Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/172

 156 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES than the gravity, dignity, wisdom, and piety of those with whom he passed his life from manhood to extreme old age." Clarendon, in his Life, speaking of himself in the third person, says : " He owed all the little he knew, and the little good that was in him, to the friendships and conversation he had still been used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age ; by whose learn- ing and information and instruction he formed his studies, and mended his understanding, and by whose gentleness and sweetness of behaviour, and justice and virtue and example, he formed his manners. . . . Whilst he was only a student of the law, and stood at gaze, and irresolute what corner of life to take, his chief acquaintances were Ben Jonson, John Selden, Charles Cotton, John Vaughan, Sir Kenelm Digby, Thomas May, and Thomas Carew, and some others of eminent faculties in their several ways. Ben Jonson's name can never be forgotten, having by his very good learning, and the severity of his nature and manners, very much reformed the stage, and indeed the English poetry itself. . . . His [Jon- son's] conversation was very good, and with the men of most note." One of the first scholars and most laborious writers of the age, conspicuous in the second rank of our poets and the front rank of our drama- tists, he was on terms of familiar friendship with the noblest of his contemporaries ; the boon-companions of his prime were the men of the Mermaid, and of his age his sons at the Apollo. He was convivial, and, as his burly namesake put it, " a clubbable man ; " and in his days, taverns were the regular social resorts of the most illustrious men, as coffee-houses in the