a duel, and once for his
part in the comedy of _Eastward Hoe_, which gave offense to King James.
He lived down to the time of Charles I (1635), and became the
acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit
combats at the Mermaid, the Devil, and other famous London taverns.

What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whom they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.[22]

The inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is simply

O rare Ben Jonson!

[Footnote 22: Francis Beaumont. _Letter to Ben Jonson_.]

Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the _vetus comaedia_ of Aristophanes,
which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an entirely
different school from Shakspere's. They were classical and not romantic,
and were pure comedies, admitting no admixture of tragic motives. There
is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range of his
dramatic creations. They were comedies not of character, in the high
sense of the word, but of manners or humors. His design was to lash the
follies and vices of the day, and his _dramatis personae_ consisted for
the most part of gulls, impostors, fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts,
and "Pauls men." In his first play, _Every Man in his Humor_ (acted in
1598), in _Every Man Out of his Humor, Bartholomew Fair_, and, indeed,
in all of his comedies, his subject was the fashionable affectations,
the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London life. His
procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic humorists,
and "squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls," by playing them off
upon each other, involving them in all manner of comical misadventures,
and rendering them utterly ridiculous and contemptible. There was thus a
perishable element in his art, for manners change; and, however
effective this exposure of contemporary affectations may have been
before an audience of Jonson's day, it is as hard for a modern reader to
detect his points as it will be for a reader two hundred years hence to
understand the satire upon the aesthetic craze in such pieces of the
present day as _Patience_, or the _Colonel_. Nevertheless, a patient
reader, with the help of copious footnotes, can gradually put together
for himself an image of that worl