"You always are making a god of your spouse;
But this neither reason nor conscience allows:
Perhaps you will say 'tis in gratitude due,
And you adore him because he adores you.
Your argument's weak, and so you will find;
For you, by this rule, must adore all mankind."
The wit and humor of Shakespeare endear him to our hearts; and what a rich harvest does the gleaner obtain from his pages! Take "Love's Labor's Lost," for instance, a play produced in his youth, so full of quips and quiddity as to live in the memory by whole scenes. There is no lack of scathing sarcasm in the play, but it leaves no bitter taste in the mouth, like the "doses" of Swift or the more unscrupulous productions of Pope in the same line. Ben Jonson,[193] who ranked so high as a dramatist, has been pronounced to be, next to Shakespeare, the greatest wit and humorist of his time. His expression was through the pen, not by the tongue: no man was more taciturn in society. Much of Jonson's matter was better adapted to his time than to ours; words which seem to us so coarse and vulgar passed unchallenged in the period which gave them birth.
Here are five lines from Jonson, with which he closes a play directed against plagiarists and libellers generally. He sums up thus:—
"Blush, folly, blush! here's none that fears
The wagging of an ass's ears,
Although a wolfish case he wears.
Detraction is but baseness' varlet,
And apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet."
It is said that Jonson was a "sombre" man. We have seen that it is by no means always sunshine with those who brighten others' spirits by their pen. The great luminary is not always above the horizon.
A friend remarked to the wife of one of our wittiest poets, "What an atmosphere of mirth you must live in, to share a home with one who writes always so sportively and wittily!" The answer was a most significant shake of the head.
We spoke of Dryden as a satirist; perhaps no writer ever went further in the line of bitterness and personality. His portrait of the Duke of Buckingham will occur to the reader in this connection:—
"A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon."
When a boy at school in Westminster, Dryden more than once showed the budding promise of the genius that was in him. When put with other classmates to write a composition on the miracle of the conversion of water into wine, he remained idle and truant, as usual, up to the last moment, when he had only time to produce one line in Latin and two in English; but they were of such excellence as to presage his future greatness as a poet, and elicit hearty praise from his tutor. They were as follows:—