Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/174

 often a contempt, but it is with the shallowest creatures; courtiers commonly: look up even with them in a new suit, you get above them straight. Nothing is more short-lived than [? their] pride: it is but while their clothes last: stay but while these are worn out, you cannot wish the thing more wretched or dejected.

In the four notes which compose a brief essay on painting (or, as Jonson calls it, picture) the finest passage by far is this wise and noble word of tribute paid to another great art by a great artist in letters:—

The summary history of 'picture,' or the art of painting, in which Jonson has given us his views on the relation of that art to poetry, geometry, optics, and moral philosophy, bears no less witness to his wide reading and his painstaking attention than to his quaint and dogmatic self-confidence in laying down the law at second hand on subjects of which he seems to have known less than little. But when we pass from criticism of painters to the lower ground