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Surfeit and fulness have killed more than

famine.

The sparrow with his little plumage flies, While the proud peacock, overcharged with pens,

Is fain to sweep the ground with his grown train

And load of feathers.

P. sen. Wise and honoured brother! None but a brother, and sent from the dead,

As you are to me, could have altered me:
I thank my destiny, that is so gracious.
Are there no pains, no penalties decreed
From whence you come, to us that smother
money

In chests and strangle her in bags ?
P. Can. O, mighty,

Intolerable fines and mulcts imposed,
Of which I come to warn you: forfeitures
Of whole estates, if they be known and
taken.

P. sen. I thank you, brother, for the light you have given me ;

I will prevent them all.

dogs,

First, free my

Lest what I have done to them, and against law,

Be a præmunire; for by magna charta They could not be committed as close prisoners,

My learned counsel tells me here, my cook:
And yet he shewed me the way first.
Lick. Who did? I!

I trench the liberty of the subjects!
P. Can. Peace,

Picklock, your guest, that Stentor, hath infected you,

Whom I have safe enough in a wooden collar.

P. sen. Next, I restore these servants to their lady,

With freedom, heart of cheer, and countenance;

It is their year and day of jubilee.

Though the clout we do not always hit,] The metaphor is taken from archery: the clout is the white mark in the butts, which the archers aimed at. WHAL.

And so it is used by Shakspeare.

Clout is merely the French clou, the wooden pin by which the target is fastened to the butt. As the head of this pin was commonly painted white, to hit the white and hit the clout were of course synonymous: both phrases expressed perfection in art, or success of any kind. In pursuing his metaphor, Jonson mentions the accidents by which the highest skill in archery was occasionally defeated; humidity, which affected

Omnes. We thank you, sir. P. sen. And lastly, to my nephew I give my house, goods, lands, all but my vices,

And those I go to cleanse; kissing this lady,

Whom I do give him too, and join their hands.

P. Can. If the spectators will join theirs, we thank 'em.

P. jun. And wish they may, as I, enjoy Pecunia.

Pec. And so Pecunia herself doth wish, That she may still be aid unto their uses, Not slave unto their pleasures, or a tyrant Over their fair desires; but teach them all The golden mean; the prodigal how to live;

The sordid and the covetous how to die : That, with sound mind; this, safe frugality. [Exeunt.

THE EPILOGUE.

Thus have you seen the maker's double scope,

To profit and delight; wherein our hope Is, though the clout we do not always hit,1

It will not be imputed to his wit:-
A tree so tried and bent, as 'twill not start:
Nor doth he often crack a string of art;
Though there may other accidents as
strange

Happen, the weather of your looks may change,

Or some high wind of misconceit arise,
To cause an alteration in our skies :
If so, we are sorry, that have so misspent
Our time and tackle; yet he's confident,
And vows the next fair day he'll have us
shoot

The same match o'er for him, if you'll come to't.

the elasticity of the string, and high winds which diverted the course of the shaft.

There are few of Jonson's dramatic works which exhibit stronger marks of his peculiar talents than this play. The language is forcible, and in some places highly poetical; the satire is powerful and well directed, and the moral pointed and just.. Its plot indeed labours under the same difficulties and defects as that of the Plutus, which the poet had in view-namely, an occasional confusion of the allegorical and real character. Queen Pecunia, like the Deity of Aristophanes, is nearly strangled in leather,

smothered in a chest, &c., and subjected to other accidents, which cannot be properly predicated of a non-existing personage. Jonson, however, offends less frequently in this matter than his great prototype, whom he also surpasses in the moral purpose of his satire. The use and abuse of riches are delineated with great force and discrimination, and the prodigal and the miser corrected in a strain of serious monition that would not misbecome the sacredness of the closet. Aristophanes had no such object in view. If the history of his own time may be trusted, every statesman had his orator, and every orator had his price, thus politics were rendered subservient to money, and the destiny of Athens waited on a bribe. To expose this general venality he wrote his Plutus. In wit of the brightest kind, in satire of the most poignant and overwhelming quality, it stands preeminent, not only over The Staple of News, but over every other drama, ancient or modern: here, however, its praise must end; it teaches nothing but that gold is omnipotent (a pernicious lesson), and it concludes with involving the dramatis persona in one mass of corruption: the whole, without distinction, conspiring to pull down the gods and raise Plutus to the vacant

seat.

In the introduction of the dogs during the transient fit of insanity brought upon the miser by the sudden defection of his treasure, Jonson

had again Aristophanes in view; but he has not imitated him with much dexterity. The short episode of Block and Lollard contributes little to the advancement of the story, since the derangement of Pennyboy sen. might easily have been communicated through the ordinary characters of the play; while the trial of the dog Labes, in The Wasps, which must have been irresistibly comic, is highly illustrative of the litigious disposition of Philocleo, and opens at the same time a masked battery against the peculations of the noted Laches.

It would not be doing justice to Jonson to pass over this division of his plot without noticing the judgment manifested in the trifling parts of Pecunia's attendants, who invariably maintain a correct and close adherence to the relative characters which they support under their principal.

The Staple is well conceived and happily executed. Credulity, which was then at its height, was irritated rather than fed by impositions of every kind; and the country kept in a feverish state of deceitful expectation by stories of wonderful events, gross and palpable, to use the words of Shakspeare, as the father of lies, who begat them. On the whole, The Staple of News is one of those compositions which the admirer of Jonson may contemplate with " de. light," and from the perusal of which the impartial reader can scarcely rise without "profit.”

ADDITIONAL NOTE, p. 294 a.

The custard politic.] The following quotation from a letter of Bishop Warburton's to Hurd (April, 1766) will ilustrate this passage :"I certainly made them merrier than ordinary at the Mansion House, where we were magnificently treated. The Lord Mayor told me the Common Council were much obliged to me, for that this was the first time he ever heard them prayed for.' I said, 'I considered them as a

body who much needed the prayers of the Church.' But, if he told me in what I abounded, I told him in what I thought he was defective That I was greatly disappointed to see no custard at table.' He said, that they had been so ridiculed for their custard that none had ventured to make its appearance for many years.' I told him I supposed that Religion and custard went out of fashion together.'"-F. C.]

The New Inn; or, the Light Heart.

THE NEW INN.] This Comedy was brought on the stage on the 19th of January, 1629, and in the technical language of the Green-room, completely damned," not being heard to the conclusion. Whatever indignation Jonson might have felt at this treatment, he appears to have made no public manifestation of it at the time; but Ben was now the sick lion, and his enemies had too little respect for his enfeebled condition to forego so good an opportunity of insulting him with impunity. Forbearance was at no time our poet's peculiar virtue, and the jealousy of reputation so natural to age and infirmity, co-operated with the taunts of his ungenerous critics, to force him upon the publication of The New Inn, two years after its condemnation. It was printed in 8vo with this angry title-page:

The New Inn; or, the Light Heart, a Comedy. As it was never Acted, but most negligently Played by some, the KING'S SERVANTS; and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the KING'S SUBJECTS, 1629. Now at last set at Liberty to the Readers, his MAJESTY'S Servants and Subjects, to be judged of, 1631.

Me lectori credere mallem,

Quàm spectatoris fastidia ferre superbi.-HOR.

This unfortunate Play not only brought a cloud over the dramatic fame of Jonson at its first appearance, but furnished a pretence for calumniating his memory even within our own times. About the middle of the last century, Macklin, the player, brought forward an indifferent piece of Ford's, called the Lover's Melancholy, for his daughter's benefit. To excite the curiosity of the town to this performance, he fabricated a most ignorant and impudent tissue of malicious charges against Jonson, whom he chose to represent as the declared enemy of Ford, as well as of Shakspeare. This atrocious libel, which seems to have been composed à pure perte,, lay, with a thousand other forgotten falsehoods, among a pile of old newspapers, till it was discovered by Steevens, who with triumphant malice dragged it again to light, and reprinted it at the end of Jonson's eulogium on Shakspeare, as the true key to that celebrated piece! Not content with the obloquy with which Macklin had so liberally furnished him, he had the incredible baseness to subjoin the following stanza from Shirley, which he declared to be also addressed to Jonson, upon the appearance of Ford's play :

"Look here thou that hast malice to the stage,
And impudence enough for the whole age;
Voluminously ignorant! be vext,

To read this tragedy, and thy own2 be next".

though he well knew that the lines were directly pointed at Prynne, and that Shirley regarded the talents and learning of Jonson with a degree of respect bordering on idolatry. This vile fabrication, in which all the creative powers of malignity are set to

1 Voluminously.] Prynne was known to the writers of his time by the name of Voluminous Prynne, under which title he is mentioned by Wood and others.

Thy own tragedy ] i.e., according to Steevens and his followers, the "Comedy of the New Inn !"

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work to destroy the character of an unoffending man, who had been more than a century in his grave, in the hope of effecting the sale of a few tickets, Mr. Malone styles" an innocent forgery," a sportive and ingenious fabrication," "a mere jeu d'esprit, for a harmless purpose," &c. He however sets about its confutation, and with the assistance of Whalley, 2 whom he condescends not once to mention, easily effects his object. In fact, a simple reference to dates, of which Macklin happened to be wholly ignorant, was amply sufficient to destroy the whole fabric.3

The rejoinder was made by Steevens, in which there is not one syllable to the purpose, though Mr. Weber, with proper gravity, observes, that it renders the affair very doubtful. In fact, Steevens, as is noticed above, knew the story to be a falsehood from the beginning; and Mr. Malone, of whom I inquired the reason of his coadjutor's disgraceful pertinacity, wrote to me in reply that Steevens merely held out "because the discovery of the forgery had been made by another." That Steevens believed a word of it he never thought for a moment.

After the complete detection of this clumsy fabrication by Mr. Malone, it might reasonably be hoped that the public would have heard no more of it; but who can sound the depths of folly! Mr. Weber, the editor of Ford, has thought proper to repeat it, and with an hardihood of assertion which his profound ignorance cannot excuse, to affirm in addition that the enmity of Jonson to Ford (on which Macklin's forgery is built), is "corroborated by indisputable documents!" One of them (the only one indeed with which he condescends to favour his readers), is the quotation produced from Shirley by Steevens (for the mischievous purpose of misleading some heedless gull), which Mr. Weber pronounces on his own knowledge, "to be evidently pointed at our author's insulting ode."

To attempt to convince a person who has not understanding enough for reason to operate upon, is, as learned authors utter, to wash a tile; to others it may be just sufficient to say that the "ode" was published nearly two years after the verses to which it is here affirmed to have given birth!-This is going beyond Mr. Steevens, and may serve to shew how dangerous it is for stupidity to meddle with cunning, or to venture on gratuitous falsehoods to recover the credit of an exploded slander.

This gentleman, thus indulgent to the unprincipled calumniator of Jonson, is the same Mr. Malone, be it observed, who taxes Jonson every instant with the blackest ingratitude, with the most rooted and rancorous malice towards Shakspeare because he uses the word "tempestuous," chorus," or target," or some other of equal rarity, which bears a fancied resemblance to the name of a play, or to a stage direction in the works of the latter.

or "

2 In Whalley's corrected copy, which Malone as well as Steevens had seen, as I find by their letters, most of Macklin's ridiculous blunders in his dates, of which Malone afterwards made such good use, are distinctly pointed out.

3 It is quite amusing to follow the enemies of Jonson through this most contemptible forgery. The prose part of it they in some measure give up; but there is a little poem with which they are all enraptured, and which is pronounced to be as much beyond the powers of Macklin as the composition of a Greek Chorus, &c. This "uncommonly elegant," this "exquisite," this "first and best of all fictions," is a miserable piece of doggrel, a wretched cento, which would not at this time be admitted into the corner of a newspaper. Will the reader have a specimen of this " combined effort of taste and learning," to which the talents of the author of The Man of the World were 66 so unequal?" Let him take then the first stanza:

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Euge Poeta! The splendour of the composition so effectually dazzled the critics, that the com pliment paid to Shakspeare by "the envious Ben" luckily escaped their notice. It would have made Mr. Malone miserable.

ΤΟ

THE READER.

If thou be such, I make thee my patron and dedicate the piece to thee: if not so much, would I had been at the charge of thy better literature. Howsoever, if thou canst but spell and join my sense, there is more hope of thee than of a hundred fastidious impertinents who were there present the first day, yet never made piece of their prospect the right way. What did they come for then? thou wilt ask me. I will as punctually

answer. To see and to be seen: to make a general muster of themselves in their clothes of credit; and possess the stage against the play: to dislike all, but mark nothing. And by their confidence of rising between the acts in oblique lines, make affidavit to the whole house of their not understanding one scene. Armed with this prejudice, as the stage-furniture or arras-clothes, they were there, as spectators, away: for the faces in the hangings and they beheld alike. So I wish they may do ever; and do trust myself and my book rather to thy rustic candour than all the pomp of their pride and solemn ignorance to boot. Fare thee well, and fall to. Read.

But first,

THE ARGUMENT.

BEN JONSON.

THE Lord Frampul, a noble gentleman, well educated, and bred a scholar in Oxford, was married young to a virtuous gentlewoman, Sylly's daughter of the South, whose worth, though he truly enjoyed, he never could rightly value; but as many green husbands (given over to their extravagant delights and some peccant humours of their own), occasioned in his over-loving wife so deep a melancholy by his leaving her in the time of her lying-in of her second daughter, she having brought him only two daughters, Frances and Lætitia: and (out of her hurt fancy) interpreting that to be a cause of her husband's coldness in affection her not being blest with a son, took a resolution with herself, after her month's time, and thanksgiving rightly in the church, to quit her home, with a vow never to return till by reducing her lord she could bring a wished happiness to the family.

He in the meantime returning and hearing of this departure of his lady, began, though over-late, to resent the injury he had done her; and out of his cock-brained resolution entered into as solemn a quest of her. Since when neither of them had been heard of. But the eldest daughter, Frances, by the title of Lady Frampul, enjoyed the estate, her sister being lost young, and is the sole relict of the family. Here begins our Comedy.

ACT I.

This lady, being a brave, bountiful lady, and enjoying this free and plentiful estate, hath an ambitious disposition to be esteemed the mistress of many servants, but loves none. And hearing of a famous New-inn that is kept by a merry host called Goodstock, in Barnet, invites some lords and gentlemen to wait on her thither, as well to see the fashions of the place as to make themselves merry with the accidents on the by. It happens there is a melancholy gentleman, one Master Lovel, hath been lodged there some days before in the inn, who (unwilling to be seen) is surprised by the lady, and invited by Prudence, the lady's chambermaid, who is elected governess of the sports in the inn for that day and installed their sovereign. Lovel is persuaded by the host, and yields to the lady's invitation, which concludes the first act. Having revealed his quality before to the host.

ACT II.

In this Prudence and her lady express their anger conceived at the tailor, who had promised to make Prudence a new suit and bring it home, as on the eve, against this day. But he failing of his word, the lady had commanded a standard of her own best apparel to be brought down; and Prudence is so fitted. The lady being put in mind

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