What does 'trunk' mean here and in the 1st scene of the 1st act? Is it a large ear-trumpet?--or rather a tube, such as passes from parlour to kitchen, instead of a bell? Whalley's note at the end. Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn of mind: and as humor is a personal quality, the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an extravagant unnatural caricatura. If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays, this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar conception of the nature and conditions of the drama and dramatic personation. Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea:-- For he knew, poet never credit gain'd By writing _truths_, but things, like truths, well feign'd. By 'truths' he means 'facts.' Caricatures are not less so, because they are found existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and leaves caricatures to farce. The safest and truest defence of old Ben would be to call the Epicæne the best of farces. The defect in Morose, as in other of Jonson's 'dramatis personæ', lies in this;--that the accident is not a prominence growing out of, and nourished by, the character which still circulates in it, but that the character, such as it is, rises out of, or, rather, consists in, the accident. Shakspeare's comic personages have exquisitely characteristic features; however awry, disproportionate, and laughable they may be, still, like Bardolph's nose, they are features. But Jonson's are either a man with a huge wen, having a circulation of its own, and which we might conceive amputated, and the patient thereby losing all his character; or they are mere wens themselves instead of men,--wens personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, mandrake-fashion. 'Nota bene'. All the above, and much more, will have been justly said, if, and whenever, the drama of Jonson is brought into comparisons of rivalry with the Shakspearian. But this should not be. Let its inferiority to the Shakspearian be at once fairly owned,--but at the same time as the inferiority of an altogether different 'genus' of the drama. On this ground, old Ben would still maintain his proud height. He, no less than Shakspeare, stands on the summit of his hill, and looks round him like a master,--though his be Lattrig and Shakspeare's Skiddaw. THE ALCHEMIST. Act I. sc. 2. Face's speech:-- Will take his oath o' the Greek _Xenophon_, If need be, in his pocket. Another reading is 'Testament.' Probably, the meaning is,--that intending to give false evidence, he carried a Greek Xenophon to pass it off for a Greek Testament, and so avoid perjury--as the Irish do, by contriving to kiss their thumb-nails instead of the book.