Ben Jonson’s detached poetry I like much, as indeed I do all about him, except when he degraded himself by ‘the laborious foolery’ of some of his farcical characters, which he could not deal with sportively, and only made stupid and pedantic. I have been blamed for what I have said, more than once, in disparagement of Ben Jonson’s comic humour; but I think he was himself aware of his infirmity, and has (not improbably) alluded to it in the following speech of Crites in Cynthia’s Revels. ‘Oh, how despised and base a thing is man, If he not strive to erect his groveling thoughts Above the strain of flesh! But how more cheap, When even his best and understanding part (The crown and strength of all his faculties) Floats like a dead-drown’d body, on the stream Of vulgar humour, mix’d with common’st dregs: I suffer for their guilt now; and my soul (Like one that looks on ill-affected eyes) Is hurt with mere intention on their follies. Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me: Or is’t a rarity or some new object That strains my strict observance to this point: But such is the perverseness of our nature, That if we once but fancy levity, (How antic and ridiculous soever It suit with us) yet will our muffled thought Chuse rather not to see it than avoid it, &c.’ Ben Jonson had self-knowledge and self-reflection enough to apply this to himself. His tenaciousness on the score of critical objections does not prove that he was not conscious of them himself, but the contrary. The greatest egotists are those whom it is impossible to offend, because they are wholly and incurably blind to their own defects; or if they could be made to see them, would instantly convert them into so many beauty-spots and ornamental graces. Ben Jonson’s fugitive and lighter pieces are not devoid of the characteristic merits of that class of composition; but still often in the happiest of them, there is a specific gravity in the author’s pen, that sinks him to the bottom of his subject, though buoyed up for a time with art and painted plumes, and produces a strange mixture of the mechanical and fanciful, of poetry and prose, in his songs and odes. For instance, one of his most airy effusions is the Triumph of his Mistress: yet there are some lines in it that seem inserted almost by way of burlesque. It is however well worth repeating.