Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/148

 132 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES "Ben Jonson, who I thought had been dead, has written a play against the next term, called the ' Magnetic Lady ; ' " which we learn was generally esteemed an excellent play. Howell wrote a char- acteristic letter to his " Father Ben " concerning it. Having quoted the ^^ Nullum fit magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementicB, " There's no great wit with out some mixture of madness," he goes on : " It is verified in you, for I find that you have been often- times mad : you were mad when you writ your 'Fox,' and madder when you writ your 'Alchemist;' you were mad when you writ 'Catiline,' and stark mad when you writ ' Sejanus ; ' but when you writ your ' Epigrams ' and the ' Magnetic Lady ' you were not so mad. . . . The madness I mean is that divine fury, that heating and heightening spirit which Ovid [Plato had been yet better] speaks of." Grant- ing the truth of this, filial piety should have kept him from blurting it out to " Father Ben," consider- ing his age and state and circumstances. In 1633 he produced his last comedy, " A Tale of a Tub : " a title which has been made his own by England's greatest satirist writing in his prime; who, turning over the leaves of the masterpiece in his far sadder decHne, justly exclaimed, "My God! what a genius I had when I wrote this ! " In the same year the king, going to Scotland to be crowned there, was magnificently entertained by the Earl of Newcastle at his seat at Welbeck, in Nottinghamshire ; and in the following year, during a Royal "progress" into the north of England, yet more magnificently at another of his seats, Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire ; and Jonson on both occasions furnished little anti-