[103] He had the palsy at that time.
[104] The names of several of Jonson's dramatis personæ.
[105] New Inn, Act iii. Scene 2.—Act iv. Scene 4.
[106] This break was purposely designed by the poet, to expose that singular one in Ben's third stanza.
[107] His man, Richard Broome, wrote with success several comedies. He had been the amanuensis or attendant of Jonson. The epigram made against Pope for the assistance W. Broome gave him appears to have been borrowed from this pun. Johnson has inserted it in "Broome's Life."
[108] He was remarkable for his memory of all that he read, not only the matter but the form, the contents of each page and the peculiar spelling of every word. It is said he was once tested by the pretended destruction of a manuscript, which he reproduced without a variation of word or line.
[109] He used to lie in a sort of lounging-chair in the midst of his study, surrounded by heaps of dusty volumes, never allowed to be removed, and forming a colony for the spiders whose society he so highly valued.
[110] His comparatively useless life was quietly satirized by the Rev. Mr. Spence, in "a parallel after the manner of Plutarch," between Magliabechi and Hill, a self-taught tailor of Buckinghamshire. It is published in Dodsley's Fugitive Pieces, 2 vols., 12mo, 1774.
[111] The Dutch are not, however, to be entirely blamed for repulsive scenes on the stage. Shakspeare's Titus Andronicus, and many of the dramas of our Elizabethan writers, exhibit cruelties very repulsive to modern ideas. The French stage has occasionally exhibited in modern times scenes that have been afterwards condemned by the censors; and in Italy the "people's theatre" occasionally panders to popular tastes by execution scenes, where the criminal is merely taken off the stage; the blow struck on a wooden block, to give reality to the action; and the executioner re-enters flourishing a bloody axe.
[112] Ned Shuter was the comedian who first introduced a donkey on the stage. Seated on the beast he delivered a prologue written on the occasion of his benefit. Sometimes the donkey wore a great tie-wig. Animals educated to play certain parts are a later invention. Horses, dogs, and elephants have been thus trained in the present century, and plays written expressly to show their proficiency.