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——————Henceforth, learn To bear yourself more humbly, nor to swell Or breathe your insolent and idle spite On him whose laughter can your worst affright: |
and dismisses him
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To some dark place, removed from company; He will talk idly else after his physic. |
“The Satiromastix” may be considered as a parody on “The Poetaster.” Jonson, with classical taste, had raised his scene in the court of Augustus: Decker, with great unhappiness, places it in that of William Rufus. The interest of the piece arises from the dexterity with which Decker has accommodated those very characters which Jonson has satirised in his “Poetaster.” This gratified those who came every day to the theatre, delighted to take this mimetic revenge on the arch bard.
In Decker’s prefatory address “To the World,” he observes, “Horace haled his Poetasters to the bar;[392] the Poetasters untrussed Horace: Horace made himself believe that his Burgonian wit[393] might desperately challenge all comers, and that none durst take up the foils against him.” But Decker is the Earl Rivers! He had been blamed for the personal attacks on Jonson; for “whipping his fortunes and condition of life; where the more noble reprehension had been of his mind’s deformity:” but for this he retorts on Ben. Some censured Decker for barrenness of invention, in bringing on those characters in his own play whom Jonson had stigmatised; but “it was not improper,” he says, “to set the same dog upon Horace, whom Horace had set to worry others.” Decker warmly concludes with defying the Jonsonians.
“Let that mad dog Detraction bite till his teeth be worn to the stumps; Envy, feed thy snakes so fat with poison till they burst; World, let all thy adders shoot out their Hydra-headed forked stings! I thank thee, thou true Venusian Horace, for these good words thou givest me. Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo.”
The whole address is spirited. Decker was a very popular 483 writer, whose numerous tracts exhibit to posterity a more detailed narrative of the manners of the town in the Elizabethan age than is elsewhere to be found.
In Decker’s Satiromastix, Horace junior is first exhibited in his study, rehearsing to himself an ode: suddenly the Pindaric rapture is interrupted by the want of a rhyme; this is satirically applied to an unlucky line of Ben’s own. One of his “sons,” Asinius Bubo, who is blindly worshipping his great idol, or “his Ningle,” as he calls him, amid his admiration of Horace, perpetually breaks out into digressive accounts of what sort of a man his friends take him to be. For one, Horace in wrath prepares an epigram: and for Crispinus and Fannius, brother bards, who threaten “they’ll bring your life and death on the stage, as a bricklayer in a play,” he says, “I can bring a prepared troop of gallants, who, for my sake, shall distaste every unsalted line in their fly-blown comedies.” “Ay,” replies Asinius, “and all men of my rank!” Crispinus, Horace calls “a light voluptuous reveller,” and Fannius “the slightest cobweb-lawn piece of a poet.” Both enter, and Horace receives them with all friendship.
The scene is here conducted not without skill. Horace complains that