1574-1637
[Sidenote: Aubrey’s _Lives of Eminent Persons_. *]
“He was (or rather had been) of a clear and faire skin, his habit
was very plaine. I have heard Mr. Lacy, the player, say that he was
wont to weare a coate like a coach-man’s coate with slitts under the
arme-pitts. He would many times exceed in drinke. Canarie was his
beloved liquer.... Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t’other and
bigger, like Clun, the player.”
[Sidenote: Anderson’s _Poets of Great Britain_. *]
“The character of Jonson, like that of most celebrated wits, has been
drawn with great diversity of lights and shades, according as affection
or envy guided the pencil. His person, as he has himself told us, was
corpulent and large. His disposition seems to have been reserved and
saturnine, and sometimes not a little oppressed with the gloom of a
splenetic imagination.... Stern and rigid as his virtue was, he was
easy and social in the convivial meetings of his friends; and the laws
of his _Symposia_, inscribed over the chimney of the Apollo, a room in
the Devil Tavern, near Temple Bar, where he kept his club, show that he
was neither averse to the pleasures of conversation, nor ignorant of
what would render it agreeable and improving.”
[Sidenote: Lafond, _Notice sur Ben Jonson_. *]
“Il est clair pour nous que Ben Jonson avait une nature violente dans
un corps robuste et athlétique; son portrait nous le montre avec une
énorme face, une vigoureuse mâchoire, des yeux profonds et durs, un
cou de taureau. Sa peau avait été, de bonne heure, couturée par le
scorbut; et lui-même dit quelque part qu’il eut, dans le milieu de
sa vie, une montagne pour ventre et un dandinement disgracieux pour
démarche. Tous ses traits fortement accentués, anguleux ou carrés,
dénoncent l’énergie, l’orgueil et l’amour des luttes de toute nature.
Il aimait la bonne chère et le vin; sa prédilection pour le vin des
Canaries avait, disait il, pour excuse la nécessité de sa constitution
scorbutique. Il avait l’esprit semblable au corps; malgré ses études
classiques, il était loin d’être un Athénien, c’était un Anglo-Saxon
enté sur un Romain de la décadence. Généreux, libéral, prodigue, il
tint toujours table ouverte, même lorsque la misère était devenue
l’hôte de son foyer.”