Yes thou wert born out of his travelling thigh
As well as from his brains, and claim'st thereby
To be his Bacchus as his Pallas: he
Ever his Thighs Male then and his Brains She.
He was paramount in the Dramatick part of Poetry, and taught the Stage an exact conformity to the Laws of Comedians, being accounted the most learned, judicious, and correct of them all, and the more to be admired for being so, for that neither the height of natural parts, for he was no Shakespear, nor the cost of extraordinary education, but his own proper industry, and addiction to Books, advanced him to this perfection. He wrote fifty Plays in all, whereof fifteen Comedies, three Tragedies, the rest Masques and Entertainments. His Comedies were, The Alchimist, Bartholomew Fair, Cynthia's Revels, Caseis alter'd, The Devil is an Ass, Every Man in his humour, every Man out of his humour, The Fox, Magnetick Lady, New Inn, Poetaster, Staple of News, Sad Shepherd, Silent Woman, and A Tale of a Tub. His Tragedies were, Cateline's Conspiracy, Mortimer's Fall, and Seianus. His Masques and Entertainments, too long here to write, were thirty and two, besides a Comedy of East-ward, hoe? in which he was partner with Chapman.
These his Plays were above the vulgar capacity, (which are onely tickled with down-right obscenity) and took not so well at the first stroke, as at the rebound, when beheld the second time, yea, they will endure reading, and that with due commendation, so long as either ingenuity or learning are fashionable in our Nation. And although all his Plays may endure the test, yet in three of his Comedies, namely, The Fox, Alchymist, and Silent Woman, he may be compared in the judgment of the learned men, for decorum, language and well-humouring parts, as well with the chief of the ancient Greek and Latine Comedians, as the prime of modern Italians, who have been judged the best of Europe for a happy vein in Comedies; nor is his Bartholomew Fair much short of them. As for his other Comedies, Staple of News, Devil's an Ass, and the rest, if they be not so sprightful and vigorous as his first pieces, all that are old will, and all that desire to be old, should excuse him therein; and therefore let the Name of Ben Johnson sheild them against whoever shall think fit to be severe in censure against them. Truth is, his Tragedies, Seianus and Cateline seem to have in them more of an artificial and inflate, than of a pathetical and naturally Tragick height; yet do they every one of them far excel any of the English ones that were writ before him; so that he may be truly said to be the first reformer of the English Stage, as he himself more truly than modestly writes in his commendatory Verses of his Servants Richard Broom's Comedy of the Northern Lass.
Which you have justly gained from the Stage,
By observation of those Comick Laws,
Which I, your Master, first did teach the Age.
In the rest of his Poetry, (for he is not wholly Dramatick) as his Underwoods, Epigrams, &c. he is sometimes bold and strenuous, sometimes Magisterial, sometimes lepid and full enough of conceit, and sometimes a man as other men are.