Authors are apt to be popularly considered as physically a feeble folk,--as timid, nervous, dyspeptic rhymers or prosers, unfitted to grapple with the rough realities of life. We shall endeavor, in the following pages, to present our readers with the image of one calculated to reverse this impression,--the image of a stalwart man of letters, who lived two centuries and a half ago, in the greatest age of English literature,--who undeniably had brawny fists as well as forgetive faculties,--one who could handle a club as readily as a pen, hit his mark with a bullet as surely as with a word, and, a sort of cross between the bully and the bard, could shoulder his way through a crowd of prize-fighters to take his seat among the tuneful company of immortal poets. This man, Ben Jonson, commonly stands next to Shakespeare in a consideration of the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth; and certainly, if the "thousand-souled" Shakespeare may be said to represent mankind, Ben as unmistakably stands for English-kind. He is "Saxon" England in epitome,--John Bull passing from a name into a man,--a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineering individual, whose intellect and personality cannot be severed, even in thought, from his body and personal appearance. Ben's mind, indeed, was rooted in Ben's character; and his character took symbolic form in his physical frame. He seemed built up, mentally as well as bodily, out of beef and sack, mutton and Canary; or, to say the least, was a joint product of the English mind and the English larder, of the fat as well as the thought of the land, of the soil as well as the soul of England. The moment we attempt to estimate his eminence as a dramatist, he disturbs the equanimity of our judgment by tumbling head-foremost into the imagination as a big, bluff, burly, and quarrelsome man, with "a mountain belly and a rocky face." He is a very pleasant boon companion as long as we make our idea of his importance agree with his own; but the instant we attempt to dissect his intellectual pretensions, the living animal becomes a dangerous subject,--his countenance flames, his great hands double up, his thick lips begin to twitch with impending invective; and while the critic's impression of him is thus all the more vivid, he is checked in its expression by a very natural fear of the consequences. There is no safety but in taking this rowdy leviathan of letters at his own valuation; and the relation of critics towards him is as perilous as that of the juries towards the Irish advocate, who had an unpleasant habit of challenging them to personal combat whenever they brought in a verdict against any of his clients. There is, in fact, such a vast animal force in old Ben's self-assertion, that he bullies posterity as he bullied his contemporaries; and while we admit his claims to rank next to Shakespeare among the dramatists of his age, we beg our readers to understand that we do it under intimidation.