Accordingly Jonson read not only the Greek and Latin
classics down to the lesser writers, but he acquainted
himself especially with the Latin writings of his
learned contemporaries, their prose as well as their
poetry, their antiquities and curious lore as well
as their more solid learning. Though a poor man,
Jonson was an indefatigable collector of books.
He told Drummond that “the Earl of Pembroke sent
him £20 every first day of the new year to buy new
books.” Unhappily, in 1623, his library
was destroyed by fire, an accident serio-comically
described in his witty poem, “An Execration upon
Vulcan.” Yet even now a book turns up from
time to time in which is inscribed, in fair large
Italian lettering, the name, Ben Jonson. With
respect to Jonson’s use of his material, Dryden
said memorably of him: “[He] was not only
a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary
of all the others; you track him everywhere in their
snow. . . . But he has done his robberies so
openly that one sees he fears not to be taxed by any
law. He invades authors like a monarch, and
what would be theft in other poets is only victory
in him.” And yet it is but fair to say
that Jonson prided himself, and justly, on his originality.
In “Catiline,” he not only uses Sallust’s
account of the conspiracy, but he models some of the
speeches of Cicero on the Roman orator’s actual
words. In “Poetaster,” he lifts
a whole satire out of Horace and dramatises it effectively
for his purposes. The sophist Libanius suggests
the situation of “The Silent Woman”; a
Latin comedy of Giordano Bruno, “Il Candelaio,”
the relation of the dupes and the sharpers in “The
Alchemist,” the “Mostellaria” of
Plautus, its admirable opening scene. But Jonson
commonly bettered his sources, and putting the stamp
of his sovereignty on whatever bullion he borrowed
made it thenceforward to all time current and his
own.
The lyric and especially the occasional poetry of
Jonson has a peculiar merit. His theory demanded
design and the perfection of literary finish.
He was furthest from the rhapsodist and the careless
singer of an idle day; and he believed that Apollo
could only be worthily served in singing robes and
laurel crowned. And yet many of Jonson’s
lyrics will live as long as the language. Who
does not know “Queen and huntress, chaste and
fair.” “Drink to me only with thine
eyes,” or “Still to be neat, still to be
dressed”? Beautiful in form, deft and graceful
in expression, with not a word too much or one that
bears not its part in the total effect, there is yet
about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and
formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous
and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak,
with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters
whose habitual thought is on greater things.
It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better
in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical
finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity