In two elaborate scenes, poor Decker stands for a full-length. Resolved to be a poet, he haunts the company of Horace: he meets him in the street, and discovers all the variety of his nothingness: he is a student, a stoic, an architect: everything by turns, “and nothing long.” Horace impatiently attempts to escape from him, but Crispinus foils him at all points. This affectionate admirer is even willing to go over the world with him. He proposes an ingenious project, if Horace will introduce him to Mæcenas. Crispinus offers to become “his assistant,” assuring him that “he would be content with the next place, not envying thy reputation with thy patron;” and he thinks that Horace and himself “would soon lift out of favour Virgil, Varius, and the best of them, and enjoy them wholly to ourselves.” The restlessness of Horace to extricate himself from this “Hydra of Discourse,” the passing friends whom he calls on to assist him, and the glue-like pertinacity of Crispinus, are richly coloured.

A ludicrous and exquisitely satirical scene occurs at the trial 481 of Crispinus and his colleagues. Jonson has here introduced an invention, which a more recent satirist so happily applied to our modern Lexiphanes, Dr. Johnson, for his immeasurable polysyllables. Horace is allowed by Augustus to make Crispinus swallow a certain pill; the light vomit discharges a great quantity of hard matter, to clear

His brain and stomach of their tumorous heats.

These consist of certain affectations in style, and adulteration of words, which offended the Horatian taste: “the basin” is called quickly for and Crispinus gets rid easily of some, but others were of more difficult passage:—

‘Magnificate!’ that came up somewhat hard!
Crispinus. ‘O barmy froth——’
Augustus. What’s that?
Crispinus. ‘Inflate!—Turgidous!—and Ventositous’—
Horace. ‘Barmy froth, inflate, turgidous, and ventosity are come up.’
Tibullus. O terrible windy words!
Gallus. A sign of a windy brain.

But all was not yet over: “Prorumpt” made a terrible rumbling, as if his spirit was to have gone with it; and there were others which required all the kind assistance of the Horatian “light vomit.” This satirical scene closes with some literary admonitions from the grave Virgil, who details to Crispinus the wholesome diet to be observed after his surfeits, which have filled

His blood and brain thus full of crudities.

Virgil’s counsels to the vicious neologist, who debases the purity of English diction by affecting new words or phrases, may too frequently be applied.

You must not hunt for wild outlandish terms
To stuff out a peculiar dialect;
But let your matter run before your words.
And if at any time you chance to meet
Some Gallo-Belgick phrase, you shall not straight
Rack your poor verse to give it entertainment,
But let it pass; and do not think yourself
Much damnified, if you do leave it out
When not the sense could well receive it.

Virgil adds something which breathes all the haughty spirit of Ben: he commands Crispinus: