VII. Of Ben Jonson I will hardly say much. His "learning and heavy-headedness" would scarcely render him the 'rare Ben' that he once was, in this age of _learned professors_ and _profound scholars._
His learning gave him an undue admiration of Aristotle, and in his plays he has followed the Grecian model too closely. Unity of time and place is particularly inculcated in the rules of the Grecian schools; and in France this had long been strictly observed. It was made matter of minute inquiry in tragedy, whether such and such transactions could be gone through while a talkative hero ranted so many verses. Or, in comedy, whether an unfortunate shepherdess could go through the _Juno Lucina fer opem_ ceremony, while a lewd city clerk stood by, and made so many studied surmises--_sotto voce_. Unless unity of time and place was observed in a drama, these 'line and rule Greekling Franks' damned it. The consequence was that one plot--one method--Aristotle's [Greek: go êythos]--was worked upon by successive dramatists, too timid to 'blanch the beaten track,' until it was threadbare. These fetters which Shakspeare snapped, Jonson hugged.
Old Ben, as he was called, was once young, but the history of his youth is rather cloudy. It seems probable, however, that the accounts delivered us by his contemporaries, are true, notwithstanding Mr. Gifford's sweeping denial. Following them, we learn, that Ben's step-father was a bricklayer; that Ben himself "served at the trade," until he left it from weariness, and joined a company of strolling players: that he enlisted and went with the English army into Flanders, where he "killed his man, and bore off the spoils." His prime and after life were spent in literary pursuits.
Old Ben was a quarrelsome, peevish companion; his body that of a bloated giant; his face filthy, with a scorbutic affection, or, as Decker quaintly says, "a face par-boiled, punched full of eyelet holes, like the cover of a warming pan." His literary quarrels with Decker, Marston, and other "men of London," eventuated in a surly retreat on the part of Jonson. He was driven from comedy to Tragedy, and we find him closing one of his poetic defences with the consoling reflection, that