As 'rare Ben' chiefly shone as a dramatist, we need not recount at
length the events of his life. He was born in 1574; his father, who had
been a clergyman in Westminster, and was sprung from a Scotch family
in Annandale, having died before his birth. His mother marrying a
bricklayer, Ben was brought up to the same employment. Disliking this,
he enlisted in the army, and served with credit in the Low Countries.
When he came home, he entered St John's College, Cambridge; but his stay
there must have been short, since he is found in London at the age of
twenty, married, and acting on the stage. He began at the same time to
write dramas. He was unlucky enough to quarrel with and kill another
performer, for which he was committed to prison, but released without
a trial. He resumed his labours as a writer for the stage; but having
failed in the acting department, he forsook it for ever. His first hit
was, 'Every Man in his Humour,' a play enacted in 1598, Shakspeare being
one of the actors. His course afterwards was chequered. He quarrelled
with Marston and Dekker,--he was imprisoned for some reflections on the
Scottish nation in one of his comedies,--he was appointed in 1619 poet-
laureate, with a pension of 100 marks,--he made the same year a journey
to Scotland on foot, where he visited Drummond at Hawthornden, and they
seem to have mutually loathed each other,'--he fell into habits of
intemperance, and acquired, as he said himself,
'A mountain belly and a rocky face.'
His favourite haunts were the Mermaid, and the Falcon Tavern, Southwark.
He was engaged in constant squabbles with his contemporaries, and died
at last, in 1637, in miserably poor circumstances. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey, under a square tablet, where one of his admirers
afterwards inscribed the words,
'O rare Ben Jonson!'
Of his powers as a dramatist we need not speak, but present our readers
with some rough and racy specimens of his poetry.