Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/195

 BEN JONSON 179 ' ' Punt, [to Carlo. Was your new-created gallant with you there, Sogliardo? Carlo. O porpoise ! hang him, no ; he's a leiger [permanent resident] at Horn's ordinary yonder ; his villainous Ganymede and he have been droning a tobacco-pipe there ever since yester- day noon. Punt. Who ? Signior Tripartite [meaning Shift of the three appellations], that would give my dog the whiffe ? Carlo. Ay, he. They have hired a chamber and all, private, to practise in, for the making of the patoun, the receipt recipro- cal, and a number of other mysteries not yet extant [revealed]. I brought some dozen or twenty gallants this morning to view them, as you'd do a piece of perspective, in at a key -hole ; and there we might see Sogliardo sit in a chair, holding his snout up like a sow under an apple-tree, while the other opened his nostrils with a poking-stick, to give the smoke a more free de- livery. They had spit some three or four score ounces between 'em afore we came away. Ptmt. How ! spit three or four score ounces ? Carlo. Ay, and preserved it in porrengers, as a barber does his blood when he opens a vein. Punt. Out, pagan ! how dost thou open the vein of thy friend ? Carlo. Friend ! is there any such foolish thing in the world, ha ? 'slid, I never relished [tasted] it yet. Punt. Thy humour is the more dangerous." Truly it is hideous, with the poking-stick for the nostrils and the spittle in porrengers; but we may hope that the scurrilous and profane jester, whose religion is railing and his discourse ribaldry, is exaggerating, if he is not wholly inventing. Droning a tobacco-pipe occurs again in the " Silent Woman, ' Act iv., Sc. I : "As he lies on his back droning a tobacco pipe." The phrase seems suggestive of a happy monotony of indolence; the slow, sleepy breathing, as of an insect drone in summer, breathed through a tube like the drone of a bagpipe : it also