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.  It has the whole “matter and copy of the father—­eye, nose, lip, the trick of his frown.”  It is just such a swaggerer as contemporaries have described old Ben to be.  Meercraft, Bobadil, the Host of the New Inn, have all his image and superscription.  But Mammon is arrogant pretension personified.  Sir Samson Legend, in Love for Love, is such another lying, overbearing character, but he does not come up to Epicure Mammon.  What a “towering bravery” there is in his sensuality! he affects no pleasure under a Sultan.  It is as if “Egypt with Assyria strove in luxury.”

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