Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/168

 His profession also, as well as his person, was attacked: 'they objected making of verses to me when I could object to most of them their not being able to read them but as worthy of scorn; and strove, after the changeless manner of their estimable kind, to back and bolster up their accusations and objections by falsified and garbled extracts, 'which was an excellent way of malice; as if any man's context might not seem dangerous and offensive, if that which was knit to what went before were defrauded of his beginning; or that things by themselves uttered might not seem subject to calumny, which read entire would appear most free.' So little difference is there, in the composition of the meanest and foolishest among literary parasites and backbiters, between the characteristic developments or the representative products of the seventeenth and the nineteenth century.

All 'great and monstrous wickednesses,' avers the Laureate—not perhaps without an implied reference to such hideous instances as the case of