I suppose a Duchess of Buckingham or any lady of court consequence would have been rather proud of the obeisance of Ben Jonson, after that play of “Every Man in his Humour,” and would have given him a commendatory wave of her fan, much sooner, and more unhesitatingly, than to the Stratford actor, who took the part of Old Knowell in it. Ben believed in conventional laws of speech or of dramatic utterance far more than Shakespeare; he regretted (or perhaps affected to regret when his jealousies were sleeping), that Will Shakespeare did not shape his language and his methods with a severer art;[115] he would--very likely--have lashed him, if he had been under him at school, for his irregularities of form and of speech--irregularities that grew out of Shakespeare’s domination of the language, and his will and his power to make it, in all subtlest phases, the servant, and not the master of his thought. Do I seem, then, to be favoring the breakage of customs, and of the rules of particular grammarians? Yes, unhesitatingly--if you have the mastery to do it as Shakespeare did it; that is, if you have that finer sense of the forces and delicacies of language which will enable you to wrest its periods out of the ruts of every-day traffic, and set them to sonorous roll over the open ground, which is broad as humanity and limitless as thought. Parrots must be taught to prate, particle by particle; but the Bob-o-Lincoln swings himself into his great flood of song as no master can teach him to sing. Even now we do not bid final adieu to Ben Jonson; but hope to encounter him again in the next reign (that of James I.) through the whole of which he carried his noisy literary mastership. _Some Prose Writers._ You must not believe, because I have kept mainly by poetic writers in these later days of Queen Elizabeth, that there were no men who wrote prose--none who wrote travels, histories, letters of advice; none who wrote stupid, dull, goodish books; alas, there were plenty of them; there always are. But there were some to be remembered too: there was William Camden--to whom I have briefly alluded already--and of whom, when you read good histories of this and preceding reigns, you will find frequent mention. He was a learned man, and a kind man, excellent antiquarian, and taught Ben Jonson at Westminster School. There was Stow,[116] who wrote a _Survey of London_, which he knew from top to bottom. He was born in the centre of it, and as a boy used to fetch milk from a farm at the Minories, to his home in Cornhill, where his father was a tailor. His fulness, his truthfulness, his simplicities, and his quaintness have made his chief book--on London--a much-prized one.