erstand
mathematics. It is to teach a person dumb and deaf to speak,
and to understand a language."

[388] The gross convivialities of the times, from the age of
Elizabeth, were remarkable for several circumstances.
Hard-drinking was a foreign vice, imported by our military men
on their return from the Netherlands: and the practice, of
whose prevalence Camden complains, was even brought to a kind
of science. They had a dialect peculiar to their orgies. See
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii. p. 294 (last edition).

Jonson's inclinations were too well suited to the prevalent
taste, and he gave as largely into it as any of his
contemporaries. Tavern-habits were then those of our poets and
actors. Ben's _Humours_, at "the Mermaid," and at a later
period, his _Leges Convivales_ at "the Apollo," the club-room
of "the Devil," were doubtless one great cause of a small
personal unhappiness, of which he complains, and which had a
very unlucky effect in rendering a mistress so obdurate, who
"through her eyes had stopt her ears." This was, as his own
verse tells us,

"His mountain-belly and his rocky face."

He weighed near twenty stone, according to his own avowal--an
Elephant-Cupid! One of his "Sons," at the "Devil," seems to
think that his _Catiline_ could not fail to be a miracle, by a
certain sort of inspiration which Ben used on the occasion.

"With strenuous sinewy words that _Catiline_ swells,
I reckon it not among men-miracles.
How could that poem heat and vigour lack,
_When each line oft cost BEN a cup of sack_?"
R. BARON'S _Pocula Castalia_, p. 113, 1650.

Jonson, in the Bacchic phraseology of the day, was "a
Canary-bird." "He would (says Aubrey) many times exceed in
drink; canary was his beloved liquor; then he would tumble
home to bed; and when he had thoroughly perspired, then to
study."

Tradition, too, has sent down to us several tavern-tales of
"Rare Ben." A good-humoured one has been preserved of the
first interview between Bishop Corbet, when a young man, and
our great bard. It occurred at a tavern, where Corbet was
sitting alone. Ben, who had probably just drank up to the