Tuesday's riot, for being of that trade, when the rest were quiet.”
“The old copies read quit,—i.e., discharged from working, and gone to divert themselves.”—Whalley's note.
It should be “quit” no doubt, but not meaning “discharged from working,” &c.—but quit, that is, acquitted. The pewterer was at his holiday diversion as well as the other apprentices, and they as forward in the riot as he. But he alone was punished under pretext of the riot, but in fact for his trade.
Act ii. sc. 1.—
“Morose. Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method than by this trunk, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of sounds?”
What does “trunk” mean here, and in the first scene of the first act? Is it a large ear-trumpet?—or rather a tube, such as passes from parlour to kitchen, instead of a bell?
Whalley's note at the end:—
“Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn of mind: and as humour is a personal quality, the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an extravagant unnatural caricatura.”
If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays, this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar conception of the nature and conditions of drama and dramatic personation. Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea:—
“For he knew, poet never credit gain'd