ood dish thou. No
marvel though, that saucy stubborn generation, the Jews, were
forbidden it, for what would they have done, well pampered with fat
pork, that durst murmur at their Maker out of garlick and onions?
'Slight! fed with it--the strummel-patched, goggle-eyed,
grumbledones would have gigantomachized.--

The following extracts will give a slight idea of Ben Jonson's varied
talent. At the conclusion of a play directed against plagiarists and
libellers, he sums up--

"Blush, folly, blush! here's none that fears
The wagging of an ass's ears,
Although a wolfish case he wears.
Detraction is but baseness varlet
And apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet."

From "The Alchemist."

_Tribulation._ What makes the devil so devilish, I would ask you.
Sathan our common enemy, but his being
Perpetually about the fire, and boiling
Brimstone and arsenic?...

_Fastidious._ How like you her wit.

_Macilente._ Her ingenuity is excellent, Sir.

_Fast._ You see the subject of her sweet fingers there (_the viol_)
oh, she tickles it so that--she makes it laugh most divinely--I'll
tell you a good jest just now, and yourself shall say it's a good
one. I have wished myself to be that instrument, I think a thousand
times, and not so few by heaven.

The two following are from "Bartholomew Fair."

_Littlewit._ I envy no man my delicates, Sir.

_Winwife._ Alas, you have the garden where they grow still. A wife
here with a strawberry breath, cherry lips, apricot cheeks, and a
soft velvet head like a melicotton.

_Lit._ Good i' faith! now dulness upon us, that I had not that
before him, that I should not light on't as well as he! Velvet
head!...

_Knockem._ Sir, I will take your counsel, and cut my hair, and
leave vapours. I see that tobacco and bottle ale, and pig and whit,
and very Ursula herself is all vanity.

_Busy._ Only pig was not comprehended in my admonition--the rest
were: for long hair, it is an ensign of pride, a banner: and the
world is full of those banners--very full of banners. And bottle
ale is a drink of Satan's, a diet-drink of Satan's devised to puff
us up, and make us swell in this latter age of vanity; as the smoke
of tobacco to keep us in mist and error: but the fleshly woman,
which you call Ursula, is above all to be avo