Never did any author precipitate himself from such height of thought to so low expressions, as he often does.  He is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost every where two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other.  Neither is the luxuriance of Fletcher, which his friends have taxed in him, a less fault than the carelessness of Shakespeare.  He does not well always; and, when he does, he is a true Englishman,—­he knows not when to give over.  If he wakes in one scene, he commonly slumbers in another; and, if he pleases you in the first three acts, he is frequently so tired with his labour, that he goes heavily in the fourth, and sinks under his burden in the fifth.

For Ben Jonson, the most judicious of poets, he always writ properly, and as the character required; and I will not contest farther with my friends, who call that wit:  it being very certain, that even folly itself, well represented, is wit in a larger signification; and that there is fancy, as well as judgment, in it, though not so much or noble:  because all poetry being imitation, that of folly is a lower exercise of fancy, though perhaps as difficult as the other; for it is a kind of looking downward in the poet, and representing that part of mankind which is below him.

In these low characters of vice and folly, lay the excellency of that inimitable writer; who, when at any time he aimed at wit in the stricter sense, that is, sharpness of conceit, was forced either to borrow from the ancients, as to my knowledge he did very much from Plautus; or, when he trusted himself alone, often fell into meanness of expression.  Nay, he was not free from the lowest and most groveling kind of wit, which we call clenches, of which “Every Man in his Humour” is infinitely full; and, which is worse, the wittiest persons in the drama speak them.  His other comedies are not exempt from them.  Will you give me leave to name some few?  Asper, in which character he personates himself, (and he neither was nor thought himself a fool) exclaiming against the ignorant judges of the age, speaks thus: 

  How monstrous and detested is’t, to see
  A fellow, that has neither art nor brain,
  Sit like an Aristarchus, or stark-ass,
  Taking men’s lines, with a tobacco face,
  In snuff, &c.

And presently after:  “I marvel whose wit ’twas to put a prologue in yond Sackbut’s mouth.  They might well think he would be out of tune, and yet you’d play upon him too.”—­Will you have another of the same stamp?  “O, I cannot abide these limbs of sattin, or rather Satan.”

But, it may be, you will object that this was Asper, Macilente, or Carlo Buffone; you shall, therefore, hear him speak in his own person, and that in the two last lines, or sting of an epigram.  It is inscribed to Fine Grand, who, he says, was indebted to him for many things which he reckons there; and concludes thus: