instead of their "sitting down and blushing," we find--

That they fly buzzing round about my nostrils;
And, like so many screaming grasshoppers
Held by the wings, fill every ear with noise.

Names were certainly not necessary to portraits, where every day the
originals were standing by their side. This is the studied pleading
of a poet, who knows he is concealing the truth.

There is a passage in the play itself where Jonson gives the true
cause of "the tumult" raised against him. Picturing himself under the
character of his favourite Horace, he makes the enemies of Horace thus
describe him, still, however, preserving the high tone of poetical
superiority.

"Alas, sir, Horace is a mere sponge. Nothing but humours and
observations he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when
he comes home squeezes himself dry again. He will pen all he knows. He
will sooner lose his best friend than his least jest. What he once
drops upon paper against a man, lives eternally to upbraid him."

Such is the true picture of a town-wit's life! The age of Augustus was
much less present to Jonson than his own; and Ovid, Tibullus, and
Horace were not the personages he cared so much about, as "that
society in which," it was said, "he went up and down sucking in and
squeezing himself dry:" the formal lawyers, who were cold to his
genius; the sharking captains, who would not draw to save their own
swords, and would cheat "their friend, or their friend's friend,"
while they would bully down Ben's genius; and the little sycophant
histrionic, "the twopenny[390] tear-mouth, copper-laced scoundrel,
stiff-toe, who used to travel with pumps full of gravel after a blind
jade and a hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel-heads to an old
crackt trumpet;" and who all now made a party with some rival of
Jonson.

All these personages will account for "the tumult" which excites the
innocent astonishment of our author. These only resisted him by
"filling every ear with noise." But one of the "screaming grasshoppers
held by the wings," boldly turned on the holder with a scorpion's
bite; and Decker, who had been lashed in "The Poetaster," produced his
"Satiromastix, or the untrussing of the humorous Poet." Decker was a
subordinate author, indeed; but, what must have been very galling to
Jonson, who was the aggressor, indignation proved such an inspirer,
that Decker seemed to have caught some portion of Jonson's own genius,
who had the ar