in his "Catiline," yet you hear from behind the scenes the sounding of trumpets, and the shouts of fighting armies. But, I add farther, that these warlike instruments, and even their presentations of fighting on the stage, are no more than necessary ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... may 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 later, to "subliming" marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury, early in the eighteenth century, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... the very comedy for which Ben Jonson left us, because we would not put it on, has been taken up by the Burbages on Will Shakspere's say-so, and is running famously at ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... some few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton, with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... a bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touched it? Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the snow, Before the soil hath smutch'd it? BEN JONSON. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... harmless character. In the Black Forest, according to Ploss and Bartels, a pregnant woman may go freely into other people's gardens and take fruit, provided she eats it on the spot, and very similar privileges are accorded to her elsewhere. Old English opinion, as reflected, for instance, in Ben Jonson's plays (as Dr. Harriet C.B. Alexander has pointed out), regards the pregnant woman as not responsible for her longings, and Kiernan remarks ("Kleptomania and Collectivism," Alienist and Neurologist, November, 1902) that this is in "a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... events, arguments and appeals that he had ever heard or read or written seemed to pass before his mind as oratorical weapons, and standing there he had but to reach forth his hand and "seize the weapons as they went smoking by." Ben Jonson could repeat all he had written. Scaliger memorized the Iliad in three weeks. Locke says: "Without memory, man is a perpetual infant." Quintilian and Aristotle regarded it as a measure ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... "Henry VIII," and being delightfully ignorant I had the great interest of reading the same period (Henry VIII) in Holinshed, and in finding Katharine's and Wolsey's speeches there! Then I have tried a little Ben Jonson and Lord Chesterfield's letters. What a worldling, and what a destroyer of a young mind that man was. Can you tell me how the son turned out? I cannot find any information about him. The language is delightful, and I wish I could remember any of his expressions.... Now ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... nicht, dass er auch dieses zu nutzen gesucht, wie sein 'Cato' es beweise. Denn eben dieses, dass er den Addisonschen 'Cato' fr das beste englische Trauerspiel hlt,[5] zeiget deutlich, dass er hier nur mit den Augen der Franzosen gesehen und damals keinen Shakespeare, keinen Jonson, keinen Beaumont und Fletcher u.s.w. gekannt hat, die er hernach aus Stolz auch nicht hat ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... the characters in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humor who assumed the dress and tried to pass himself off ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... in their mother tongue, and takes his place as an immortal classic. The miracle may be repeated; an English-educated Hindu may produce masterpieces of Elizabethan English that will rank him with Bacon and Ben Jonson; but it will surprise us, when it does happen. That Lucian was himself aware of the awful dangers besetting the writer who would revive an obsolete fashion of speech ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... withdrawn, the quietude of the gardens lured from their chambers scholars and poets, who under murmuring branches pondered the results of past study, or planned new works. Ben Jonson was accustomed to saunter beneath the elms of Lincoln's Inn; and Steele—alike on 'open' and 'close' days—used to frequent the gardens of the same society. "I went," he writes in May, 1809, "into Lincoln's Inn Walks, and having ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear. A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night— It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be. —BEN JONSON ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... affectation arises from hypocrisy, than when from vanity; for to discover any one to be the exact reverse of what he affects, is more surprizing, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he desires the reputation of. I might observe that our Ben Jonson, who of all men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... 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
... 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 ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walking through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget the great poet Edmund Spenser, who, a victim to barbarity, died there, in destitution and grief. Ben Jonson's terse record of that calamity says: "The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King Street." Ben Jonson is closely associated with places that can still be seen. He passed ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... Italy, carries us to the year 1846. But before going on with the history of that year, there are one or two points to be taken up in the history of 1845. The first is the performance, on the 21st of September, of Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in his Humour," by a select company of amateur actors, among whom Dickens held chief place. "He was the life and soul of the entire affair," says Forster. "I never seem till then to have known his business capabilities. He took everything on ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... who could say what was really "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy "Every Man in his Humour" became the standard of action for two whole generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... produced in his old age, for it was not published, I believe, till 1627, when it formed part of a small folio volume, containing The Battaile of Agincourt and The Miseries of Queene Margarite. Prefixed to this volume was the noble but tardy panegyric of his friend Ben Jonson, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... in us the sympathy which we feel for Milton in his old age doing battle against a Philistine reaction, or for Spenser overwhelmed with calamities at the end of a life full of bitter disappointment. But at least we may look upon it with the respectful pity which we entertain for Ben Jonson groaning in the midst of his literary honours under that dura rerum necessitas, which is rarely more a matter of indifference to poets than it ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... meditative, philosophic plant May best luxuriate; yet some would say That in the task of limning mortal life A fitter preparation might be made Beside the banks of Thames. And then again, If I be suspect, in that I was not A fellow of a college, how, I pray, Will Jonson pass, or Marlowe, or the rest, Whose measured verse treads with as proud a gait As that which was my own? Whence did they suck This honey that they stored? Can you recite The vantages which each of these has had And I had not? Or is the argument [104] That my Lord Verulam hath written all, And covers ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... in the hall. She had a bunch of violets in her belt, he remembered. He said over softly Ben Jonson's quaint lines,— ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... playwrights were quick to seize the salient absurdities of such an advertisement. In The Staple of News Jonson proposed a News Trust to collect all the news of the world, corner it, classify it into authentic, apocryphal, barber's gossip, and so forth, and then sell it, for the sole benefit of the consumer, in lengths to suit all purchasers. In The Devil is an Ass he is a little ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... and Mr. Bucke, and General Butler, and Mr. Atkinson, who writes in 'The Spiritualist,' and Mrs. Gallup, and Judge Webb, Mr. Smith rested, first, on Shakespeare's lack of education, and on the wide learning of the author of the poems and plays. Now, Ben Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon, averred that the former had 'small Latin and less Greek,' doubtless with truth. It was necessary, therefore, to prove that the author of the plays had plenty of Latin and Greek. Here Mr. John Churton Collins suggests that Ben meant ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... 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
... the restless state of a lover"), "as novises newly sprung out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch" (Puttenham's Art of Poesie, 1589, pp. 48-50); and later again, Daniel ("To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford"), Ben Jonson, and Milton (Psalms ii., vi.) afford specimens of terza rima. There was, too, one among Byron's contemporaries who had already made trial of the metre in his Prince Athanase (1817) and The Woodman and the Nightingale (1818), and who, shortly, in his Ode to the West Wind (October, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... tablets all over the floor, under our feet! Look, I'm standing on Dickens' grave this very minute! And there's 'Oh, Rare Ben Jonson,' right there on the wall; I've always heard of that. And here's Spenser, and Chaucer, and Browning, and Tennyson, very close together. Oh! It's dreadful! I don't want to step on them! Why, everybody who ever was anybody seems to be here!" gasped John, forgetting his grammar ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... Cf. the quotation from Jonson below. Scott says here: "Everything belonging to the chase was matter of solemnity among our ancestors; but nothing was more so than the mode of cutting up, or, as it was technically called, breaking, the slaughtered stag. The forester had his allotted ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... skill; when I was drawing the outlines of an art, without any living 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 ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... speedily, and as the meeting breaks up one of the younger fellows whispers to another, "Shakespeare was sent us from Heaven, but Jonson from—College." ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic and assafoetida with which Byron, Fielding, and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature. English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this point human nature intervened; poor human ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... "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.' ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... British Poets from Ben Jonson to Beattie. New Edition; with Biographical and Critical Prefaces, and Selections ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... foremost as a national poet. His humanity is too calm and broad to suffer the prejudices and exclusions of international enmities. The sovereignty that he holds has been allowed to him by men of all parties. The schools of literature have, from the very first, united in his praise. Ben Jonson, who knew him and loved him, was a classical scholar, and disapproved of some of his romantic escapades, yet no one will ever outgo Ben Jonson's praise ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... 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 ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... sparkling wit has charmed the world. If only we had space here to assign to the Erasmus of the Colloquies his just and lofty place in that brilliant constellation of sixteenth-century followers of Democritus: Rabelais, Ariosto, Montaigne, Cervantes, and Ben Jonson! ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... 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, the Conversation between Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, Spence's Anecdotes of Pope, and other valuable remains in our own language. How delighted should we have been, if thus introduced into the company of Shakespeare and of Dryden, of whom we know ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... calamity by the abundant kindness of the people of Sydney, concocted plans for bringing destruction upon their benefactors, and proffered their services to show the way. One thinks perforce of a rough speech of Dol Common in Ben Jonson's Alchemist: ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Ben Jonson were vagrants, deserving of the stocks; poetry was foolishness; law, politics, and money-making the sole occupations worthy of a masculine and vigorous mind. "For a profound knowledge of the common law of England," says the biographer, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... been 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 of ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... 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, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the emoluments appear uncertain, as will be seen by Gifford's statement relative to the amount paid to B. Jonson, vol. i. cxi.:— ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... 30. Ben Jonson, a friend of Shakespeare's, wrote of him, "He was not of an age, but for all time." What ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Ben Jonson's Alchemist having taken gold from Abel Drugger, the Tobacco Man, for the device of a sign—'a good lucky one, a thriving sign'—will give him nothing so commonplace as a sign copied from the constellation he was ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... prompted in a practical voice. It was well a practical remark fitted the occasion for the line from old Ben Jonson, which David had only a few hours ago accused him of plagiarizing, rose to the surface of his mind. Such deep wells of eyes he had never looked into in all his life before, and they were as ever, filled to the brim with reverence, ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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
... of the church of St. Mary le Bow in Cheapside. So far back as Ben Jonson's time (Eastward Ho, I, ii, 36) it was the mark of the unfashionable middle-class citizen to live in this quarter. A "wit" in Queen Anne's day would have scorned ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... gallant Cecil, to be called Earl of Wimbledon; gallant Sir John Burroughs, gallant Sir Hatton Cheek,—it is still their way. Deathless military renowns are gathered there in this manner; deathless for the moment. Did not Ben Jonson, in his young hard days, bear arms very manfully as a private soldado there? Ben, who now writes learned plays and court-masks as Poet Laureate, served manfully with pike and sword there, for his groat a day with rations. And once when a Spanish soldier came ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... 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, Barrow, Bunyan, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... in Shakespeare explained by our author would fill a volume like this itself. Other writers, again, simply "lift" the book wholesale. Chester and Du Bartas write page after page of rhyme, all but versified direct from Bartholomew. Jonson and Spenser, Marlowe and Massinger, make ample use of him. Lyly and Drayton owe him a heavy debt. Considerations of space forbid their insertion, but for every extract made here, the Editor has collected several passages from first-class authors ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... that driven down With beer and butter-milk, mingled together. It is against my freehold, my inheritance. Wine is the word that glads the heart of man, And mine's the house of wine. Sack, says my bush, Be merry and drink Sherry, that's my posie. Ben Jonson's New Inn. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Daniel. Princess Elizabeth and Descartes. Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz. Lady Jane Grey and Elmer. Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton. Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier. Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer. Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson. Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson. Countess Ranelagh and Milton. Duchess of Queensbury and Gay. Relations with Women, of Sophocles, Virgil, Frauenlob, Bernadin St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Jean Paul Richter. Rahel Levin and her Friendships with Men. Madame Recamier and her Friendships with ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... plunge away 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
... I will finish by reciting to you the lines old Ben Jonson addressed to the pretty girls of his time, which form an appropriate ending to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... to know what those who have an answer to everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... note, in reference to this passage, appears, in Mr. Gifford's hand-writing, on the copy of the above letter:—"It is a pity that Lord B. was ignorant of Jonson. The old poet has a Satire on the Court Pucelle that would have supplied him with ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of the loveliest music, and even in some cases that of comparatively recent times, are unknown to us. This is the case for instance with the exquisite song "Drink to me only with thine eyes," the words of which were taken by Jonson from Philostratus, and which has been considered as the most beautiful of all ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... nothing of borrowing from The Misanthrope and The Forced Marriage. The preface was, besides political difference, the chief cause of the quarrel between Shadwell and Dryden; for in it the former defends Ben Jonson against the latter, and mentions that—"I have known some of late so insolent to say that Ben Jonson wrote his best playes without wit, imagining that all the wit playes consisted in bringing two persons upon the stage to break jest, and to bob one ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... 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
... in one of Ben Jonson's old plays: "When I once take the humor of a thing, I am like your tailor's needle—I ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... chaplain and parasite, one Dr. Warner, than whom Plautus, or Ben Jonson, or Hogarth, never painted a better character. In letter after letter he adds fresh strokes to the portrait of himself, and completes a portrait not a little curious to look at now that the man has passed away; all the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young friend is largely the theme of a poem, Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... popularity. Its learning and gravity made it better suited to be the oracle of scholars than the organ of a party. Compared with its adversary across the Tweed, it was like a ponderous knight, cased in complete steel, attacking an agile, light-armed Moorish cavalier; or, to use Ben Jonson's illustration, like a Spanish great galleon opposed to the facile manoeuvres of a British man-of-war. For such an enemy there were needed other weapons. Well might the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... to suspect that the crowning glory of Elizabeth's reign was to be the work of playwrights; yet before she died the genius of Marlowe had blazed and been quenched, Hamlet had appeared on the boards, Jonson's "learned sock" had achieved fame; the men whose names we are wont to associate with the "Mermaid" had most of them already begun their career, even if they had not yet passed the stage of merely adapting, doctoring, and "writing ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... London News-Letter, September 6th, 1600, there occurred this personal notice: "At the Sweet Briar coffee-house Mr. A. Wilwhite, from Stratford-on-Avon, sojourneth as the guest of William Shack-speyr, player." About the same time Ben Jonson wrote to Dick Craven at Canterbury: "Andrew Wilwhite hath been with us amid great cheer and merriment, the same being that he saith he was the one that discovered our master, Will Shackpur, and that I do for a verity believe, for that Shakspur is ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... undertaking interfere with their trade. These gentry covenanted for the sum of L3 or L4 a year to write a news letter every post day to their subscribers in the country. That this curious trade was thoroughly systematized is evident from the following passage in Ben Jonson's 'Staple ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... 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 ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... his books 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 ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... were often received with reprobation and derision, sometimes disappeared again, sometimes established their footing in the language: see The Art of English Poetry (ascribed to Puttenham), Book III. chap. 4, and Ben Jonson's Poetaster, Act. V. sc. I. Good judges did not know whether a word was really called for: even Shakespeare thought 'remuneration' and 'accommodate' ridiculous. But such national exigencies rarely arise; and in our own time great authors distinguish themselves ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... there no friend to pay the tribute of a tear? No just observer of life to record the virtues of the deceased? Was even envy silent? It seemed to have been agreed, that if an author's works survived, the history of the man was to give no moral lesson to after-ages. If tradition told us that Ben Jonson went to the Devil tavern; that Shakespeare stole deer, and held the stirrup at play-house doors; that Dryden frequented Button's coffee-house; curiosity was lulled asleep, and biography forgot the best part of her function, which is, to instruct mankind by examples taken from the school ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Shakspeare, in respect of diction, imagery, management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his dramas, in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, &c. in the endeavour to determine what of Shakspeare's merits and defects are common to him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to his ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... 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
... were the laws laid down by London dramatists; and they assuredly were so easy to follow and so productive to obey, that if any Ben Jonson or Beaumarchais, Sheridan or Marivaux, had arisen and attempted to infringe them, he would have infallibly been regarded as a very evil example, and been extinguished by means of journalistic ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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 ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant |
