. It is
inscribed to _Fine Grand_, who, he says, was indebted to him for many
things which he reckons there; and concludes thus:

Forty things more, dear _Grand_, which you know true,
For which, or pay me quickly, or I'll pay you.

This was then the mode of wit, the vice of the age, and not Ben
Jonson's; for you see, a little before him, that admirable wit, Sir
Philip Sidney, perpetually playing with his words. In his time, I
believe, it ascended first into the pulpit, where (if you will give me
leave to clench too) it yet finds the benefit of its clergy; for they
are commonly the first corrupters of eloquence, and the last reformed
from vicious oratory; as a famous Italian has observed before me, in
his Treatise of the Corruption of the Italian Tongue; which he
principally ascribes to priests and preaching friars.

But, to conclude with what brevity I can, I will only add this, in
defence of our present writers, that, if they reach not some
excellencies of Ben Jonson, (which no age, I am confident, ever shall)
yet, at least, they are above that meanness of thought which I have
taxed, and which is frequent in him.

That the wit of this age is much more courtly, may easily be proved,
by viewing the characters of gentlemen which were written in the last.
First, for Jonson:--True-wit, in the "Silent Woman," was his
master-piece; and Truewit was a scholar-like kind of man, a gentleman
with an allay of pedantry, a man who seems mortified to the world, by
much reading. The best of his discourse is drawn, not from the
knowledge of the town, but books; and, in short, he would be a fine
gentleman in an university. Shakespeare shewed the best of his skill
in his Mercutio; and he said himself, that he was forced to kill him
in the third act, to prevent being killed by him. But, for my part, I
cannot find he was so dangerous a person: I see nothing in him but
what was so exceeding harmless, that he might have lived to the end of
the play, and died in his bed, without offence to any man.

Fletcher's Don John is our only bugbear; and yet I may affirm, without
suspicion of flattery, that he now speaks better, and that his
character is maintained with much more vigour in the fourth and fifth
acts, than it was by Fletcher in the three former. I have always
acknowledged the wit of our predecessors, with all the veneration
which becomes me; but, I am sure, their wit was not that of gentlemen;
there was ever somewhat that was ill