————————When I dip my pen
In distill’d roses, and do strive to drain
Out of mine ink all gall—
Mine enemies, with sharp and searching eyes,
Look through and through me.
And when my lines are measured out as straight
As even parallels, ’tis strange, that still,
Still some imagine that they’re drawn awry.
The error is not mine, but in their eye,
That cannot take proportions.

To the querulous satirist, Crispinus replies with dignified gravity—

Horace! to stand within the shot of galling tongues
Proves not your guilt; for, could we write on paper
Made of these turning leaves of heaven, the clouds,
Or speak with angels’ tongues, yet wise men know
That some would shake the head, though saints should sing;
Some snakes must hiss, because they’re born with stings.
——————Be not you grieved
If that which you mould fair, upright, and smooth,
Be screw’d awry, made crooked, lame, and vile,
By racking comments.— 484
So to be bit it rankles not, for Innocence
May with a feather brush off the foul wrong.
But when your dastard wit will strike at men
In corners, and in riddles fold the vices
Of your best friends, you must not take to heart
If they take off all gilding from their pills,
And only offer you the bitter core.—

At this the galled Horace winces. Crispinus continues, that it is in vain Horace swears, that

———————He puts on
The office of an executioner,
Only to strike off the swoln head of sin,
Where’er you find it standing. Say you swear,
And make damnation, parcel of your oath,
That when your lashing jests make all men bleed,
Yet you whip none—court, city, country, friends,
Foes, all must smart alike.—

Fannius, too, joins, and shows Ben the absurd oaths he takes, when he swears to all parties, that he does not mean them. How, then, of five hundred and four, five hundred

Should all point with their fingers in one instant,
At one and the same man?

Horace is awkwardly placed between these two friendly remonstrants, to whom he promises perpetual love.

Captain Tucca, a dramatic personage in Jonson’s Poetaster, and a copy of his own Bobadil, whose original the poet had found at “Powles,” the fashionable lounge of that day, is here continued with the same spirit; and as that character permitted from the extravagance of its ribaldry, it is now made the vehicle for those more personal retorts, exhibiting the secret history of Ben, which perhaps twitted the great bard more than the keenest wit, or the most solemn admonition which Decker could ever attain. Jonson had cruelly touched on Decker being out at elbows, and made himself too merry with the histrionic tribe: he, who was himself a poet, and had been a Thespian! The blustering captain thus attacks the great wit:—“Do’st stare, my Saracen’s head at Newgate? I’ll march through thy Dunkirk guts, for shooting jests at me.” He insists that as Horace, “that sly knave, whose shoulders were once seen lapp’d in a player’s old cast cloak,” and who had reflected on Crispinus’s satin doublet being ravelled out; that he should wear one of Crispinus’s 485 “old cast sattin suits,” and that Fannius should write a couple of scenes for his own “strong garlic comedies,” and Horace should swear that they were his own—he would easily bear “the guilt of conscience.” “Thy Muse is but a hagler, and wears clothes upon best be trust (a humorous Deckerian phrase)—thou’rt great in somebody’s books for this!” Did it become Jonson to gibe at the histrionic tribe, who is himself accused of “treading the stage, as if he were treading mortar.”[394] He once put up—“a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, and hadst been still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face upon’t. Thou hast forget how thou ambled’st in leather-pilch, by a play-waggon in the highway; and took’st mad Jeronimo’s part, to get service among the mimics,” &c.

Ben’s person was, indeed, not gracious in the playfulness of love or fancy. A female, here, thus delineates Ben:—