“Blush, folly, blush! here’s none that fears
   The wagging of an ass’s ears,
   Although a wolfish case he wears. 
   Detraction is but baseness varlet
   And apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet.”

From “The Alchemist.”

Tribulation. What makes the devil so devilish, I would ask you.  Sathan our common enemy, but his being Perpetually about the fire, and boiling Brimstone and arsenic?...

     Fastidious. How like you her wit.

     Macilente. Her ingenuity is excellent, Sir.

Fast. You see the subject of her sweet fingers there (the viol) oh, she tickles it so that—­she makes it laugh most divinely—­I’ll tell you a good jest just now, and yourself shall say it’s a good one.  I have wished myself to be that instrument, I think a thousand times, and not so few by heaven.

The two following are from “Bartholomew Fair.”

     Littlewit. I envy no man my delicates, Sir.

     Winwife. Alas, you have the garden where they grow still.  A wife
     here with a strawberry breath, cherry lips, apricot cheeks, and a
     soft velvet head like a melicotton.

     Lit. Good i’ faith! now dulness upon us, that I had not that
     before him, that I should not light on’t as well as he!  Velvet
     head!...

     Knockem. Sir, I will take your counsel, and cut my hair, and
     leave vapours.  I see that tobacco and bottle ale, and pig and whit,
     and very Ursula herself is all vanity.

Busy. Only pig was not comprehended in my admonition—­the rest were:  for long hair, it is an ensign of pride, a banner:  and the world is full of those banners—­very full of banners.  And bottle ale is a drink of Satan’s, a diet-drink of Satan’s devised to puff us up, and make us swell in this latter age of vanity; as the smoke of tobacco to keep us in mist and error:  but the fleshly woman, which you call Ursula, is above all to be avoided, having the marks upon her of the three enemies of man—­the world, as being in the Fair, the Devil, as being in the fire;[53] and the flesh as being herself.

Ben Jonson has a strange, and I believe original conceit of introducing persons to explain their plays, and make remarks on the characters.  Sometimes many interruptions of this kind occur in the course of a drama, affording variety and amusement to the audience, or the reader.  In “Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” we have the insertion of a play within a play.  The following taken from Jonson’s epigrams have fine complexity, and show a certain tinge of humour.

  THE HOUR GLASS.

  “Consider this small dust here in the glass,
          By atoms moved: 
   Could you believe that this the body was
          Of one that loved;
   And in his mistress’ flame, playing like a fly,
   Was turned to cinders by her eye: 
   Yes; and in death as like unblest,
          To have’t exprest,
   Ev’n ashes of lovers find no rest.”