Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/117

Rh tures, for their insolencies, worthy to be taxed ? Yet to which of these so pointingly, as he might not either ingenuously have confest, or wisely dissembled his disease?" In the Prologue he answers those who said that he was a year about a play :— " To this there needs no lie, but this his creature, Which was two months since no feature ; And though he dares give them five lives to mend it, 'Tis known, five weeks fully penned it, From his own hand, without a coadjutor, Novice, journeyman, or tutor." Gifford well observes : " No human powers could have completed such a work in such a time, unless the author's mind had been previously stored with all the treasure of ancient and modern learning, on which he might draw at pleasure. . . . Before Jonson was three-and-twenty, he had mastered the Greek and Roman classics, and was at the period of which we are now speaking, among the first scholars of the age ; " and Lord Falkland (Clarendon's Falk- land, killed at the battle of Newbury, in that great civil war which was breaking his heart), writes in his excellent and earnest " Eglogue on the Death of Ben Jonson " : * — " His learning such, no author old nor new, Escaped his reading that deserved his view. And such his judgment, so exact his test. Of what was best in books, as what books best, the hint for a famous passage in one of his prose works, contemning the authority of the Fathers : — "And Time, like what our brooks act in our sight, Oft sinks the weighty, and upholds the light."
 * From another couplet of this piece Milton may have derived