It was inevitable that the imperious attitude Jonson had assumed, and the insolent pungency of his satire, should rouse the wrath of the classes he lampooned, and the enmity of the poets he ridiculed and decried. Among those who conceived themselves assailed, or who felt insulted by his arrogant tone, were two dramatists, Thomas Dekkar and John Marston. They soon recriminated; and as Ben was better fitted by nature to dispense than to endure scorn and derision, he in 1601 produced "The Poetaster," the object of which was to silence forever, not only Dekkar and Marston, but all other impudent doubters of his infallibility. The humor of the thing is, that, in this elaborate attempt to convict his adversaries of calumny in taxing him with self-love and arrogance, he ostentatiously exhibits the very qualities he disclaims. He keeps no terms with those who profess disbelief in Ben. They are "play-dressers and plagiaries," "fools or jerking pedants," "buffoon barking wits," tickling "base vulgar ears with beggarly and barren trash," while his are "The high raptures of a happy Muse, Borne on the wings of her immortal thought, That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel, And beats at heaven's gate with her bright hoofs." Dekkar retorted in a play called "Satiromastrix; or, the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet"; but, though the scurrility is brilliantly bitter, it is less efficient and hearted than Jonson's. This literary controversy, conducted in acted plays, had to the public of that day a zest similar to that we should enjoy if the editors of two opposing political newspapers should meet in a hall filled with their subscribers, and fling their thundering editorials in person at each other's heads. The theatre-goers seem to have declared for Dekkar and Marston; and Ben, disgusted with such a proof of their incapacity of judgment, sulked and growled in his den, and for two years gave nothing to the stage. He had, however, found a patron, who enabled him to do this without undergoing the famine of insufficient meat, and the still more dreadful drought of insufficient drink; for, in a gossiping diary of the period, covering these two years, we are informed, "B. J. now lives with one Townsend, and scorns the world." While, however, pleasantly engaged in this characteristic occupation, for which he had a natural genius, he was meditating a play which he thought would demonstrate to all judging spirits his possession equally of the acquirements of the scholar and the talents of the dramatist. In the conclusion of the Apologetic Dialogue which accompanies "The Poetaster," he had hinted his purpose in these energetic lines:--