Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/245

 BEN JONSON 229 (1632), has, I believe, but a single mention of tobacco. At the close of Act iii., Damplay, one of the critical chorus, which Ben was fond of introducing, replies to his companion and contrast, Probee : — " I care not for marking the play ; I'll damn it, talk, and do that I come for. I will not have gentlemen lose their privilege, nor I myself my prerogative, for never an overgrown or super- annuated poet of them all. He shall not give me the law : I will censure and be witty, and take my tobacco, and enjoy my Magna Charta of reprehension, as my predecessors have done before me." There are several interesting allusions in this play to the poet himself and his earlier works. Being then in his sixtieth year, he indulged in the retrospection and expansiveness of age. In the Induction, the Boy of the House (Black Friars), who is the third member of the chorus, says — " The author beginning his studies of this kind with ' Every Man in his Humour ; ' and after, ' Every Man out of his Humour ; ' and since continuing in all his plays, especially those of the comic thread, whereof the ' New Inn ' was the last, some recent humours still, or manners of men, that went along with the times ; finding himself now near the close, or shutting up, of his circle, hath fancied to himself in idea this ' Magnetic Mistress ' ... to draw thither a diversity of guests, all persons of different humours, to make up his perimeter. And this he hath called 'Humours Reconciled.'" No better definition of the leading idea of the greater part of his comedies could be given than is thus furnished by old Ben himself, who always knew as thoroughly what he meant to do as how to do it, composing not by impulse, but with settled purpose and plan.