That is every word which a man who "loved him" could say of William Shakespeare!--that he was a skilled and careful penman, "never blotting out a line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to be checked; that, in playing the part of Cæsar on the stage, somebody interpolated the speech, "Cæsar, thou dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response; ** and that he (Jonson) wished he (Shakespeare) had blotted out a thousand of his lines. Blot out a thousand Shakespearean lines!--a thousand of the priceless lines of the peerless book we call "Shakespeare!" * "Works," cited ante, vol. vii., p. 91. ** Possibly this may have occurred in playing the very version of the "Cæsar" we now possess, though there are, of course, no such lines to be found there. Fancy the storm which would follow such a vandal proposition to-day! Ben Jonson does not specify _which_ thousand he would have expurgated, but would be satisfied with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of the writings of his "soul of the age," the man "not of an age, but for all time!" And yet it is on the uncorroborated word of this man Jonson that we build monuments to the Stratford lad, and make pilgrimages to his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel about the spelling of his name! If there is not a {138}strong smack of patronage in this prose allusion to Shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect its flavor. Very possibly the fact was that, so far from having been an admirer of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson saw through his pretensions, and only through policy sang his praises against the stomach of his sense. For Ben Jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of the day (we have history as authority for that), was poor and a borrower, over head and ears in debt to Shakespeare; he was a stock actor on the rich managers boards, and could not take the bread out of his own mouth. But the poor scholar, and still poorer actor, could yet indulge himself, and take his covert fling at the rich charlatan:= ```"Though need make many poets, and some such ```As art and nature have not bettered much, ```Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage ```As he dare serve the ill customs of the age: ```Or purchase your delight at such a rate ```As for it, he himself must justly hate. ```To make a child now swaddled, to proceed ```Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed-- ```Past threescore years, or with three rusty swords ```And help of some few foot and half foot words-- ```Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, ```And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars! ```He [_that is, Ben himself_] rather prays you will be pleased to see ```One such to-day, as other plays should be; `````[_that is, one he wrote himself _] ```Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas, ```Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please."= Ben says this himself--in the prologue to his "Every Man in his Humour."