Forty things more, dear Grand, which you know true,
  For which, or pay me quickly, or I’ll pay you.

This was then the mode of wit, the vice of the age, and not Ben Jonson’s; for you see, a little before him, that admirable wit, Sir Philip Sidney, perpetually playing with his words.  In his time, I believe, it ascended first into the pulpit, where (if you will give me leave to clench too) it yet finds the benefit of its clergy; for they are commonly the first corrupters of eloquence, and the last reformed from vicious oratory; as a famous Italian has observed before me, in his Treatise of the Corruption of the Italian Tongue; which he principally ascribes to priests and preaching friars.

But, to conclude with what brevity I can, I will only add this, in defence of our present writers, that, if they reach not some excellencies of Ben Jonson, (which no age, I am confident, ever shall) yet, at least, they are above that meanness of thought which I have taxed, and which is frequent in him.

That the wit of this age is much more courtly, may easily be proved, by viewing the characters of gentlemen which were written in the last.  First, for Jonson:—­True-wit, in the “Silent Woman,” was his master-piece; and Truewit was a scholar-like kind of man, a gentleman with an allay of pedantry, a man who seems mortified to the world, by much reading.  The best of his discourse is drawn, not from the knowledge of the town, but books; and, in short, he would be a fine gentleman in an university.  Shakespeare shewed the best of his skill in his Mercutio; and he said himself, that he was forced to kill him in the third act, to prevent being killed by him.  But, for my part, I cannot find he was so dangerous a person:  I see nothing in him but what was so exceeding harmless, that he might have lived to the end of the play, and died in his bed, without offence to any man.

Fletcher’s Don John is our only bugbear; and yet I may affirm, without suspicion of flattery, that he now speaks better, and that his character is maintained with much more vigour in the fourth and fifth acts, than it was by Fletcher in the three former.  I have always acknowledged the wit of our predecessors, with all the veneration which becomes me; but, I am sure, their wit was not that of gentlemen; there was ever somewhat that was ill-bred and clownish in it, and which confessed the conversation of the authors.

And this leads me to the last and greatest advantage of our writing, which proceeds from conversation.  In the age wherein those poets lived, there was less of gallantry than in ours; neither did they keep the best company of theirs.  Their fortune has been much like that of Epicurus, in the retirement of his gardens; to live almost unknown, and to be celebrated after their decease.  I cannot find that any of them had been conversant in courts, except Ben Jonson; and his genius lay not so much that way, as to make