and your clear-skinned pieces-of-eight of
Castile," which he and his fellows the beggars kept secret to
themselves, and did privately enjoy in a plentiful manner. "For to
have them to pay them away is not to enjoy them; to enjoy them is to
have them lying by us; having no other need of them than to use them
for the clearing of the eyesight, and the comforting of our senses.
These we did carry about with us, sewing them in some patches of our
doublets near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as we could
handsomely quilt them in, holding them to be restorative."

_Poetaster_.--This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies
of Ben in his own days and ours, who have said that he made a
pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole Court
of Augustus, by a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of
the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse in our
own tongue more finely and poetically than they were used to express
themselves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined more
elegant, refined, and court-like, than the scenes between this Louis
the Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. The whole essence and
secret of that kind of intercourse is contained therein. The
economical liberality by which greatness, seeming to waive some part
of its prerogative, takes care to lose none of the essentials; the
prudential liberties of an inferior, which flatter by commanded
boldness and soothe with complimentary sincerity;--these, and a
thousand beautiful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels,
and from those numerous court-masques and entertainments, which he
was in the daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to show the
poetical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard.

_Alchemist_.--The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torrent of
images, words, and book-knowledge, with which Epicure Mammon (Act
ii., Scene 2) confounds and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come
pouring out like the successive falls of Nilus. They "doubly redouble
strokes upon the foe." Description outstrides proof. We are made to
believe effects before we have testimony for their causes. If there
is no one image which attains the height of the sublime, yet the
confluence and assemblage of them all produces a result equal to the
grandest poetry. The huge Xerxean army countervails against single
Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the most determined offspring of its
author. I