Bian. Fye! what a foolish duty call you this? Bian. The more fool you for laying on my duty. Pet. Katharine, I charge thee, tell these headstrong women What duty they do owe their lords and husbands. Wid. Come, come, you're mocking; we will have no telling. Pet. I say she shall; and first begin with her. Kath. Fye, fye! unknit that threat'ning unkind brow; And dart not scornful glances from those eyes, To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor : It blots thy beauty, as frosts do bite the meads: A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled, Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee, To painful labor, both by sea and land; To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, Too little payment for so great a debt. Such duty as the subject owes the prince, And, when she's troward, peevish, sullen, sour, What is she, but a foul contending rebel, I am asham'd, that women are so simple To offer war, where they should kneel for peace; Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway, When they are bound to serve, love, and obey. But now, I see our lances are but straws; And place your hands below your husbands' foot: My hand is ready, may it do him ease. Pet. Why, there's a wench !-Come on, and kiss me, Kate. Come, Kate, we'll to bed; We three are married, but you two are sped. Hor. Now go thy ways, thou hast tam'd a curst shrew. [Exeunt. 1 "His horse hipped," &c., &c.—If Ben Jonson had poured forth this profusion of horse-dealer's knowledge (a little overdone, it must be confessed, even for farce), it would have been charged against him as ostentation. 2 "Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam'd so."-He means to intimate that he does not think her tamed after all. A woman, by the way, like Katharine, could never have uttered those beautiful words about "a fountain troubled," &c. But this is the constant exception to Shakspeare's otherwise perfect nature. He makes all his characters, unless they are downright fools, talk as well as himself. BEN JONSON. (See Imagination and Fancy," p. 140.) THE greatest portion of Ben Jonson's comic writing is in prose ; but the reader is here presented with a striking specimen in verse, —indeed, the best scene of his best production. Ben Jonson's famous humor is as pampered, jovial, and dictatorial as he was in his own person. He always gives one the idea of a man sitting at the head of a table and a coterie. He carves up a subject as he would a dish; talks all the while to show off both the dish and himself; and woe betide difference of opinion, or his "favorite aversion," envy. He was not an envious man himself, provided you allowed him his claims. He praised his contemporaries all round, chiefly in return for praises. He had too much hearty blood in his veins to withhold eulogy where it was not denied him; but he was somewhat too willing to cancel it on offence. He complains that he had given heaps of praises undeserved; tells Drayton that it had been doubted whether he was a friend to anybody (owing, doubtless, partly to this caprice) and in the collection of epigrams printed under his own care, there are three consecutive copies of verse, two of them addressed to Lord Salisbury in the highest style of panegyric, and the third to the writer's muse, consisting of a recantation, apparently of the same panegyric, and worth repeating here for its scorn and spleen :— TO MY MUSE. Away, and leave me, thou thing most abhorr'd, Made me commit most fièrce idolatry Be thy next master's more unlucky Muse, And, as thou'st mine, his hours and youth abuse. Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill will, Make him lose all his friends; and, which is worse, (This is melancholy.) With me thou leav'st an happier Muse than thee, This is ingenious and true; but from a lord so "worthless," it hardly became the poet to withdraw the alms of his panegyric. He should have left posterity to do him justice; or have reposed on the magnanimity of a silent disdain. Lord Salisbury was the famous Robert Cecil, son of Burleigh. Ben Jonson had probably found his panegyric treated with neglect, perhaps contempt; and it was bold in him to return it; but it was proclaiming his own gratuitous flattery. It has been objected to Ben Jonson's humors, and with truth, that they are too exclusive of other qualities; that the characters are too much absorbed in the peculiarity, so as to become personifications of an abstraction. They have also, I think, an amount of turbulence which hurts their entire reality; gives them an air of conscious falsehood and pretension, as if they were rather acting the thing than being it. But this, as before intimated, arose from the character of the author, and his own wil. ful and flustered temperament. If they are not thoroughly what they might be, or such as Shakspeare would have made them, they are admirable Jonsonian presentations, and overflowing with wit, fancy, and scholarship. THE FOX. SCENE. A Room in VOLPONE's House. Enter VOLPONE and MOSCA. Volp. Good morning to the day: and next, my gold !— Open the shrine, that I may see my saint. [Mosca withdraws the curtain, and discovers piles of gold, plate, jewels, &c.] Hail the world's soul, and mine! more glad than is The teeming earth to see the long'd-for sun Of sacred treasure in this blessed room. Well did wise poets, by thy glorious name, Title that age which they would have the best; Thou being the best of things, and far transcending All style of joy, in children, parents, friends, Or any other waking dream on earth. Thy looks when they to Venus did ascribe, They should have given her twenty thousand Cupids : Dear saint, Riches, the dumb god, that giv'st all men tongues, Mos. And what he will, sir. Riches are in fortune A greater good than wisdom is in nature. Volp. True, my beloved Mosca. Yet I glory |