Discoveries | The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson

Edited by Lorna Hutson

INTRODUCTION

Timber, or Discoveries remains a provocative and mysterious text. It holds out the promise of what Swinburne referred to as ‘mental autobiography’ (Swinburne, 1889, 137): access to the workings of Jonson’s poetic mind. It contains some of Jonson’s best-known pronouncements on poetry and poetics, and the language in which these are expressed is of such consciously achieved clarity and precision that its very restraint is suffused with a peculiar emotional power. When we read, for example, a pronouncement such as ‘Pure and neat language I love, yet plain and customary’ (1325), we are conscious both of the sentiment’s apparent emotional directness, and of a kind of intellectual strenuousness hidden in its simplicity. The inversion of the word order smuggles in an artful symmetry, matching pairs of adjectives at either end of the sentence, so that we are forced to think more precisely than we might have about the distinctions between these everyday words. Why are ‘pure’ and ‘neat’ contrasted with ‘plain’ and ‘customary’? What is that ‘yet’ implying? There is a kind of audacity in the very performance of the plainness here advocated. Its extreme austerity of expression is far from being really ‘customary’, then or now. But there is another kind of audacity or risk, too, with which this introduction will be chiefly concerned. It is the risk Jonson takes in performing his own direct emotional involvement (‘Pure and neat language I love’), by manipulating, with consummate art, the utterances of other men (in this passage, Quintilian).

Discoveries may be defined as a commonplace book. Jonson’s title-page, after all, identifies his ‘discoveries’ as formulations that have ‘flowed out of his daily readings’. But recognition of this in itself may pose problems for Jonson’s readers in the twenty-first century, who may be looking for something more like the delightfully-sustained argumentative movement of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, or the pleasurable mixture of poetic insight and literary gossip that we find in William Drummond’s recording of Jonson’s conversations in the Informations. Unfamiliar as we are with the conventions of the printed commonplace book, or the habits of mind that made it congenial to readers, we are likely to find the very look of Discoveries a little off-putting. Editors have chosen to deal in different ways with the mixture of commonplace-book headings, proverbs, quotations, names, and citations of references that appear in the crowded margins of F2, but the effect is inevitably somewhat miscellaneous. Some sections of text are more fragmentary than others. Lines 127 to 155, for example, consist of a mixture of musings on Latin proverbs or literary phrases – sometimes so brief that they amount to densely-wrought vernacular renderings – mixed with facetious comments on snatches of contemporary news, and commonplaces of moral philosophy, sententiously delivered as if arising from personal observation and experience. Other sections, such as that on the analogies between poetry and painting at lines 1074 to 1162 (which derives from Antonio Possevino’s summary of passages from Pliny’s Natural History), or the section on epistolary style at lines 1506 to 1623 (transcribed from John Hoskyns’s Directions for Speech and Style, c. 1598–1603, which reworks Justus Lipsius’s Epistolica institutio) have more continuity, and could be classed as short essays, were they not known to be translations or transcriptions. And yet, as we read our way across this topical heterogeneity and these palimpsestic layers of authors upon authors, it is impossible for us not to be aware that these textual fragments are unified by a lapidary consistency of style. We even have a sense of the magisterial presence of the author in the first-person pronoun that so often claims to have personally experienced or observed the truths uttered in these pages. It is as if Jonson’s acts of reading and translation or transcription themselves constitute acts of possessive re-origination through expressive choice, and in articulating the discoveries that have ‘flowed out of his daily readings’, Jonson has produced a model of stylistic coherence, a kind of inalienable expressive integrity.

The question of the extent to which the derivativeness of Jonson’s text exists in tension with the implicit claims of its first-person pronouncements is an interesting, and indeed, unavoidable one. Jonson translates from the younger Seneca to the effect that ‘Truth lies open to all; it is no man’s several’ (99). This statement, and the fact of its having been taken from a classical author, have been read as endorsing the theories of literary imitation popularized by Erasmian humanism and particularly in evidence in Erasmus’s De copia (1526) and Adages (1500, 1508). In the literary culture of imitation created by Erasmus’s De copia, as Terence Cave has written, the boundaries between reading and authorship are erased: ‘a text is read in view of its transcription as part of another text; conversely, the writer as imitator concedes that he cannot escape entirely the constraints of what he has read’ (Cave, 1979, 35). Likewise, Kathy Eden has noted how a kind of literary communism, a lack of property boundaries, characterizes Erasmus’s project of facilitating access to classical literature in the Adages: ‘Making available for common use the collected intellectual wealth of the classical tradition, the Adages begins with a proverb about friendship, and not only about friendship, but about the common ownership of property’ (Eden, 2001, 25).

By this kind of analogy, it would tempting to read Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries as a silva, a wood- or timber-collection of raw literary materials made communistically available to others, in precisely the way Erasmus referred to his Adages as sylvam aliquam adagiorum, ‘a sort of collection of adages’, which would give modern readers access to classical literary wealth (CWE, 9.316). However, as we read through Jonson’s silva, it becomes clear that the effect of his translations – quite unlike that of Erasmus’s Adages – is not to leave the resource-potential of the sentiment or adage communal and ‘open to all’, but to make its expression ‘several’, or particular, to Jonson’s production of his ethical and autobiographical voice. For example, when Jonson, translating a passage from Seneca’s On Benefits, observes that ‘he that writes other verses upon my verses, takes not away the first letters, but hides them’ (324–5), the statement is charged with autobiographical effect. Choosing to translate Seneca’s scriptis nostris ‘our writings’, as ‘my verses’, Jonson ensures that the specificity of ‘verses’ and the singular possessive intensify a reader’s desire to infer an autobiographical meaning. Seneca’s lines, occurring in the context of his essay, illustrate a general moral truth which lies ‘open to all’: injuries do not erase benefits, though they may deface them. Jonson, however, inflects the moral truth with the authority of experience; he seems to remember having had someone scrawl over his poems, or, perhaps (as Dekker did), parody his verses, writing verses ‘upon my verses’ in that sense. There are many other examples of similar autobiographical effects. More scandalous instances include Jonson’s praise of Bacon at lines 673–9, or his lament for the loss of his powers of memory, at lines 348–60. The first passage, powerfully emotive in its apparent witness of Jonson’s personal loyalty to Bacon during his impeachment, has been found to have been transcribed from someone else’s letter about Bacon. The second, which prompted Swinburne’s reflections on ‘mental autobiography’, and which has us all imagining Jonson’s boyhood memories of recitation at Westminster School, is actually translated word for word from the elder Seneca.

Should we feel cheated to find that Jonson’s apparently personal opinions and autobiographical revelations are in fact derived from others’ writings? Assessments have varied tellingly across the centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, responses to Discoveries were not marked by any such concern, but neither was the text read as revelatory about Jonson. In Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), Dryden appreciated Jonson for enabling English dramatic theory to rival that of French neoclassicism: ‘in his Discoveries, we have as many and profitable rules for perfecting the stage as any wherewith the French can furnish us’ (Dryden, Works, 1971, 17.58). These dramatic precepts are in fact lengthy passages of close translation from a work on the poetics of tragedy by the Dutch scholar Daniel Heinsius. Dryden, who was certainly aware of Heinsius’s work, evidently thought the indebtedness not worth mentioning. Peter Whalley, including Discoveries in his edition of Jonson’s works in 1756, merely comments that, ‘many of the following passages are imitations, or observations made upon authors of his daily reading’. He declares he will not point out each instance, since ‘it will be of no great importance, whether the sentiment be Jonson’s own, or borrowed from a classic original’ (Whalley, 7.71).

A century later, however, the terms on which any appreciation of Discoveries might be based had changed completely. Legal and economic claims to authorial ownership and to rights over publication began, in the writings of the German Romantics, to rely on discourses of aesthetic genius and originality (Woodmansee, 1984, 425–48). In establishing an author’s claim to own his work, it became necessary to show that literary style was the inalienable, because organic, expression of an individual genius and individual nature. When Jonson’s Discoveries were ‘rediscovered’ in Swinburne’s A Study of Ben Jonson (1889), the effects of this change may be seen in the curious way in which Swinburne judges Jonson’s virile writing style as proof of the poet’s honest, incorruptible character. Swinburne championed Jonson’s observations on men and morals over the better-known essays of Bacon on the grounds that in reading Jonson’s prose we are in the presence of ‘one of the noblest, manliest, most honest and most helpful natures that ever dignified and glorified a powerful intelligence and an admirable genius’ (Swinburne, 1889, 130).

The time was ripe for the revelation of Jonson’s literary indebtedness as a full-blown scandal. Felix Schelling’s 1892 edition of Discoveries gently pointed out that a passage which Swinburne had extolled was not Jonson (Schelling, 1892, 90), but Euripides (whom Swinburne reviled for his ‘flaccid verse and sentimental sophistry’, Swinburne, 1889, 139). Then, in 1906, the publication of Maurice Castelain’s Parisian doctoral dissertation explicitly aimed ‘to prove that Discoveries might be, without any serious objection, left out of the Jonsonian canon’, because, ‘the book is not his; or, at least, . . . the merit and interest of it are for the most part attributable to other men’ (Castelain, 1906, ⅶ). It was nothing less than a fraud, argued Castelain (with a glance at Swinburne), to go on admiring as Jonson’s own ‘[t]he deep and noble thoughts, the strong manly expressions’ of Discoveries. These, he insisted ‘we must now give back to their right owners’ (Castelain, 1906, ⅶ, ⅹⅹⅳ).

Castelain defended his views with the new weapons of bibliographical argument. Whereas knowledge that Discoveries was published after Jonson’s death had merely prompted nineteenth-century editors, such as William Gifford, to enhance the text’s pathos by presenting it to readers as ‘the last drops of Jonson’s quill’ (Gifford, 1816, 9.150), Castelain took posthumous publication to undermine the text’s authority, based as that was on the new bibliographical principle of authorial intention. Not only was Discoveries ‘nothing but a “commonplace book”’ and therefore not Jonson’s ‘own’ thoughts, but the text’s arrangement into sections with marginal headnotes, he believed, was entirely the work of the printer, Thomas Walkley, and so was likewise not Jonson’s own. The textual evidence for Castelain’s assertion, and the fascinating history of the legal disputes that interrupted the printing of Discoveries, are treated more fully in my Textual Essay (Electronic Edition). Here it is only necessary to say that in 1947 the next editors of Discoveries, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, refuted the main plank of Castelain’s argument that the text was not intended for publication. Where Castelain had maintained that the ‘Silva’ epigraph had been attached to Jonson’s text by an enterprising printer to give the work a spurious coherence, the Simpsons found no reason to doubt that it was Jonson’s, noting its having been used as Jonson’s headnote to his poetry collection Underwood. The Simpsons thus asserted authorial intention and propriety over the text (they also argued convincingly for Jonson’s authorship of the marginal headnotes), while at the same time accepting the idea of Jonson’s extensive literary indebtedness with equanimity, recording (as Castelain had also done) almost all the Latin, Greek, and vernacular texts from which Jonson had amassed his observations (H&S, 8.557–8).

Castelain’s questions about the text, however, were far from beside the point, and were not actually resolved by the new edition. Jonson’s translations clearly do tend to produce autobiographical effects from sententious and generalized sources. Why does this happen? Why does Jonson, as Castelain asks, ‘apply to Shakespeare or Bacon, the very same words which applied [in the elder Seneca] to Cassius Severus or Haterius?’ (Castlelain, 1906, xviii). What, exactly, was Jonson’s purpose in translating Latin texts on ethics and poetics, and adapting their referents to his own time? C. J. Sisson attractively suggests that Discoveries is a collection of the lecture notes Jonson made while employed as deputy Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. Sisson’s hypothesis (TLS, 21 September 1952, 604) is supported by the fact that Jonson signed himself in a Chancery deposition of 20 October, 1623, as ‘Beniamin Johnson of Gresham Colledge in London, gent.’ Further supporting evidence is the fact that Sir Kenelm Digby, who had custody of the pages of Discoveries before passing them to Thomas Walkley to print, spent some time living in and studying at Gresham College in the early 1630s. However, Sisson’s argument is also open to the usual weakness of any attempt to infer Jonson’s purpose in writing from reflexive moments in the text itself. It turns out – inevitably – that the evidence Sisson alleges for Jonson’s intentions is actually a translation from someone else’s words: ‘At the end we have,’ a typical lecturer’s invitation to the next lecture – “such are the episodes, of which hereafter”.’ However, this phrase is a direct translation of Heinsius’s On the Constitution of Tragedy. ‘Of which hereafter’ (1996) thus turns out to refer (though not necessarily exclusively) to Professor Heinsius’s, rather than Professor Jonson’s, pedagogic intentions. Once again Jonson’s personal aims and opinions remain elusive.

If Sisson’s attractive and plausible thesis must nevertheless remain speculation at this point, can we gather anything from his attribution of Heinsius’s words to Jonson? What, in other words, is to be learned from Jonson’s practices as a translator and transcriber of texts? Twentieth-century literary theory has undermined the moral high ground occupied by the idea of originality. Deconstructive work on Renaissance imitation, along with materialist work on the sociology of reading, have put us in a better position from which to appreciate the effects of what R. R. Bolgar called the ‘notebook culture’ of the Renaissance (Bolgar, 1954, 272–5, 317–29). And yet, in practice, scholarly work on Discoveries has still tended to seek for evidence of Jonson’s opinions by seeking for bits of ‘original’ text, rather than by describing what Jonson does when he translates. In what is otherwise one of the best essays on Jonson and imitation, Thomas Greene notes that Jonson’s pronouncements on the practice of imitation are remarkably ambivalent, and yet this ambivalence, Greene asserts, cannot be merely ascribed to effects of a commonplace book, since ‘[t]oo much discrimination as well as rewriting clearly went into its compilations, and not all entries have as yet been traced to a source’ (T. M. Greene, 1982, 274). Greene goes on to single out one passage which suggestively expresses Jonson’s ambivalence about imitation, a passage the more important because it is one ‘for which no source has as yet been identified’. It occurs at lines 784–8, beginning, ‘I have considered our whole life is like a play: wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another.’ Greene was unaware that Margaret Clayton had found a source for this extraordinary passage in the Policraticus of the twelfth-century writer, John of Salisbury (Clayton, 1979).

If Clayton exposed once more the extent to which Jonson’s rhetoric of first-person observation and experience can be deceptive, however, she also illuminated Greene’s point about Jonsonian discrimination in compiling. The lines that immediately precede those on imitation also come largely from John of Salisbury’s writing, and they form a coherent paragraph on the evils of adulatio (flattery). Here Jonson meditates on the extent to which flattery is a collusive project, arguing that noblemen are themselves to blame for ‘submit[ting] their dignity and authority’ to soothing speeches, and his observations on this topic build to a powerful rhetorical climax in the hyperbolic irony of the comment that nowadays the man who flatters modestly ‘is thought to malign’. Yet this apparently seamless passage, powerfully combining axiomatic truths with scathing irony, actually weaves together two stylistically heterogeneous Latin texts: the rhetorical climax to John of Salisbury’s observations comes from Seneca. Clayton convincingly proposes that Jonson was alerted to the moral and tonal connections between these quite different texts by the work of sixteenth-century editors in classifying sections of their contents in tables and indexes. Here, then, we have historical scholarship on early modern reading practices which helps us to understand how Jonson was drawn to connections between diverse texts, and which can only enhance, pace Castelain, our appreciation of the creativity that went into rendering them into a passionately controlled and compelling English voice.

But what about the deceptive authority of Jonson’s rhetoric of personal experience? Does this not still raise ethical questions of property and ownership, as Castelain suggested? The question can be approached differently by first acknowledging that Jonson’s appropriation of his source texts by the use of this first-person rhetoric is not inadvertent, but deliberate. It is of a piece with his precise interweaving of heterogeneous source texts to form a stylistic unity and the illusion of a single voice. These strategies contribute to what Wesley Trimpi identified as Jonson’s ‘plain style’. This, Trimpi argued, was the main business of Discoveries: to advocate, in place of the full, balanced periods of English imitators of Cicero, a more conversational style of English prose (Trimpi, 1962a, 3–91). The new plain style was largely associated with Renaissance neostoicism and with the younger Seneca. One of its characteristics was that, in dispensing with syntactic ligatures such as conjunctions, it gave the illusion of presenting a writer’s thoughts spontaneously, as they came to him. And though it grew out of the rhetorical practice of imitation, one consequence of its seventeenth-century advocacy was that, as Trimpi noted, ‘the doctrine of imitation would be the most difficult to apply. The unspecialized, styleless style, whose models are the familiar letter and the urbane conversation, is by definition incapable of predication’ (Trimpi, 1962a, 58).

In political and ethical terms, the neostoic plain style offered a challenge to the idea of imitation as the following of the characteristic schemes and tropes of one textual model in particular. The neostoic writer/speaker was, rather, aware of the range of political positions associated with different rhetorical styles, so that his writing or oration dramatized this knowledge as a process of critical selection. Andrew Shiflett has written of Justus Lipsius’s neostoicism that it shifted the work of imitation itself into ‘a dramatization of the problem of choosing models’, which in turn staged the writer’s effort to make a ‘“disciplined, strong and truly virile” response to real political situations’ (Shiflett, 1998, 26). The ‘virility’ of the neostoic rejection of the slavish imitation of another writer’s schemes and tropes becomes an expression of the independence of the speaker’s or writer’s political and literary judgement. Thus it is that while the neostoic plain style claimed, in the words of Justus Lipsius, to communicate ‘simplicity’ (simplicitas) and ‘forthrightness’ (ingenuitas), this was not the simplicity and frankness of a confessional outpouring of the self, but that which is revealed by witnessing the mind’s independence in the act of judgement. Lipsius wrote that the conversational style should ‘disclose the special candour of a free mind’ (Principles of Letter-Writing, 24–5, 30–1). The mind’s freedom, rhetorically asserted in the forthright, plain-speaking first-person rhetoric of experience, is displayed in the drama of allusion that plays just beneath the textual surface, inviting the informed reader to appreciate the author’s discrimination between positions of allegiance and engagement with source texts.

Although Discoveries can be classed as a commonplace book, then, its stylistic project constitutes a radical break with the commonplace-book culture and imitation theory of the sixteenth century. Earlier products of the De copia moment in imitation history, such as John Lyly’s Euphues, Rabelais’s books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Montaigne’s Essays, are freighted with the more or less unacknowledged results of compendious reading in the form of examples, the evidential status of which (varied in the ways Erasmus suggests as similes, metaphors, allegories, ironic fictions, and so forth) tends to be indeterminate, resisting ideological closure and producing sceptical effects. By contrast, the dearth of examples in Discoveries is remarkable: Jonson seems to have culled Seneca, Plutarch, Pliny, Ovid, Horace, and the other much-used sources of Renaissance exemplarity not for examples, but more precisely for what we could call apologetic statements. A typical instance is Jonson’s moving testimony to having been slandered by enemies, at lines 969–70: ‘At last they upbraided my poverty. I confess she is my domestic.’ These two sentences, eloquently constituting the confession of poverty as a moral defence against the slander of it, are translated directly from the Apology of the second-century satirist and rhetorician, Lucius Apuleius, who had been accused of having used magic to gain the affections of a rich widow. It is characteristic of the bias of Jonson’s Discoveries that it should draw more upon Apuleius’s Apology than upon his much-better-known novel, Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. Jonson turned precisely to examples of the genre of the apologia – Erasmus’s letter to Martin Dorp in defence of the Praise of Folly, Joseph Justus Scaliger’s confutation of Gaspar Scioppius’s slanderous attacks on himself and his father – for similarly high-minded statements in his personal and professional defence.

It follows that Jonson’s rhetoric of personal observation and experience works with his strategy of seamlessly interweaving extracts from different texts to produce a drama of implicit ironies and tacit allusions. The ability to allude, to communicate implicitly, becomes part of the stylistic ideal of conversational plainness, and helps to define the ‘virility’, which, as Patricia Parker has shown, is inevitably associated with this stylistic ideal (P. Parker, 1996, 201–22). Both the superficial ostentation of elaborate schemes and tropes, and the no less ostentatious preference for a ‘manly’ syntactical irregularity in composition are condemned by Jonson, because both alike locate their distinctiveness in an explicit departure from conversational norms. So Jonson writes:

You have others that labour only to ostentation, and are ever more busy about the colours and surface of a work than in the matter and foundation: for that is hid, the other is seen. Others that in composition are nothing but what is rough and broken: Quae per salebras, altaque saxa cadunt. And if it would come gently, they trouble it of purpose. They would not have it run without rubs, as if that style were more strong and manly, that struck the ear with a kind of unevenness. (499–505)

While this passage distinguishes writers who concentrate on ‘matter and foundation’ from those who merely vary the figurative surface of the text, the foundational irregularity of the latter is nevertheless ‘superficial’ when compared with Jonson’s ideal, which is expressed here in his own prose. For the positive stylistic ideal is a prose which appears to move plainly and transparently, but which is distinguished by hidden or implicit meanings, by a witty play of allusion designed to appeal to the especially alert and discriminating reader. One allusion here is overt, and its source is noted in the margin: the line Quae per salebras, altaque saxa cadunt (‘That stumble among ruts and boulders’) comes from the 90th epigram in Martial’s eleventh book, a poem which makes fun of the assumption that irregular metre and archaic diction make poems especially virile. However, the following line, ‘They would not have it run without rubs, as if that style were more strong and manly, that struck the ear with a kind of unevenness’ is a translation from Seneca’s 114th epistle on literary and bodily styles, Nolunt sine salebra esse iuncturam; virilem putant et fortem, quae aurem inaequalitate percutiat (‘They would have jolts in all their transitions; they think strong and manly whatever makes an uneven impression on the ear’). The use of the word salebra (‘a jolting’, ‘a rough patch of road’) in the quotation from Martial alludes to the Latin behind Jonson’s translation of Seneca’s ‘sine salebra’ as ‘without rubs’, tying Martial’s line more closely to the Senecan topos of the inextricability of style and sexual codes, and reinforcing, while concealing at the level of textual surface, the link between the cultural assumptions of Seneca’s text, and Martial’s obscenely homophobic punchline. Jonson’s text thus decorously conceals its own endorsement of Martial’s joke that the affectation of a rugged virility in poetry is actually a sign of the pathic (the sexually passive partner in a male couple, a negative stereotype in Roman culture; see Richlin, 1992) and, in doing so, identifies its own tactful and allusive silence as the truly manly, conversational ideal.

Castelain’s view that Jonson’s classical indebtedness in Discoveries was a reason to reject Jonson’s ‘ownership’ of the sentiments and of the ‘strong and manly expressions’ therein is clearly off the mark. As we can see from this passage, the extent of Jonson’s classical indebtedness, if we may call it that, is absolutely crucial to the drama of allusion that distinguishes a writer as having real critical judgement, real powers of discrimination. Thus it is, too, that the tendency of the writing is always to assert personal integrity. The cultivation of an apparently spontaneous and transparent style which is rich in critically inflected allusions tends always to the proving of the speaker’s or writer’s independence of mind in the mind of an imagined, equally discerning, and critical reader/interlocutor. Indeed, Jonson’s allusive plain style produced a new kind of urbane comic hero for the stage: the wit who is tactful in dealing with fools, but whose allusions communicate to his friend and to the audience a more critical response than the fool, oblivious to the insult, can understand (examples are Wellbred and Knowell in Every Man In His Humour and Dauphine and Clerimont in Epicene). The plain style in this sense demands or imagines a community of well-read and highly discriminating interlocutors, capable of appreciating the judgements involved in alluding to this or that work, or author, or political context.

Swinburne, in relation to this last point, proves a better reader of Jonson than Castelain, for all that he did not recognize Jonson’s sources. For Swinburne saw that Jonson’s writings on political government, though always endorsing monarchy, nevertheless imagine it as operating in tension with, and constrained by, a critical, literate public sphere. Jonson’s writings on monarchy, as Swinburne put it, are ‘tempered and allayed with rational or republican good sense’ (Swinburne, 1889, 155). Not that this republican good sense tends in any way towards democracy; Jonson’s scorn for both popular and courtly standards of poetic discrimination is nicely captured in his observation that the vulgar, in preferring the works of John Taylor over Spenser, exercise a monarchical ‘prerogative . . . to lose their judgements and like that which is naught’ (448–9). Democracy for Jonson meant an absurd equivalence of power between men whose judgements ought to be weighed according to the proof of their reasons for discrimination. Nothing, he says, is ‘so unequal as the equality’ in a system of democratic suffrage, for ‘how odd soever men’s brains or wisdoms are’, their opinions are counted as numerical equivalents in voting (367–9). Emphatically neither democratic nor courtly, Jonson’s plain style imagines an elite community of readers and writers whose freely expressed discriminations advance political, ethical, and natural knowledge. Like Quintilian who, in spite of writing under the emperor Domitian, imagined eloquence functioning only in the traditional fora of public life, and not in the imperial court, Jonson imagines a literate – if elite – public sphere in which a conversational style advances men and letters. Hence his stress on the importance of public schooling, which he imagines as preparation for the public life. In what seems to be a draft of a letter to a nobleman on the education of his sons, he writes,

I wish them sent to the best school, and a public, which I think the best . . . To breed them at home is to breed them in a shade, where in a school they have the light and heat of the sun. They are used and accustomed to things and men. When they come forth into the commonwealth, they find nothing new or to seek . . . They hear . . . themselves, much approved, much corrected: all which they bring to their own store and use, and learn as much as they hear. (1182–3, 1188–94)

Here Jonson’s imagery of sun and shade relates back to his earlier assessment, taken from the elder Seneca, of the relative merits of declamation and effective public speaking in the forum. Declamation was a form of rhetorical display, in vogue during the empire, when rhetoric was said to have lost the political centrality it enjoyed during the republic. Seneca, Quintilian, and others suggest that declamation is merely ornamental and even decadent. In the passage in which Jonson contrasts declamation with effective public speaking, he adapts Seneca to his own time, denouncing the ‘umbratical’ (shaded) declaimers or university doctors by comparison with the metaphorically sunburnt or publicly tried and tested speakers in pulpits and law courts: ‘I can see whole volumes dispatched by the umbratical doctors on all sides. But . . . let them appear sub dio [in the daylight], and they are changed with the place, like bodies bred i’ the shade’ (309–11). As in his comments on schooling, Jonson here argues that only in public exchange, in the public sphere, is eloquence really put to the test (although his conception of the public sphere of eloquence tellingly omits Parliament).

There is an integral connection between Jonson’s concerns with public schooling as a preparation for a truly critical, discerning, conversational style, and his conception of the role of the dramatic poet. In a rewriting of the dramatic theory of Daniel Heinsius Jonson makes the critical public sphere, the sphere of political discourse, into the proper object of the comic dramatist’s study. Heinsius dedicated On the Constitution of Tragedy (1611) to the statesman and dramatist Rochus van den Honaert, and he accordingly compliments his dedicatee on combining these roles. Necque enim ex umbra ad ea accedebas: sed cum in Republica versatus esses, quae magnatum est schola, he writes: ‘Neither, indeed, did you approach it [tragedy] from the shadow: but you were employed in the Republic, which is the school of great men.’ Jonson repositions Heinsius’s compliment so van den Honaert’s political experience becomes an aspect of ‘study’, one of the requisites of the ideal comic poet: ‘He [the poet] must have civil prudence and eloquence, and that whole, not taken up by snatches . . . as if he came then out of the declaimers’ gallery, or shadow, but furnished out of the body of the state, which commonly is the school of men’ (1791–4, my italics). Jonson thus links Heinsius’s metaphor of shadow to his own earlier use in his denunciation of the merely ornamental rhetoric of declamation, and, where Heinsius complimented a statesman turned poet, Jonson insists, in a striking phrase, that the ‘body of the state’ is the appropriate school of the ideal dramatic poet.

Jonson makes another significant alteration in his translation of Heinsius. Where Heinsius has van den Honaert versatus (‘experienced’ or ‘employed’) in the Republic, Jonson says the poet should be ‘furnished’ out of the body of the state. The word ‘furnished’ is a resonant one for Jonson. Discoveries opens with an epigraph about being inadequately furnished, which is also a statement about how to ‘own’ or inhabit one’s political virtue more thoroughly through the cultivation of a critical independence of mind. Tecum habita, ut noris quam sit tibi curta supellex (‘Live with yourself, and get to know how poor your furniture is’) is the scathing conclusion of Persius’s fourth satire, which, in Isaac Casaubon’s 1605 edition (which Jonson knew; see Jonson’s Library, Electronic Edition), was identified as echoing the Socratic dialogue, Alcibiades I. In Persius’s poem, a politically ambitious and beautiful young man is admonished by ‘the bearded sage’ (Socrates) who pours scorn on the idea that sexual attractiveness and precocity are enough to qualify the youth as a statesman. The final line, Jonson’s epigraph, may be read as enjoining the young man to stop relying on seduction, to ‘live alone’ without lovers, but with books. The adjective curta (‘short’, ‘gelded’) suggests that supellex be read as ‘sexual equipment’, but this satirical sense is entirely compatible with an ethical reading in which solitary living becomes, not just an opportunity to contemplate the limits of sexual power, but to supply the defect of a poorly furnished interior or soul. While the injunction to ‘live alone’ might seem at odds with Jonson’s emphasis on the ‘sunshine’ of public speaking and conversation, it is clear that for Jonson, conversational exchange is always imagined as between highly literate men, and the appreciation of allusion in conversational exchange itself presupposes each speaker coming ‘furnished’ to the occasion of speech. Reading precedes conversation, but the occasion should dictate the appropriateness or otherwise of alluding to one’s reading. Jonson complains of essayists that they ‘confess still what books they have read last’ and reveal their reading unnecessarily in their texts: ‘not that the place did need it neither, but they thought themselves furnished, and would vent it’ (524–7).

The Latin word for furniture, supellex, positioned so prominently in this book on ethics and imitation, is one that has an important role in the history of the ethics and poetics of imitation for Christian humanists. As Kathy Eden has noted, Erasmus used the word supellex in his Antibarbarians to help justify the humanist appropriation of classical literature for Christian uses (Eden, 2001, 143–73). The early Church fathers had already developed a justification for a Christian entitlement to pagan literary models through their exegesis of passages in Exodus (3.22, 12.35–6) which concerned God’s command to the Israelites that, in flying from the Egyptians, they take moveables from their houses to assist them in the promised land. Erasmus’s version of this justification refers to the ‘moveables’ of the Egyptians as supellex, and what the Christians legitimately take from the unclean household of pagan literature becomes its supellex bonarum litterarum, ‘furniture of good learning’ (CWE, 23.97). In Erasmus’s use of it, then, the word supellex, furniture, identifies literary value with transferability, with the capacity to be moved from one context to another. Erasmus would also have known that supellex has a rhetorical sense, as well as a technical sense in Roman property law. Though the word’s rhetorical sense is not mentioned by Eden, it figures prominently in Roman discussions of oratory and literature, especially in relation to imitation and copia. Quintilian, Institutes of the orator (8.prooemium, 28) advises the orator who faces the poverty of sudden loss of inspiration while speaking to accumulate a copious ‘furniture’ of words (verborum supellectilem) by means of reading. Supellex, then, is a word that hovers, like copia, between res and verba, ideas and words, focusing on their value as resources. Erasmus’s conception of the supellex litteraria finds in supellex a definition of literary property in which what is valuable is what is moveable. Jonson, by contrast, no longer concerned with the early humanist project of making the ruined estate of classical letters available to a Christian res publica, reconfigures the supellex litteraria at the outset of Discoveries as constitutive of the individual reader-author’s integrity, masculinity, and stoic political virtue. For Erasmus, furniture is the moveable part of pagan, literary real estate, transferrable to Christians. For Jonson, the important thing is to be ‘furnished’, as if the interiority of the reading and writing self came into being, as dwelling spaces do, by having furniture inside it. Thus, from being defined by their alienability, the supellex bonarum litterarum, or the classical furnishings which so worried Castelain, come to define the inalienability of Jonson’s personal literary style.

Jonson’s intentions in naming this text are unclear, for the prefatory material uses four different titles: Timber, Silva, Explorata, and Discoveries. Of these, the name Discoveries is used most extensively in F2, appearing on the title-page and half-title, and throughout the running-heads, and so is adopted as the title for this edition. The F2 text is printed as continuous paragraphs, but the marginal headings in Latin suggest that Jonson may have intended to divide the text into units corresponding to the changes in topic, a procedure which is followed in the present edition. For fuller discussion, see the Textual Essay, Electronic Edition.

SILVA

Rerum, et sententiarum, quasi Υ‘λη dicta a multiplici materia, et varietate, in iis contenta. Quemadmodum enim vulgo solemus infinitam arborum nascentium indiscriminatim multitudinem silvam dicere: ita etiam libros suos in quibus variae, et diversae materiae opuscula temere congesta erant, silvas appellabant antiqui: timber-trees.

EXPLORATA, OR DISCOVERIES

Ill fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not. I therefore

have counselled my friends never to trust to her fairer side (though she seemed

to make peace with them) but to place all things she gave them so as she might

ask them again without their trouble: she might take them from them, not pull

them; to keep always a distance between her and themselves. He knows not 5

his own strength that hath not met adversity. Heaven prepares good men with

crosses, but no ill can happen to a good man. Contraries are not mixed. Yet that

which happens to any man, may to every man. But it is in his reason what he

accounts it, and will make it.

Change into extremity is very frequent and easy. As when a beggar suddenly 10

grows rich, he commonly becomes a prodigal; for, to obscure his former obscurity,

he puts on riot and excess.

No man is so foolish but may give another good counsel sometimes, and no

man is so wise but may easily err, if he will take no other’s counsel but his own.

But very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching. 15

For he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master.

A fame that is wounded to the world would be better cured by another’s

apology than its own; for few can apply medicines well themselves. Besides, the

man that is once hated, both his good and his evil deeds oppress him: he is not

easily emergent. 20

In great affairs it is a work of difficulty to please all. And oft-times we lose the

occasion of carrying a business well and thoroughly, by our too much haste. For

passions are spiritual rebels, and raise sedition against the understanding.

There is a necessity all men should love their country; he that professeth the

contrary may be delighted with his words, but his heart is there. 25

Natures that are hardened to evil you shall sooner break than make straight;

they are like poles that are crooked and dry: there is no attempting them.

We praise the things we hear with much more willingness than those we see,

because we envy the present and reverence the past; thinking ourselves instructed

by the one, and overlaid by the other. 30

Opinion is a light, vain, crude, and imperfect thing, settled in the imagination,

but never arriving at the understanding, there to obtain the tincture of reason.

We labour with it more than truth. There is much more holds us than presseth

us. An ill fact is one thing, an ill fortune is another, yet both oftentimes sway us

alike by the error of our thinking. 35

Many men believe not themselves what they would persuade others; and less

do the things which they would impose on others: but least of all know what they

themselves most confidently boast. Only they set the sign of the cross over their

outer doors, and sacrifice to their gut and their groin in their inner closets.

What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend the better part of life in! In 40

scattering compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, following

feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner.

Puritanus hypocrita est haereticus, quem opinio propriae perspicaciae, qua sibi videtur,

cum paucis, in ecclesia dogmatibus errores quosdam animadvertisse, de statu mentis

eturbavit: unde sacro furore percitus, phrenetice pugnat contra magistratus, sic ratus, obedientiam 45

praestare Deo.

Learning needs rest: sovereignty gives it. Sovereignty needs counsel: learning

affords it. There is such a consociation of offices between the prince and whom

his favour breeds, that they may help to sustain his power, as he their knowledge.

It is the greatest part of his liberality, his favour; and from whom doth he hear 50

discipline more willingly, or the arts discoursed more gladly, than from those

whom his own bounty and benefits have made able and faithful?

In being able to counsel others, a man must be furnished with an universal

store in himself, to the knowledge of all nature: that is the matter and seedplot;

there are the seats of all argument and invention. But especially you must 55

be cunning in the nature of man: there is the variety of things, which are as the

elements and letters, which his art and wisdom must rank and order to the present

occasion. For we see not all letters in single words, nor all places in particular

discourses. That cause seldom happens, wherein a man will use all arguments.

The two chief things that give a man reputation in counsel are the opinion 60

of his honesty and the opinion of his wisdom. The authority of those two will

persuade, when the same counsels, uttered by other persons less qualified, are of

no efficacy or working.

Wisdom without honesty is mere craft and cozenage. And therefore the reputation

of honesty must first be gotten, which cannot be but by living well. A good 65

life is a main argument.

Next a good life, to beget love in the persons we counsel, by dissembling

our knowledge of ability in ourselves, and avoiding all suspicion of arrogance;

ascribing all to their instruction, as an ambassador to his master, or a subject to

his sovereign; seasoning all with humanity and sweetness, only expressing care 70

and solicitude. And not to counsel rashly, or on the sudden, but with advice and

meditation. Dat nox consilium. For many foolish things fall from wise men, if they

speak in haste, or be extemporal. It therefore behoves the giver of counsel to

be circumspect; especially to beware of those, with whom he is not thoroughly

acquainted, lest any spice of rashness, folly, or self-love appear, which will be 75

marked by new persons, and men of experience in affairs.

And to the prince, or his superior, to behave himself modestly, and with

respect. Yet free from flattery or empire. Not with insolence or precept; but as the

prince were already furnished with the parts he should have, especially in affairs

of state. For in other things they will more easily suffer themselves to be taught 80

or reprehended; they will not willingly contend. But hear (with Alexander) the

answer the musician gave him: Absit o rex, ut tu melius haec scias, quam ego.

A man should so deliver himself to the nature of the subject whereof he speaks,

that his hearer may take knowledge of his discipline with some delight; and so

apparel fair and good matter that the studious of elegancy be not defrauded; 85

redeem arts from their rough and braky seats, where they lay hid and overgrown

with thorns, to a pure, open, and flowery light, where they may take the eye, and

be taken by the hand.

I cannot think Nature is so spent, and decayed, that she can bring forth nothing

worth her former years. She is always the same, like herself: and when she collects 90

her strength, is abler still. Men are decayed, and studies: she is not.

I know nothing can conduce more to letters than to examine the writings of

the ancients, and not to rest in their sole authority, or take all upon trust from

them, provided the plagues of judging and pronouncing against them be away:

such as are envy, bitterness, precipitation, impudence, and scurrile scoffing. For 95

to all the observations of the ancients, we have our own experience, which, if we

will use and apply, we have better means to pronounce. It is true they opened the

gates, and made the way, that went before us; but as guides, not commanders:

non domini nostri, sed duces fuere. Truth lies open to all; it is no man’s several. Patet

omnibus veritas; nondum est occupata. Multum ex illa, etiam futuris relictum est. 100

If in some things I dissent from others, whose wit, industry, diligence, and

judgement I look up at and admire, let me not therefore hear presently of ingratitude

and rashness. For I thank those that have taught me and will ever; but yet

dare not think the scope of their labour and inquiry was to envy their posterity

what they also could add, and find out. 105

If I err, pardon me: nulla ars simul et inventa est et absoluta. I do not desire to be

equal to those that went before, but to have my reason examined with theirs, and

so much faith to be given them, or me, as those shall evict. I am neither author, or

fautor of any sect. I will have no man addict himself to me; but if I have anything

right, defend it as truth’s, not mine (save as it conduceth to a common good). It 110

profits not me to have any man fence or fight for me, to flourish, or take a side.

Stand for truth, and ’tis enough.

Arts that respect the mind were ever reputed nobler than those that serve

the body, though we less can be without them. As tillage, spinning, weaving,

building, etc., without which we could scarce sustain life a day. But these were 115

the works of every hand; the other of the brain only, and those the most generous

and exalted wits, and spirits that cannot rest, or acquiesce. The mind of man is

still fed with labour: opere pascitur.

There is a more secret cause; and the power of liberal studies lies more hid than

that it can be wrought out by profane wits. It is not every man’s way to hit. They 120

are men (I confess) that set the carat and value upon things as they love them; but

science is not every man’s mistress. It is as great a spite to be praised in the wrong

place, and by a wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature.

If divers men seek fame or honour by divers ways, so both be honest, neither

is to be blamed; but they that seek immortality, are not only worthy of leave, but 125

of praise.

He hath a delicate wife, a fair fortune, and family to go to to be welcome; yet

he had rather be drunk with mine host, and the fiddlers of such a town, than go

home.

Affliction teacheth a wicked person sometime to pray: prosperity never. 130

Many might go to heaven with half the labour they go to hell, if they would

venture their industry the right way; but ‘The devil take all!’ quoth he that was

choked i’the mill dam, with his four last words in his mouth.

A cripple in the way out-travels a footman or a post out of the way.

Bags of money to a prodigal person are the same that cherry stones are with 135

some boys, and so thrown away.

A woman, the more curious she is about her face, is commonly the more

careless about her house.

Of this spilt water, there is little to be gathered up: it is a desperate debt.

The thief (with a great belly) that had a longing at the gallows to commit one 140

robbery more before he was hanged.

And like the German lord, when he went out of Newgate into the cart, took

order to have his arms set up in his last harborough, said he was taken and

committed upon suspicion of treason, no witness appearing against him; but

the judges entertained him most civilly, discoursed with him, offered him the 145

courtesy of the rack; but he confessed, etc.

I am beholden to calumny, that she hath so endeavoured, and taken pains to

belie me. It shall make me set a surer guard on myself, and keep a better watch

upon my actions.

A tedious person is one a man would leap a steeple from; gallop down any 150

steep hill to avoid him; forsake his meat, sleep, nature itself, with all her benefits,

to shun him. A mere impertinent, one that touched neither heaven nor earth in

his discourse. He opened an entry into a fair room; but shut it again presently.

I spake to him of garlic, he answered asparagus; consulted him of marriage, he

tells me of hanging: as if they went by one and the same destiny. 155

What a sight it is, to see writers committed together by the ears for ceremonies,

syllables, points, colons, commas, hyphens, and the like! Fighting, as for their

fires and their altars, and angry that none are frighted at their noises, and loud

brayings under their asses’ skins!

There is hope of getting a fortune without digging in these quarries. Sed meliore 160

(in omne) ingenio, animoque quam fortuna sum usus.

Pingue solum lassat, sed iuvat ipse labor.

Wits made out their several expeditions then, for the discovery of truth, to

find out great and profitable knowledges; had their several instruments for the

disquisition of arts. Now there are certain scioli, or smatterers, that are busy in 165

the skirts and outsides of learning and have scarce anything of solid literature to

commend them. They may have some edging or trimming of a scholar, a welt, or

so; but it is no more.

Imposture is a specious thing, yet never worse than when it feigns to be best,

and to none discovered sooner than the simplest. For truth and goodness are plain 170

and open; but imposture is ever ashamed of the light.

A puppet-play must be shadowed, and seen in the dark; for draw the curtain,

et sordet gesticulatio.

There is a great difference in the understanding of some princes, as in the

quality of their ministers about them. Some would dress their masters in gold, 175

pearl, and all true jewels of majesty; others furnish them with feathers, bells, and

ribbons: and are therefore esteemed the fitter servants. But they are ever good

men that must make good the times; if the men be naught, the times will be such.

Finis expectandus est in unoquoque hominum; animali, ad mutationem promptissimo.

It is a quick saying with the Spaniards: Artes inter haeredes non dividi. Yet these 180

have inherited their fathers’ lying, and they brag of it. He is a narrow-minded

man that affects a triumph in any glorious study; but to triumph in a lie, and a

lie themselves have forged, is frontless. Folly often goes beyond her bounds; but

impudence knows none.

Envy is no new thing, nor was it born only in our times. The ages past have 185

brought it forth, and the coming ages will. So long as there are men fit for it,

quorum odium virtute relicta placet, it will never be wanting. It is a barbarous envy,

to take from those men’s virtues, which, because thou canst not arrive at, thou

impotently despairest to imitate. Is it a crime in me that I know that which others

had not yet known but from me? Or that I am the author of many things which 190

never would have come in thy thought, but that I taught them? It is a new but

a foolish way you have found out, that whom you cannot equal, or come near in

doing, you would destroy or ruin with evil speaking; as if you had bound both

your wits and natures prentices to slander, and then came forth the best artificers,

when you could form the foulest calumnies. 195

Indeed, nothing is of more credit or request now than a petulant paper, or

scoffing verses; and it is but convenient to the times and manners we live with,

to have then the worst writings and studies flourish when the best begin to be

despised. Ill arts begin where good end.

The time was, when men would learn, and study good things, not envy those 200

that had them. Then men were had in price for learning; now, letters only make

men vile. He is upbraidingly called a poet, as if it were a most contemptible

nickname. But the professors (indeed) have made the learning cheap. Railing,

and tinkling rhymers, whose writings the vulgar more greedily read, as being

taken with the scurrility and petulancy of such wits. He shall not have a reader 205

now, unless he jeer and lie. It is the food of men’s natures: the diet of the times!

Gallants cannot sleep else. The writer must lie, and the gentle reader rests happy,

to hear the worthiest works misinterpreted, the clearest actions obscured, the

innocentest life traduced; and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of

slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his laughter? Hence comes the 210

epidemical infection. For how can they escape the contagion of the writings,

whom the virulency of the calumnies hath not staved off from reading?

Nothing doth more invite a greedy reader than an unlooked-for subject. And

what more unlooked-for than to see a person of an unblamed life made ridiculous

or odious by the artifice of lying? But it is the disease of the age; and no wonder 215

if the world, growing old, begin to be infirm: old age itself is a disease. It is long

since the sick world began to dote and talk idly. Would she had but doted still;

but her dotage is now broke forth into a madness, and become a mere frenzy.

This Alastor, who hath left nothing unsearched or unassailed by his impudent

and licentious lying in his aguish writings (for he was in his cold quaking fit all 220

the while), what hath he done more than a troublesome base cur: barked, and

made a noise afar off? Had a fool or two to spit in his mouth, and cherish him with

a musty bone? But they are rather enemies of my fame, than me, these barkers.

It is an art to have so much judgement as to apparel a lie well, to give it a

good dressing; that though the nakedness would show deformed and odious, the 225

suiting of it might draw their readers. Some love any strumpet (be she never so

shop-like or meritorious) in good clothes. But these, nature could not have formed

them better, to destroy their own testimony; and overthrow their calumny.

That an elephant, 1630, came hither ambassador from the Great Mogul (who

could both write and read) and was every day allowed twelve cast of bread, twenty 230

quarts of canary sack, besides nuts and almonds the citizens’ wives sent him. That

he had a Spanish boy to his interpreter, and his chief negotiation was to confer

or practise with Archy, the principal fool of state, about stealing hence Windsor

Castle and carrying it away on his back if he can.

A wise tongue should not be licentious and wandering, but moved and (as it 235

were) governed with certain reins from the heart and bottom of the breast; and

it was excellently said of that philosopher, that there was a wall or parapet of

teeth set in our mouth to restrain the petulancy of our words; that the rashness of

talking should not only be retarded by the guard and watch of our heart, but be

fenced in and defended by certain strengths placed in the mouth itself, and within 240

the lips. But you shall see some so abound with words without any seasoning or

taste of matter, in so profound a security, as while they are speaking (for the most

part) they confess to speak they know not what.

Of the two (if either were to be wished) I would rather have a plain downright

wisdom, than a foolish and affected eloquence. For what is so furious and Bedlam-like 245

as a vain sound of chosen and excellent words, without any subject of sentence

or science mixed?

Whom the disease of talking still once possesseth, he can never hold his peace.

Nay, rather than he will not discourse, he will hire men to hear him. And so heard,

not hearkened unto, he comes off most times like a mountebank, that when he 250

hath praised his medicines, finds none will take them or trust him. He is like

Homer’s Thersites, Α᾿μετρο∊πὴς, Α᾿κριτόμυθος, speaking without judgement, or

measure.

Loquax magis, quam facundus.

Satis loquentiae, sapientiae parum. 255

Γλώσσης τοι θησαυρὸς ἐν ἀνθρώποισιν ἄριστος

Φ∊ιδωλῆς, πλ∊ίστη δὲ χάρις κατὰ μέτρον ἰούσης.

Optimus est homini linguae thesaurus, et ingens

Gratia, quae parcis mensurat singula verbis.

Ulysses, in Homer, is made a long-thinking man before he speaks; and 260

Epaminondas is celebrated by Pindar to be a man that, though he knew much,

yet he spoke but little. Demaratus, when on the bench he was long silent and said

nothing, one asking him if it were folly in him or want of language, he answered,

‘A fool could never hold his peace.’ For too much talking is ever the indice of a

fool. 265

Dum tacet indoctus, poterit cordatus haberi;

Is morbos animi namque tacendo tegit.

Nor is that worthy speech of Zeno the philosopher to be passed over without

the note of ignorance; who being invited to a feast in Athens where a great prince’s

ambassadors were entertained, and was the only person had said nothing at the 270

table; one of them with courtesy asked him, ‘What shall we return from thee,

Zeno, to the prince our master, if he ask us of thee?’ ‘Nothing,’ he replied, ‘more,

but that you found an old man in Athens, that knew to be silent amongst his

cups.’ It was near a miracle, cups makes it fully a wonder.

It was wittily said upon one that was taken for a great and grave man so long as 275

he held his peace, ‘This man might have been a counsellor of state till he spoke, but

having spoken, not the beadle of the ward.’ Ε᾿χ∊μυθία Pythagorae quam laudabilis!

γλώσσης πρὸ τῶν ἄλλων κράτ∊ι, θ∊οῖς ἑπόμ∊νος. Linguam cohibe, prae aliis omnibus,

ad Deorum exemplum. Digito compesce labellum.∗

There is almost no man but he sees clearlier and sharper the vices in a speaker, 280

than the virtues. And there are many that with more ease will find fault with what

is spoken foolishly, than that can give allowance to wherein you are wise silently.

The treasure of a fool is always in his tongue (said the witty comic poet) and it

appears not in anything more, than in that nation; whereof one, when he had got

the inheritance of an unlucky old grange, would needs sell it; and to draw buyers, 285

proclaimed the virtues of it. ‘Nothing ever thrived on it,’ saith he. ‘No owner of it

ever died in his bed: some hung, some drowned themselves, some were banished,

some starved; the trees were all blasted, the swine died of the measles, the cattle

of the murrain, the sheep of the rot; they that stood were ragged, bare, and bald as

your hand; nothing was ever reared there, not a duckling, or a goose.’ Hospitium 290

fuerat calamitatis. Was not this man like to sell it?

Expectation of the vulgar is more drawn and held with newness than goodness;

we see it in fencers, in players, in poets, in preachers, in all where fame promiseth

anything; so it be new, though never so naught and depraved, they run to it and

are taken. Which shows that the only decay or hurt of the best men’s reputation 295

with the people is, their wits have outlived the people’s palates. They have been

too much or too long a feast.

Greatness of name in the father oft-times helps not forth but o’erwhelms the

son; they stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth; so much, that

we see the grandchild come more and oftener to be the heir of the first, than doth 300

the second. He dies between: the possession is the third’s.

Eloquence is a great and diverse thing; nor did she yet ever favour any man

so much as to become wholly his. He is happy that can arrive to any degree

of her grace. Yet there are who prove themselves masters of her, and absolute

lords; but I believe they may mistake their evidence: for it is one thing to be 305

eloquent in the schools or in the hall, another at the bar or in the pulpit. There

is a difference between mooting and pleading; between fencing and fighting. To

make arguments in my study and confute them is easy, where I answer myself,

not an adversary. So I can see whole volumes dispatched by the umbratical doctors

on all sides. But draw these forth into the just lists: let them appear sub dio, and 310

they are changed with the place, like bodies bred i’the shade; they cannot suffer

the sun or a shower, nor bear the open air; they scarce can find themselves, that

they were wont to domineer so among their auditors. But indeed I would no more

choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school than I would a pilot for rowing in a

pond. 315

Love that is ignorant, and hatred, have almost the same ends. Many foolish

lovers wish the same to their friends, which their enemies would: as to wish a

friend banished, that they might accompany him in exile; or some great want,

that they might relieve him; or a disease, that they might sit by him. They make

a causeway to their courtesy by injury; as if it were not honester to do nothing, 320

than to seek a way to do good by a mischief.

Injuries do not extinguish courtesies; they only suffer them not to appear fair.

For a man that doth me an injury after a courtesy, takes not away the courtesy,

but defaces it; as he that writes other verses upon my verses, takes not away the

first letters, but hides them. 325

Nothing is a courtesy, unless it be meant us; and that friendly and lovingly.

We owe no thanks to rivers, that they carry our boats; or winds, that they be

favouring, and fill our sails; or meats, that they be nourishing. For these are what

they are necessarily. Horses carry us, trees shade us, but they know it not. It is true,

some man may receive a courtesy, and not know it; but never any man received it 330

from him that knew it not. Many men have been cured of diseases by accidents,

but they were not remedies. I myself have known one helped of an ague by falling

into a water; another whipped out of a fever: but no man would ever use these for

medicines. It is the mind, and not the event, that distinguisheth the courtesy from

wrong. My adversary may offend the judge with his pride, and impertinences, 335

and I win my cause; but he meant it not me as a courtesy. I scaped pirates by being

shipwrecked, was the wreck a benefit therefore? No; the doing of courtesies aright

is the mixing of the respects for his own sake and for mine. He that doth them

merely for his own sake is like one that feeds his cattle to sell them; he hath his

horse well dressed for Smithfield. 340

The price of many things is far above what they are bought and sold for. Life

and health, which are both inestimable, we have of the physician; as learning, and

knowledge, the true tillage of the mind, from our schoolmasters. But the fees of

the one or the salary of the other, never answer the value of what we received, but

served to gratify their labours. 345

Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail; it is the

first of our faculties that age invades. Seneca the father, the rhetorician, confesseth

of himself he had a miraculous one, not only to receive, but to hold. I myself could

in my youth have repeated all that ever I had made, and so continued till I was

past forty; since, it is much decayed in me. Yet I can repeat whole books that I have 350

read, and poems of some selected friends which I have liked to charge my memory

with. It was wont to be faithful to me, but shaken with age now, and sloth (which

weakens the strongest abilities), it may perform somewhat, but cannot promise

much. By exercise it is to be made better and serviceable. Whatsoever I pawned

with it while I was young and a boy, it offers me readily and without stops; but 355

what I trust to it now, or have done of later years, it lays up more negligently,

and oftentimes loses; so that I receive mine own (though frequently called for)

as if it were new and borrowed. Nor do I always find presently from it, what I

do seek; but while I am doing another thing, that I laboured for will come; and

what I sought with trouble will offer itself when I am quiet. Now in some men I 360

have found it as happy as nature, who, whatsoever they read or pen, they can say

without book presently, as if they did then write in their mind. And it is more a

wonder in such as have a swift style, for their memories are commonly slowest;

such as torture their writings, and go into council for every word, must needs fix

somewhat, and make it their own at last, though but through their own vexation. 365

Suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed; nor can it be otherwise

in those public councils, where nothing is so unequal as the equality: for there,

how odd soever men’s brains or wisdoms are, their power is always even and the

same.

Some actions, be they never so beautiful and generous, are often obscured by 370

base and vile misconstructions, either out of envy or ill nature, that judgeth of

others as of itself. Nay, the times are so wholly grown to be either partial, or

malicious, that if he be a friend, all sits well about him, his very vices shall be

virtues; if an enemy or of the contrary faction, nothing is good or tolerable in him;

insomuch that we care not to discredit and shame our judgements to soothe our 375

passions.

Man is read in his face, God in his creatures; but not as the philosopher, the

creature of glory reads him, but as the divine, the servant of humility; yet even

he must take care, not to be too curious. For to utter truth of God (but as he

thinks only) may be dangerous, who is best known by our not knowing. Some 380

things of Him, so much as He hath revealed or commanded, it is not only lawful,

but necessary for us to know; for therein our ignorance was the first cause of our

wickedness.

Truth is man’s proper good; and the only immortal thing, was given to our

mortality to use. No good Christian or ethnic, if he be honest, can miss it; no 385

statesman or patriot should. For without truth all the actions of mankind are

craft, malice, or what you will, rather than wisdom. Homer says he hates him

worse than hell-mouth, that utters one thing with his tongue, and keeps another

in his breast. Which high expression was grounded on divine reason. For a lying

mouth is a stinking pit, and murders with the contagion it venteth. Beside, 390

nothing is lasting that is feigned; it will have another face than it had, ere long.

As Euripides saith, ‘No lie ever grows old.’

It is strange, there should be no vice without his patronage, that (when we

have no other excuse) we will say, we love it; we cannot forsake it; as if that made it

not more a fault. We cannot, because we think we cannot: and we love it, because 395

we will defend it. We will rather excuse it than be rid of it. That we cannot, is

pretended; but that we will not is the true reason. How many have I known that

would not have their vices hid? Nay, and to be noted, live like antipodes to others

in the same city; never see the sun rise or set in so many years, but be as they

were watching a corpse by torchlight; would not sin the common way, but held 400

that a kind of rusticity; they would do it new, or contrary, for the infamy! They

were ambitious of living backward; and at last arrived at that, as they would love

nothing but the vices, not the vicious customs. It was impossible to reform these

natures; they were dried, and hardened in their ill. They may say they desired to

leave it, but do not trust them; and they may think they desired it, but they may 405

lie for all that. They are a little angry with their follies, now and then; marry, they

come into grace with them again quickly. They will confess, they are offended

with their manner of living; like enough, who is not? When they can put me in

security that they are more than offended, that they hate it, then I’ll hearken

to them, and, perhaps, believe them; but many nowadays love and hate their ill 410

together.

I do hear them say often, some men are not witty because they are not everywhere

witty; than which nothing is more foolish. If an eye or a nose be an excellent

part in the face, therefore, be all eye or nose? I think the eyebrow, the forehead,

the cheek, chin, lip, or any part else, are as necessary, and natural in the place. 415

But now nothing is good that is natural: right and natural language seems to

have least of the wit in it; that which is writhed and tortured, is counted the more

exquisite. Cloth of baudekin, or tissue, must be embroidered; as if no face were

fair, that were not powdered or painted! No beauty to be had but in wresting and

writhing our own tongue? Nothing is fashionable till it be deformed, and this is 420

to write like a gentleman. All must be as affected and preposterous as our gallants’

clothes, sweet bags, and night-dressings, in which you would think our men lay

in like ladies, it is so curious.

Nothing in our age, I have observed, is more preposterous than the running

judgements upon poetry and poets; when we shall hear those things commended 425

and cried up for the best writings which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap

any wholesome drug in; he would never light his tobacco with them. And those

men almost named for miracles who yet are so vile that if a man should go about

to examine and correct them, he must make all they have done but one blot. Their

good is so entangled with their bad as forcibly one must draw on the other’s death 430

with it. A sponge dipped in ink will do all:

— comitetur Punica librum

spongea. —

Et paulo post,

Non possunt . . . multae . . . una litura potest. 435

Yet their vices have not hurt them; nay, a great many they have profited,

for they have been loved for nothing else. And this false opinion grows strong

against the best men, if once it take root with the ignorant. Cestius in his time

was preferred to Cicero, so far as the ignorant durst. They learned him without

book, and had him often in their mouths. But a man cannot imagine that thing 440

so foolish or rude but will find and enjoy an admirer; at least a reader or spectator.

The puppets are seen now in despite of the players; Heath’s epigrams and the

Sculler’s poems have their applause. There are never wanting that dare prefer

the worst preachers, the worst pleaders, the worst poets; not that the better have

left to write or speak better, but that they that hear them judge worse: non illi 445

peius dicunt, sed hi corruptius iudicant. Nay, if it were put to the question of the

water-rhymer’s works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find more

suffrages, because the most favour common vices, out of a prerogative the vulgar

have to lose their judgements and like that which is naught.

Poetry in this latter age hath proved but a mean mistress to such as have wholly 450

addicted themselves to her, or given their names up to her family. They who have

but saluted her on the by, and now and then tendered their visits, she hath done

much for, and advanced in the way of their own professions (both the law and

the gospel) beyond all they could have hoped or done for themselves without her

favour. Wherein she doth emulate the judicious but preposterous bounty of the 455

times’ grandees, who accumulate all they can upon the parasite or freshman in

their friendship, but think an old client or honest servant bound by his place to

write and starve.

Indeed the multitude commend writers as they do fencers or wrestlers, who if

they come in robustiously, and put for it with a deal of violence, are received for the 460

braver fellows; when many times their own rudeness is a cause of their disgrace,

and a slight touch of their adversary gives all that boisterous force the foil. But

in these things, the unskilful are naturally deceived, and judging wholly by the

bulk, think rude things greater than polished, and scattered more numerous than

composed. Nor think this only to be true in the sordid multitude but the neater 465

sort of our gallants; for all are the multitude, only they differ in clothes, not in

judgement or understanding.

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare,

that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line. My answer

hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand.’ Which they thought a malevolent 470

speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that

circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justify

mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this

side idolatry) as much as any. He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free

nature; had an excellent fantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein 475

he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped.

‘Sufflaminandus erat’, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power;

would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could

not escape laughter: as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him,

‘Caesar thou dost me wrong’; he replied, ‘Caesar did never wrong, but with just 480

cause’; and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his

virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised, than to be pardoned.

In the difference of wits I have observed there are many notes, and it is a

little mastery to know them: to discern what every nature, every disposition, will

bear; for before we sow our land, we should plough it. There are no fewer forms of 485

minds than of bodies amongst us. The variety is incredible, and therefore we must

search. Some are fit to make divines, some poets, some lawyers, some physicians,

some to be sent to the plough, and trades.

There is no doctrine will do good where nature is wanting. Some wits are

swelling and high, others low and still; some hot and fiery, others cold and dull; 490

one must have a bridle, the other a spur.

There be some that are forward and bold, and these will do every little thing

easily – I mean that is hard by and next them: which they will utter, unretarded,

without any shamefastness. These never perform much, but quickly. They are

what they are on the sudden; they show presently like grain that, scattered on the 495

top of the ground, shoots up, but takes no root; has a yellow blade, but the ear

empty. They are wits of good promise at first, but there is an ingeni-stitium.^* They

stand still at sixteen, they get no higher.

You have others that labour only to ostentation, and are ever more busy about

the colours and surface of a work than in the matter and foundation: for that is 500

hid, the other is seen.

Others that in composition are nothing but what is rough and broken: Quae

per salebras altaque saxa cadunt. And if it would come gently, they trouble it of

purpose. They would not have it run without rubs, as if that style were more

strong and manly, that struck the ear with a kind of unevenness. These men err 505

not by chance, but knowingly and willingly; they are like men that affect a fashion

by themselves, have some singularity in a ruff, cloak, or hatband, or their beards

specially cut to provoke beholders and set a mark upon themselves. They would

be reprehended, while they are looked on. And this vice, one that is in authority

with the rest, loving, delivers over to them to be imitated; so that oft-times the 510

faults which he fell into, the others seek for: this is the danger, when vice becomes

a precedent.

Others there are that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and

rhyming fall in what they write. It runs and slides, and only makes a sound.

‘Women’s poets’, they are called, as you have ‘women’s tailors’. 515

They write a verse, as smooth, as soft, as cream;

In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.

You may sound these wits, and find the depth of them, with your middle

finger. They are cream-bowl- or but puddle-deep.

Some that turn over all books and are equally searching in all papers, that 520

write out of what they presently find or meet, without choice; by which means it

happens, that what they have discredited and impugned in one work, they have

before or after extolled the same in another. Such are all the essayists, even their

master, Montaigne. These in all they write, confess still what books they have

read last – and therein their own folly – so much, that they bring it to the stake 525

raw and undigested; not that the place did need it neither, but that they thought

themselves furnished, and would vent it.

Some again, who – after they have got authority, or, which is less, opinion,

by their writings, to have read much – dare presently to feign whole books and

authors, and lie safely. For what never was will not easily be found, not by the 530

most curious.

And some, by a cunning protestation against all reading, and false venditation

of their own naturals, think to divert the sagacity of their readers from themselves,

and cool the scent of their own fox-like thefts; when yet they are so rank as a

man may find whole pages together usurped from one author; their necessities 535

compelling them to read for present use, which could not be in many books; and

so come forth more ridiculously and palpably guilty than those who, because they

cannot trace, they yet would slander their industry.

But the wretcheder are the obstinate contemners of all helps and arts; such

as presuming on their own naturals (which perhaps are excellent) dare deride all 540

diligence, and seem to mock at the terms when they understand not the things,

thinking that way to get off wittily with their ignorance. These are imitated often

by such as are their peers in negligence, though they cannot be in nature; and they

utter all they can think with a kind of violence and indisposition; unexamined,

without relation, either to person, place, or any fitness else; and the more willful, 545

and stubborn they are in it, the more learned they are esteemed of the multitude,

through their excellent vice of judgement, who think those things the stronger

that have no art; as if to break were better than to open, or to rend asunder gentler

than to loose.

It cannot but come to pass that these men who commonly seek to do more 550

than enough may sometimes happen on something that is good and great; but

very seldom; and when it comes, it doth not recompense the rest of their ill. For

their jests and their sentences (which they only and ambitiously seek for) stick

out and are more eminent, because all is sordid and vile about them, as lights

are more discerned in a thick darkness than a faint shadow. Now because they 555

speak all they can (however unfitly) they are thought to have the greater copy;

where the learned use ever election, and a mean. They look back to what they

intended at first, and make all an even and proportioned body. The true artificer

will not run away from nature, as he were afraid of her, or depart from life and

the likeness of truth, but speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his 560

language differ from the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity,

with the Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them

but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant

gapers. He knows it is his only art so to carry it as none but artificers perceive it.

In the meantime perhaps he is called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer (or by what 565

contumelious word can come in their cheeks) by these men, who without labour,

judgement, knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred before him. He

gratulates them and their fortune. Another age, or juster men, will acknowledge

the virtues of his studies; his wisdom in dividing; his subtlety in arguing; with

what strength he doth inspire his readers; with what sweetness he strokes them; 570

in inveighing, what sharpness; in jest, what urbanity he uses. How he doth reign

in men’s affections; how invade, and break in upon them; and makes their minds

like the thing he writes. Then in his elocution to behold what word is proper,

which hath ornament, which height, what is beautifully translated, where figures

are fit, which gentle, which strong to show the composition manly. And how he 575

hath avoided faint, obscure, obscene, sordid, humble, improper, or effeminate

phrase; which is not only praised of the most, but commended (which is worse)

especially for that it is naught.

I know no disease of the soul but ignorance; not of the arts and sciences, but

of itself; yet relating to those, it is a pernicious evil, the darkener of man’s life, the 580

disturber of his reason, and common confounder of truth, with which a man goes

groping in the dark no otherwise than if he were blind. Great understandings

are most racked and troubled with it; nay, sometimes they will rather choose to

die than not to know the things they study for. Think then what an evil it is, and

what good the contrary. 585

Knowledge is the action of the soul and is perfect without the senses, as having

the seeds of all science and virtue in itself; but not without the service of the senses.

By those organs the soul works. She is a perpetual agent, prompt and subtle, but

often flexible and erring, entangling herself like a silkworm; but her reason is a

weapon with two edges and cuts through. In her indagations oft-times new scents 590

put her by; and she takes in errors into her by the same conduits she doth truths.

Ease and relaxation are profitable to all studies. The mind is like a bow, the

stronger by being unbent. But the temper in spirits is all, when to command a

man’s wit, when to favour it. I have known a man vehement on both sides, that

knew no mean either to intermit his studies or call upon them again. When he hath 595

set himself to writing, he would join night to day, press upon himself without

release, not minding it, till he fainted; and when he left off, resolve himself into

all sports, and looseness again, that it was almost a despair to draw him to his

book; but once got to it, he grew stronger and more earnest by the ease. His whole

powers were renewed; he would work out of himself what he desired, but with 600

such excess as his study could not be ruled: he knew not how to dispose his own

abilities or husband them; he was of that immoderate power against himself. Nor

was he only a strong, but an absolute speaker and writer; but his subtlety did not

show itself; his judgement thought that a vice. For the ambush hurts more that is

hid. He never forced his language, nor went out of the highway of speaking, but 605

for some great necessity or apparent profit. For he denied figures to be invented

for ornament, but for aid; and still thought it an extreme madness to bend or

wrest that which ought to be right.

It is no wonder men’s eminence appears but in their own way. Virgil’s felicity

left him in prose, as Tully’s forsook him in verse. Sallust’s orations are read in the 610

honour of story, yet the most eloquent Plato’s speech, which he made for Socrates,

is neither worthy of the patron, or the person defended. Nay, in the same kind of

oratory, and where the matter is one, you shall have him that reasons strongly,

open negligently; another that prepares well, not fit so well; and this happens not

only to brains, but to bodies. One can wrestle well, another run well, a third leap, 615

or throw the bar, a fourth lift, or stop a cart going; each hath his way of strength.

So in other creatures: some dogs are for the deer, some for the wild boar, some are

foxhounds, some otter-hounds. Nor are all horses for the coach or saddle; some

are for the cart and panniers.

I have known many excellent men that would speak suddenly to the admiration 620

of their hearers who, upon study and premeditation, have been forsaken

by their own wits, and no way answered their fame. Their eloquence was greater

than their reading, and the things they uttered better than those they knew. Their

fortune deserved better of them than their care. For men of present spirits and

of greater wits than study do please more in the things they invent than in those 625

they bring. And I have heard some of them compelled to speak out of necessity,

that have so infinitely exceeded themselves, as it was better, both for them and

their auditory, that they were so surprised, not prepared. Nor was it safe then to

cross them, for their adversary: their anger made them more eloquent. Yet these

men I could not but love and admire, that they returned to their studies. They left 630

not diligence (as many do) when their rashness prospered. For diligence is a great

aid even to an indifferent wit, when we are not contented with the examples of

our own age, but would know the face of the former. Indeed, the more we confer

with, the more we profit by, if the persons be chosen.

One, though he be excellent, and the chief, is not to be imitated alone. For 635

never no imitator ever grew up to his author; likeness is always on this side truth.

Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in

his speaking. His language (where he could spare, or pass by a jest) was nobly

censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or

suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his 640

speech but consisted of the own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside

from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry

and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The

fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.

Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equalled to 645

their empire: ingenium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages

– to take in but the former seculum – Sir Thomas More, the elder Wyatt, Henry,

Earl of Surrey, Chaloner, Smith, Elyot, Bishop Gardiner, were for their times

admirable; and the more because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nicholas Bacon

was singular and almost alone in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s times. Sir 650

Philip Sidney and Master Hooker (in different matter) grew great masters of wit

and language, and in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgement

met. The Earl of Essex, noble and high; and Sir Walter Ralegh, not to be contemned

either for judgement or style. Sir Henry Savile grave, and truly lettered; Sir Edwin

Sandys, excellent in both; Lord Egerton, the Chancellor, a grave and great orator, 655

and best when he was provoked. But his learned and able (though unfortunate)

successor is he who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue

which may be compared, or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.

In short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits born that could

honour a language or help study. Now things daily fall: wits grow downward and 660

eloquence grows backward, so that he may be named and stand as the mark and

ἀχμὴ of our language.

I have ever observed it to have been the office of a wise patriot among the

greatest affairs of the state, to take care of the commonwealth of learning. For

schools, they are the seminaries of state; and nothing is worthier the study of a 665

statesman than that part of the republic which we call the advancement of letters.

Witness the care of Julius Caesar who, in the heat of the civil war, writ his books of

Analogy and dedicated them to Tully. This made the late Lord St Albans entitle his

work Novum Organum; which though by the most of superficial men, who cannot

get beyond the title of nominals, it is not penetrated, nor understood, it really 670

openeth all defects of learning whatsoever, and is a book,

Qui longum noto scriptori porriget aevum.

My conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his place or

honours. But I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper

to himself, in that he seemed to me ever by his work one of the greatest men, 675

and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I

ever prayed that God would give him strength; for greatness he could not want.

Neither could I condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident

could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest.

There cannot be one colour of the mind, another of the wit. If the mind be 680

staid, grave, and composed, the wit is so; that vitiated, the other is blown and

deflowered. Do we not see, if the mind languish, the members are dull? Look upon

an effeminate person: his very gait confesseth him. If a man be fiery, his motion

is so; if angry, ’tis troubled, and violent. So that we may conclude: wheresoever

manners and fashions are corrupted, language is. It imitates the public riot. The 685

excess of feasts and apparel are the notes of a sick state, and the wantonness of

language, of a sick mind.

If we would consider what our affairs are indeed, not what they are called, we

should find more evils belong us than happen to us. How often doth that which

was called a calamity, prove the beginning and cause of a man’s happiness? And 690

on the contrary: that which happened, or came to another with great gratulation

and applause, how it hath lifted him but a step higher to his ruin! As if he stood

before where he might fall safely.

The vulgar are commonly ill-natured, and always grudging against their

governors; which makes that a prince has more business and trouble with them 695

than ever Hercules had with the bull, or any other beast; by how much they have

more heads than will be reined with one bridle. There was not that variety of

beasts in the ark, as is of beastly natures in the multitude; especially when they

come to that iniquity to censure their sovereign’s actions. Then all the counsels

are made good or bad by the events. And it falleth out that the same facts receive 700

from them the names now of diligence, now of vanity; now of majesty, now of

fury; where they ought wholly to hang on his mouth, as he to consist of himself,

and not others’ counsels.

After God, nothing is to be loved of man like the prince. He violates nature that

doth it not with his whole heart. For when he hath put on the care of the public 705

good and common safety, I am a wretch and put off man, if I do not reverence and

honour him, in whose charge all things divine and human are placed. Do but ask

of nature, why all living creatures are less delighted with meat and drink, that

sustains them, than with venery, that wastes them. And she will tell thee, the first

respects but a private, the other a common, good: propagation. 710

He is the arbiter of life and death; when he finds no other subject for his mercy,

he should spare himself. All his punishments are rather to correct than to destroy.

Why are prayers with Orpheus said to be the daughters of Jupiter, but that princes

are thereby admonished, that the petitions of the wretched ought to have more

weight with them than the laws themselves? 715

It was a great accumulation to His Majesty’s deserved praise that men might

openly visit and pity those whom his greatest prisons had at any time received, or

his laws condemned.

Wise is rather the attribute of a prince, than learned, or good. The learned man

profits others, rather than himself; the good man, rather himself than others: 720

but the prince commands others, and doth himself. The wise Lycurgus gave

no law but what himself kept. Sulla and Lysander did not so; the one living

extremely dissolute himself, enforced frugality by the laws; the other permitted

those licences to others which himself abstained from. But the prince’s prudence

is his chief art and safety. In his counsels and deliberations he foresees the future 725

times. In the equity of his judgement, he hath remembrance of the past, and

knowledge of what is to be done, or avoided for the present. Hence the Persians

gave out their Cyrus to have been nursed by a bitch, a creature to encounter ill as

of sagacity to seek out good; showing that wisdom may accompany fortitude, or

it leaves to be, and puts on the name of rashness. 730

There be some men are born only to suck out the poison of books: habent

venenum pro victu; immo, pro deliciis. And such are they that only relish the obscene,

and foul things in poets, which makes the profession taxed. But by whom? Men

that watch for it, and – had they not had this hint – are so unjust valuers of letters,

as they think no learning good but what brings in gain. It shows they themselves 735

would never have been of the professions they are, but for the profits and fees. But

if another learning, well used, can instruct to good life, inform manners, no less

persuade and lead men than they threaten and compel, and have no reward, is it

therefore the worse study? I could never think the study of wisdom confined only

to the philosopher, or of piety to the divine, or of state to the politic. But that he 740

which can feign a commonwealth (which is the poet) can govern it with counsels,

strengthen it with laws, correct it with judgements, inform it with religion and

morals, is all these. We do not require in him mere elocution, or an excellent

faculty in verse, but the exact knowledge of all virtues, and their contraries; with

ability to render the one loved, the other hated, by his proper embattling them. 745

The philosophers did insolently to challenge only to themselves that which the

greatest generals, and gravest counsellors never durst. For such had rather do,

than promise the best things.

Some controverters in divinity are like swaggerers in a tavern, that catch that

which stands next them, the candlestick or pots; turn everything into a weapon; 750

oft-times they fight blindfold, and both beat the air. The one milks a he-goat, the

other holds under a sieve. Their arguments are as fluxive as liquor spilt upon a

table, which with your finger you may drain as you will. Such controversies, or

disputations, carried with more labour than profit, are odious, where most times

the truth is lost in the midst, or left untouched. And the fruit of their fight is that 755

they spit one upon another, and are both defiled. These fencers in religion I like

not.

The body hath certain diseases that are with less evil tolerated than removed. As

if to cure a leprosy a man should bathe himself with the warm blood of a murdered

child; so in the church, some errors may be dissimuled with less inconvenience, 760

than can be discovered.

Men that talk of their own benefits are not believed to talk of them because

they have done them, but to have done them because they might talk of them.

That which had been great if another had reported it of them, vanisheth, and is

nothing, if he that did it speak of it. For men, when they cannot destroy the deed, 765

will yet be glad to take advantage of the boasting, and lessen it.

I have seen that poverty makes men do unfit things; but honest men should

not do them: they should gain otherwise. Though a man be hungry, he should

not play the parasite. That hour wherein I would repent me to be honest, there

were ways enough open for me to be rich. But flattery is a fine pick-lock of tender 770

ears; especially of those whom Fortune hath borne high upon her wings,

that submit their dignity and authority to it, by a soothing of themselves. For indeed

men could never be taken in that abundance with the springes of others’ flattery,

if they began not there; if they did but remember, how much more profitable

the bitterness of truth were, than all the honey distilling from a whorish voice, 775

which is not praise, but poison. But now it is come to that extreme folly, or rather

madness, with some, that he that flatters them modestly or sparingly is thought

to malign them. If their friend consent not to their vices, though he do not

contradict them, he is nevertheless an enemy. When they do all things the worst

way, even then they look for praise. Nay, they will hire fellows to flatter them with 780

suits and suppers, and to prostitute their judgements. They have livery-friends,

friends of the dish and of the spit, that wait their turns, as my lord has his feasts

and guests.

I have considered our whole life is like a play: wherein every man, forgetful

of himself, is in travail with expression of another. Nay, we so insist in imitating 785

others, as we cannot (when it is necessary) return to ourselves; like children, that

imitate the vices of stammerers so long, till at last they become such, and make

the habit to another nature, as it is never forgotten.

Good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate

the times. God did never let them be wanting to the world: as Abel, for an example 790

of innocency, Enoch of purity, Noah of trust in God’s mercies, Abraham of faith,

and so of the rest. These, sensual men thought mad, because they would not be

partakers, or practisers of their madness. But they, placed high on the top of all

virtue, looked down on the stage of the world, and contemned the play of fortune.

For though the most be players, some must be spectators. 795

I have discovered that a feigned familiarity in great ones is a note of certain

usurpation on the less. For great and popular men feign themselves to be servants

to others, to make those slaves to them. So the fisher provides baits for the trout,

roach, dace, etc., that they may be food to him.

The complaint of Caligula was most wicked of the condition of his times, when 800

he said they were not famous by any public calamity, as the reign of Augustus

was, by the defeat of Varus and the legions; and that of Tiberius, by the falling of

the theatre at Fidenae, whilst his oblivion was imminent, through the prosperity

of his affairs. As that other voice of his was worthier a headsman, than a head,

when he wished the people of Rome had but one neck. But he found (when he 805

fell) they had many hands. A tyrant, how great and mighty soever he may seem to

cowards and sluggards, is but one creature, one animal.

I have marked among the nobility some are so addicted to the service of the

prince and commonwealth, as they look not for spoil; such are to be honoured

and loved. There are others, which no obligation will fasten on, and they are of 810

two sorts. The first are such as love their own ease; or, out of vice of nature or

self-direction, avoid business and care. Yet these the prince may use with safety.

The other remove themselves upon craft and design (as the architects say) with a

premeditated thought to their own rather than their prince’s profit. Such let the

prince take heed of, and not doubt to reckon in the list of his open enemies. 815

There is a great variation between him that is raised to the sovereignty by

the favour of his peers, and him that comes to it by the suffrage of the people.

The first holds with more difficulty; because he hath to do with many that think

themselves his equals, and raised him for their own greatness, and oppression

of the rest. The latter hath no upbraiders, but was raised by them that sought to 820

be defended from oppression, whose end is both the easier and the honester to

satisfy. Beside, while he hath the people to friend, who are a multitude, he hath

the less fear of the nobility, who are but few. Nor let the common proverb of ‘He

that builds on the people, builds on the dirt’, discredit my opinion: for that hath

only place where an ambitious and private person, for some popular end, trusts 825

in them against the public justice and magistrate. There they will leave him. But

when a prince governs them, so as they have still need of his administration (for

that is his art), he shall ever make and hold them faithful.

A prince should exercise his cruelty not by himself, but by his ministers; so

he may save himself and his dignity with his people, by sacrificing those when 830

he list, saith the great doctor of state, Machiavel. But I say he puts off man, and

goes into a beast, that is cruel. No virtue is a prince’s own, or becomes him more,

than this clemency; and no glory is greater than to be able to save with his power.

Many punishments sometimes and in some cases as much discredit a prince as

many funerals a physician. The state of things is secured by clemency; severity 835

represseth a few, but it irritates more.∗ The lopping of trees makes the boughs

shoot out thicker; and the taking away of some kind of enemies, increaseth the

number. It is then most gracious in a prince to pardon when many about him

would make him cruel; to think then how much he can save when others tell

him how much he can destroy; not to consider what the impotence of others hath 840

demolished, but what his own greatness can sustain. These are a prince’s virtues;

and they that give him other counsels are but the hangman’s factors.

He that is cruel to halves (saith the said St Nicholas) loseth no less the opportunity

of his cruelty than of his benefits; for then to use his cruelty is too late,

and to use his favours will be interpreted fear and necessity, and so he loseth the 845

thanks. Still the counsel is cruelty. But princes, by hearkening to cruel counsels,

become in time obnoxious to the authors, their flatterers and ministers, and are

brought to that, that when they would, they dare not change them; they must

go on, and defend cruelty with cruelty; they cannot alter the habit. It is then

grown necessary, they must be as ill as those have made them; and in the end 850

they will grow more hateful to themselves than to their subjects. Whereas, on the

contrary, the merciful prince is safe in love, not in fear. He needs no emissaries,

spies, intelligencers, to entrap true subjects. He fears no libels, no treasons. His

people speak what they think, and talk openly what they do in secret. They have

nothing in their breasts that they need a cipher for. He is guarded with his own 855

benefits.

The strength of empire is in religion. What else is the Palladium (with Homer)

that kept Troy so long from sacking? Nothing more commends the sovereign to

the subject than it. For he that is religious must be merciful and just necessarily;

and they are two strong ties upon mankind. Justice is the virtue that innocence 860

rejoiceth in. Yet even that is not always so safe, but it may love to stand in the

sight of mercy. For sometimes misfortune is made a crime, and then innocence

is succoured no less than virtue. Nay, oftentimes virtue is made capital, and

through the condition of the times it may happen that that may be punished

with our praise. Let no man therefore murmur at the actions of the prince who is 865

placed so far above him. If he offend, he hath his discoverer. God hath a height

beyond him. But where the prince is good, Euripides saith, God is a guest in a

human body.

There is nothing with some princes sacred above their majesty, or profane,

but what violates their sceptres. But a prince with such counsel is like the God 870

Terminus, of stone, his own landmark; or (as it is in the fable) a crowned lion. It is

dangerous offending such an one, who, being angry, knows not how to forgive;

that cares not to do anything for maintaining, or enlarging of empire; kills not

men or subjects, but destroyeth whole countries, armies, mankind, male and

female, guilty or not guilty, holy or profane; yea, some that have not seen the 875

light. All is under the law of their spoil and licence. But princes that neglect their

proper office thus, their fortune is oftentimes to draw a Sejanus to be near about

them, who will at last affect to get above them, and put them in a worthy fear

of rooting both them out and their family. For no men hate an evil prince more

than they that helped to make him such. And none more boastingly weep his ruin 880

than they that procured and practised it. The same path leads to ruin which did

to rule, when men profess a licence in governing. A good king is a public servant.

A prince without letters is a pilot without eyes. All his government is groping.

In sovereignty it is a most happy thing not to be compelled; but so it is the most

miserable not to be counselled. And how can he be counselled that cannot see to 885

read the best counsellors, which are books: for they neither flatter us nor hide

from us? He may hear, you will say. But how shall he always be sure to hear truth?

Or be counselled the best things, not the sweetest? They say princes learn no art

truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is the brave beast is no flatterer.

He will throw a prince as soon as his groom. Which is an argument that the good 890

counsellors to princes are the best instruments of a good age. For though the

prince himself be of most prompt inclination to all virtue, yet the best pilots have

need of mariners, beside sails, anchor, and other tackle.

If men did know what shining fetters, gilded miseries, and painted happiness

thrones and sceptres were, there would not be so frequent strife about the getting, 895

or holding of them. There would be more principalities than princes. For a prince

is the pastor of the people. He ought to shear, not to flay his sheep; to take their

fleeces, not their fells. Who were his enemies before, being a private man, become

his children, now he is public. He is the soul of the commonwealth, and ought

to cherish it as his own body. Alexander the Great was wont to say, he hated that 900

gardener that plucked his herbs or flowers up by the roots. A man may milk a

beast, till the blood come: churn milk, and it yieldeth butter; but wring the nose,

and the blood followeth. He is an ill prince that so pulls his subjects’ feathers

as he would not have them grow again; that makes his exchequer a receipt for

the spoils of those he governs. No, let him keep his own, not affect his subjects’; 905

strive rather to be called just than powerful. Not like the Roman tyrants, affect

the surnames that grow by human slaughters; neither to seek war in peace, or

peace in war, but to observe faith given, though to an enemy. Study piety toward

the subject; show care to defend him. Be slow to punish in divers cases; but be a

sharp and severe revenger of open crimes. Break no decrees or dissolve no orders 910

to slacken the strength of laws. Choose neither magistrates civil or ecclesiastic

by favour or price, but with long disquisition and report of their worth by all

suffrages. Sell no honours, nor give them hastily, but bestow them with counsel

and for reward; if he do, acknowledge it, though late, and mend it. For princes

are easy to be deceived. And what wisdom can escape it, where so many court-arts 915

are studied? But above all, the prince is to remember that when the great day

of account comes, which neither magistrate nor prince can shun, there will be

required of him a reckoning for those whom he hath trusted, as for himself, which

he must provide. And if piety be wanting in the priests, equity in the judges, or

the magistrate be found rated at a price, what justice or religion is to be expected? 920

Which are the only two attributes make kings akin to gods, and is the Delphic

sword, both to kill sacrifices and to chastise offenders.

When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his

enemies, and glory to his posterity. Nay, his honours are a great part of the honour

of the times, when by this means he is grown to active men an example, to the 925

slothful a spur, to the envious a punishment.

He which is sole heir to many rich men, having – beside his father’s and uncles’

– the states of divers his kindred come to him by accession, must needs be richer

than father, or grandfather; so they which are left heirs ex asse of all their ancestors’

vices, and by their good husbandry improve the old, and daily purchase new, must 930

needs be wealthier in vice, and have a greater revenue or stock of ill to spend on.

The great thieves of a state are lightly the officers of the crown; they hang the

less still, play the pikes in the pond, eat whom they list. The net was never spread

for the hawk or buzzard that hurt us, but the harmless birds: they are good meat.

Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas. 935

Non rete accipitri tennitur, neque milvo.

But they are not always safe, though, especially when they meet with wise

masters. They can take down all the huff and swelling of their looks and, like

dexterous auditors, place the counter where he shall value nothing. Let them but

remember Louis the eleventh, who to a clerk of the Exchequer that came to be 940

Lord Treasurer, and had for his device represented himself sitting upon Fortune’s

wheel, told him he might do well to fasten it with a good strong nail, lest turning

about, it might bring him where he was again. As indeed it did.

A good man will avoid the spot of any sin. The very aspersion is grievous,

which makes him choose his way in his life as he would in his journey. The ill 945

man rides through all confidently; he is coated and booted for it. The oftener he

offends, the more openly; and the fouler, the fitter in fashion. His modesty like a

riding coat, the more it is worn, is the less cared for. It is good enough for the dirt

still, and the ways he travels in.

An innocent man needs no eloquence: his innocence is instead of it; else I 950

had never come off so many times from these precipices whither men’s malice

hath pursued me. It is true I have been accused to the lords, to the king, and by

great ones; but it happened my accusers had not thought of the accusation with

themselves, and so were driven, for want of crimes, to use invention, which was

found slander; or too late (being entered so far) to seek starting-holes for their 955

rashness, which were not given them. And then they may think what accusation

that was like to prove, when they that were the engineers feared to be the authors.

Nor were they content to feign things against me, but to urge things, feigned by

the ignorant, against my profession; which though from their hired and mercenary

impudence, I might have passed by, as granted to a nation of barkers that let 960

out their tongues to lick others’ sores, yet I durst not leave myself undefended,

having a pair of ears unskilful to hear lies; or have those things said of me, which

I could truly prove of them. They objected making of verses to me, when I could

object to most of them their not being able to read them, but as worthy of scorn.

Nay, they would offer to urge mine own writings against me, but by pieces, which 965

was an excellent way of malice: as if any man’s context might not seem dangerous

and offensive, if that which was knit to what went before were defrauded

of his beginning, or that things by themselves uttered might not seem subject

to calumny, which read entire would appear most free. At last they upbraided

my poverty. I confess she is my domestic: sober of diet, simple of habit, frugal, 970

painful, a good counsellor to me, that keeps me from cruelty, pride, or other more

delicate impertinences, which are the nurse-children of riches. But let them look

over all the great and monstrous wickednesses, they shall never find those in poor

families. They are the issue of the wealthy giants and the mighty hunters; whereas

no great work or worthy of praise or memory, but came out of poor cradles. It was 975

the ancient poverty that founded commonweals, built cities, invented arts, made

wholesome laws, armed men against vices, rewarded them with their own virtues,

and preserved the honour and state of nations, till they betrayed themselves to

riches.

Money never made any man rich, but his mind. He that can order himself 980

to the law of nature is not only without the sense but the fear of poverty. Oh,

but to strike blind the people with our wealth and pomp is the thing! What a

wretchedness is this, to thrust all our riches outward, and be beggars within; to

contemplate nothing but the little, vile, and sordid things of the world, not the

great, noble, and precious! We serve our avarice, and not content with the good 985

of the earth that is offered us, we search and dig for the evil that is hidden. God

offered us those things and placed them at hand and near us, that He knew were

profitable for us; but the hurtful He laid deep and hid. Yet do we seek only the

things whereby we may perish, and bring them forth, when God and nature hath

buried them. We covet superfluous things when it were more honour for us if we 990

could contemn necessary. What need hath nature of silver dishes, multitudes of

waiters, delicate pages, perfumed napkins? She requires meat only, and hunger

is not ambitious. Can we think no wealth enough but such a state for which a

man may be brought into a praemunire, begged, proscribed, or poisoned? Oh,

if a man could restrain the fury of his gullet and groin, and think how many 995

fires, how many kitchens, cooks, pastures, and ploughed lands; what orchards,

stews, ponds, and parks, coops, and garners he could spare; what velvets, tissues,

embroideries, laces he could lack; and then how short and uncertain his life is; he

were in a better way to happiness than to live the emperor of these delights, and

be the dictator of fashions! But we make ourselves slaves to our pleasures, and 1000

we serve fame and ambition, which is an equal slavery. Have not I seen the pomp

of a whole kingdom, and what a foreign king could bring hither also to make

himself gazed and wondered at, laid forth as it were to the show, and vanish all

away in a day? And shall that which could not fill the expectation of few hours

entertain and take up our whole lives, when even it appeared as superfluous to 1005

the possessors, as to me that was a spectator? The bravery was shown, it was not

possessed; while it boasted itself, it perished. It is vile and a poor thing to place

our happiness on these desires. Say we wanted them all: famine ends famine.

There is nothing valiant or solid to be hoped for from such as are always kempt

and perfumed and every day smell of the tailor. The exceedingly curious, that are 1010

wholly in mending such an imperfection in the face, in taking away the morphew

in the neck, or bleaching their hands at midnight, gumming and bridling their

beards, or making the waist small, binding it with hoops, while the mind runs

at waste; too much pickedness is not manly. Nor from those that will jest at

their own outward imperfections, but hide their ulcers within – their pride, lust, 1015

envy, ill nature – with all the art and authority they can. These persons are in

danger; for whilst they think to justify their ignorance by impudence, and their

persons by clothes and outward ornaments, they use but a commission to deceive

themselves; where, if we will look with our understanding and not our senses,

we may behold virtue and beauty (though covered with rags) in their brightness; 1020

and vice and deformity so much the fouler, in having all the splendour of riches

to gild them, or the false light of honour and power to help them. Yet this is that

wherewith the world is taken, and runs mad to gaze on: clothes and titles, the

birdlime of fools.

What petty things they are we wonder at, like children that esteem every 1025

trifle and prefer a fairing before their fathers! What difference is between us and

them, but that we are dearer fools, coxcombs at a higher rate? They are pleased

with cockleshells, whistles, hobby-horses, and such like; we with statues, marble

pillars, pictures, gilded roofs, where underneath is lath and lime, perhaps loam.

Yet we take pleasure in the lie, and are glad we can cozen our selves. Nor is it 1030

only in our walls and ceilings, but all that we call happiness is mere painting and

gilt, and all for money: what a thin membrane of honour that is! And how hath

all true reputation fallen, since money began to have any! Yet the great herd, the

multitude, that in all other things are divided, in this alone conspire and agree:

to love money. They wish for it, they embrace it, they adore it, while yet it is 1035

possessed with greater stir and torment than it is gotten.

Some men, what losses soever they have, they make them greater; and if they

have none, even all that is not gotten is a loss. Can there be creatures of more

wretched condition than these, that continually labour under their own misery,

and others’ envy? A man should study other things, not to covet, not to fear, not 1040

to repent him; to make his base such as no tempest shall shake him; to be secure of

all opinion; and pleasing to himself, even for that wherein he displeaseth others.

For the worst opinion gotten for doing well should delight us. Wouldst not thou

be just, but for fame, thou ought’st to be it with infamy. He that would have his

virtue published is not the servant of virtue, but glory. 1045

It is a dangerous thing when men’s minds come to sojourn with their affections,

and their diseases eat into their strength; that when too much desire and

greediness of vice hath made the body unfit or unprofitable, it is yet gladded

with the sight and spectacle of it in others; and for want of ability to be an actor,

is content to be a witness. It enjoys the pleasure of sinning in beholding others 1050

sin; as in dicing, drinking, drabbing, etc. Nay, when it cannot do all these, it is

offended with his own narrowness, that excludes it from the universal delights

of mankind, and oft-times dies of a melancholy that it cannot be vicious enough.

I am glad when I see any man avoid the infamy of a vice; but to shun the vice

itself were better. Till he do that he is but like the prentice, who, being loath to 1055

be spied by his master coming forth of Black Lucy’s, went in again; to whom his

master cried, ‘The more thou runnest that way to hide thyself, the more thou art

in the place.’ So are those that keep a tavern all day, that they may not be seen at

night. I have known lawyers, divines – yea, great ones – of this heresy.

There is a greater reverence had of things remote or strange to us than of 1060

much better, if they be nearer and fall under our sense. Men, and almost all sorts

of creatures, have their reputation by distance. Rivers, the farther they run and

more from their spring, the broader they are and greater. And where our original

is known, we are the less confident; among strangers we trust fortune. Yet a

man may live as renowned at home in his own country, or a private village, as 1065

in the whole world. For it is virtue that gives glory; that will endenizen a man

everywhere. It is only that can naturalize him. A native, if he be vicious, deserves

to be a stranger, and cast out of the commonwealth as an alien.

A dejected countenance and mean clothes beget often a contempt, but it is

with the shallowest creatures: courtiers, commonly. Look up even with them in a 1070

new suit, you get above them straight. Nothing is more short-lived than pride; it

is but while their clothes last: stay but while these are worn out, you cannot wish

the thing more wretched or dejected.

Poetry and picture are arts of a like nature, and both are busy about imitation. It

was excellently said of Plutarch, poetry was a speaking picture, and picture a mute 1075

poesy. For they both invent, feign, and devise many things, and accommodate all

they invent to the use and service of nature. Yet of the two, the pen is more noble

than the pencil; for that can speak to the

understanding, the other, but to the sense. They both behold pleasure and profit as their common object; but should

abstain from all base pleasures, lest they should err from their end, and while they 1080

seek to better men’s minds, destroy their manners. They both are born artificers,

not made. Nature is more powerful in them than study.

Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry.

Picture is the invention of heaven: the most ancient and most akin to nature. It

is itself a silent work, and always of one and the same habit; yet it doth so enter 1085

and penetrate the inmost affection – being done by an excellent artificer – as

sometimes it o’ercomes the power of speech and oratory. There are divers graces

in it, so are there in the artificers. One excels in care, another in reason, a third in

easiness, a fourth in nature and grace. Some have diligence and comeliness, but

they want majesty. They can express a human form in all the graces, sweetness and 1090

elegancy, but they miss the authority. They can hit nothing but smooth cheeks,

they cannot express roughness or gravity. Others aspire to truth so much as they

are rather lovers of likeness than beauty. Zeuxis and Parrhasius are said to be

contemporaries; the first found out the reason of lights and shadows in picture;

the other more subtly examined the lines. 1095

In picture, light is required no less than shadow; so in style, height, as well as

humbleness. But beware they be not too humble: as Pliny pronounced of Regulus’

writings, you would think them written not on a child, but by a child. Many, out

of their own obscene apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words, as ‘occupy’,

‘nature’, and the like; so the curious industry in some, of having all alike good, 1100

hath come nearer a vice than a virtue.

Picture took her feigning from poetry; from geometry her rule, compass,

lines, proportion, and the whole symmetry. Parrhasius was the first won

reputation, by adding symmetry to picture; he added subtlety to the countenance,

elegancy to the hair, loveliness to the face, and by the public voice of all artificers, 1105

deserved honour in the outer lines. Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers,

and other elegancies. From the optics it drew reasons by which it considered

how things placed at distance and afar off, should appear less; how above or

beneath the head should deceive the eye, etc. So from thence it took shadows,

recessor, light, and heightenings. From moral philosophy it took the soul, the 1110

expression of senses, perturbations, manners, when they would paint an angry

person, a proud, an inconstant, an ambitious, a brave, a magnanimous, a just,

a merciful, a compassionate, an humble, a dejected, a base, and the like. They

made all heightnings bright, all shadows dark, all swellings from a plane, all

solids from breaking. See where∗ he complains of their painting chimeras, by 1115

the vulgar unaptly called grotesque, saying that men who were born truly to

study and emulate nature, did nothing but make monsters against nature; which

Horace^a so laughed at. The art plastic was moulding in clay or potters’ earth

anciently. This is the parent of statuary, sculpture, graving, and picture, cutting

in brass and marble, all serve under her. Socrates taught Parrhasius and Clito, two 1120

noble statuaries, first to express manners by their looks in imagery. Polygnotus,

and Aglaophon were ancienter. After them Zeuxis, who was the lawgiver to

all painters, after Parrhasius. They were contemporaries, and lived both about

Philip’s time, the father of Alexander the Great. There lived in this latter age six

famous painters in Italy, who were excellent and emulous of the ancients: Raphael 1125

de Urbino, Michelangelo Buonarota, Titian, Antonio of Correggio, Sebastian of

Venice, Giulio Romano, and Andrea Sartorio.

∗These are flatterers for their bread, that praise all my oraculous lord does or

says, be it true or false; invent tales that shall please; make baits for His Lordship’s

ears; and if they be not received in what they offer at, they shift a point of the 1130

compass, and turn their tale, presently tack about, deny what they confessed and

confess what they denied, fit their discourse to the persons and occasions. What

they snatch up and devour at one table, utter at another; and grow suspected of the

master, hated of the servants, while they inquire, and reprehend, and compound,

and delate business of the house they have nothing to do with. They praise My 1135

Lord’s wine, and the sauce he likes; observe the cook and bottleman; while they

stand in My Lord’s favour, speak for a pension for them, but pound them to dust

upon My Lord’s least distaste, or change of his palate.

How much better is it, to be silent, or at least to speak sparingly! For it is

not enough to speak good, but timely things. If a man be asked a question, to 1140

answer; but to repeat the question before he answer is well, that he be sure to

understand it, to avoid absurdity. For it is less dishonour to hear imperfectly,

than to speak imperfectly. The ears are excused, the understanding is not. And in

things unknown to a man, not to give his opinion, lest by affectation of knowing

too much he lose the credit he hath, by speaking or knowing the wrong way what 1145

he utters. Nor seek to get his patron’s favour by embarking himself in the factions

of the family, to inquire after domestic simulties, their sports or affections. They

are an odious and vile kind of creatures that fly about the house all day, and,

picking up the filth of the house, like pies or swallows, carry it to their nest – the

lord’s ears – and oftentimes report the lies they have 1150

feigned, for what they have seen and heard.

These are called instruments of grace and power with great persons; but they

are indeed the organs of their impotency, and marks of weakness. For sufficient

lords are able to make these discoveries themselves. Neither will an honourable

person inquire who eats and drinks together, what that man plays, whom this 1155

man loves, with whom such a one walks, what discourse they held, who sleeps

with whom. They are base and servile natures that busy themselves about these

disquisitions. How often have I seen (and worthily) these censors of the family

undertaken by some honest rustic, and cudgelled thriftily? These are commonly

the off-scouring and dregs of men that do these things, or calumniate others. Yet 1160

I know not truly which is worse: he that maligns all, or that praises all. There is

as great a vice in praising, and as frequent, as in detracting.

It pleased Your Lordship of late to ask my opinion touching the education of

your sons, and especially to the advancement of their studies. To which, though

I returned somewhat for the present which rather manifested a will in me than 1165

gave any just resolution to the thing propounded, I have upon better cogitation

called those aids about me, both of mind and memory, which shall venture my

thoughts clearer, if not fuller, to Your Lordship’s demand. I confess, my lord,

they will seem but petty and minute things I shall offer to you, being writ for

children, and of them. But studies have their infancy as well as creatures. We see 1170

in men even the strongest compositions had their beginnings from milk and the

cradle; and the wisest tarried sometimes about apting their mouths to letters and

syllables. In their education, therefore, the care must be the greater had of their

beginnings, to know, examine, and weigh their natures; which, though they be

proner in some children to some disciplines, yet are they naturally prompt to 1175

taste all by degrees, and with change. For change is a kind of refreshing in studies,

and infuseth knowledge by way of recreation. Thence the school itself is called

a play or game, and all letters are so best taught to scholars. They should not be

affrighted or deterred in their entry, but drawn on with exercise and emulation.

A youth should not be made to hate study before he know the causes to love it, 1180

or taste the bitterness before the sweet, but called on and allured, entreated, and

praised, yea, when he deserves it not. For which cause I wish them sent to the best

school, and a public, which I think the best. Your Lordship I fear hardly hears

of that, as willing to breed them in your eye and at home, and doubting their

manners may be corrupted abroad. They are in more danger in your own family, 1185

among ill servants (allowing they be safe in their schoolmaster) than amongst a

thousand boys, however immodest. Would we did not spoil our own children and

overthrow their manners ourselves by too much indulgence! To breed them at

home is to breed them in a shade, where in a school they have the light and heat of

the sun. They are used and accustomed to things and men. When they come forth 1190

into the commonwealth, they find nothing new or to seek. They have made their

friendships and aids, some to last till their age. They hear what is commanded

to others, as well as themselves, much approved, much corrected: all which they

bring to their own store and use, and learn as much as they hear. Eloquence would

be but a poor thing, if we should only converse with singulars, speak but man 1195

and man together. Therefore I like no private breeding. I would send them where

their industry should be daily increased by praise, and that kindled by emulation.

It is a good thing to inflame the mind, and though ambition itself be a vice, it is

often the cause of great virtue. Give me that wit whom praise excites, glory puts

on, or disgrace grieves: he is to be nourished with ambition, pricked forward with 1200

honour, checked with reprehension, and never to be suspected of sloth. Though

he be given to play, it is a sign of spirit and liveliness, so there be a mean had of

their sports and relaxations. And from the rod or ferule, I would have them free,

as from the menace of them; for it is both deformed and servile.

For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries: to read the best 1205

authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style. In style

to consider what ought to be written, and after what manner, he must first think

and excogitate his matter; then choose his words and examine the weight of

either. Then take care in placing and ranking both matter and words, that the

composition be comely; and to do this with diligence and often. No matter how 1210

slow the style be at first, so it be laboured and accurate; seek the best, and be not

glad of the forward conceits or first words that offer themselves to us, but judge of

what we invent, and order what we approve. Repeat often what we have formerly

written; which beside that it helps the consequence, and makes the juncture

better, it quickens the heat of imagination, that often cools in the time of setting 1215

down, and gives it new strength, as if it grew lustier by the going back. As we see

in the contention of leaping, they jump farthest, that fetch their race largest; or,

as in throwing a dart or javelin, we force back our arms to make our loose the

stronger. Yet if we have a fair gale of wind, I forbid not the steering out of our sail,

so the favour of the gale deceive us not. For all that we invent doth please us in the 1220

conception or birth, else we would never set it down. But the safest is to return

to our judgement, and handle over again those things, the easiness of which

might make them justly suspected. So did the best writers in their beginnings;

they imposed upon themselves care and industry. They did nothing rashly. They

obtained first to write well, and then custom made it easy and a habit. By little and 1225

little, their matter showed itself to them more plentifully; their words answered,

their composition followed, and all, as in a well-ordered family, presented itself

in the place. So that the sum of all is: ready writing makes not good writing; but

good writing brings on ready writing; yet when we think we have got the faculty,

it is even then good to resist it, as to give a horse a check sometimes with bit, 1230

which doth not so much stop his course, as stir his mettle. Again, whether a man’s

genius is best able to reach, thither it should more and more contend, lift and

dilate itself, as men of low stature raise themselves on their toes, and so oft-times

get even, if not eminent. Besides, as it is fit for grown and able writers to stand of

themselves, and work with their own strength, to trust and endeavour by their 1235

own faculties, so it is fit for the beginner and learner to study others and the best.

For the mind and memory are more sharply exercised in comprehending another

man’s things, than our own; and such as accustom themselves and are familiar

with the best authors, shall ever and anon find somewhat of them in themselves,

and in the expression of their minds, even when they feel it not; be able to utter 1240

something like theirs, which hath an authority above their own. Nay, sometimes

it is the reward of a man’s study, the praise of quoting another man fitly: and

though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet

he must exercise all. For as in an instrument, so in style, there must be a harmony

and concent of parts. 1245

I take this labour in teaching others, that they should not be always to be

taught, and I would bring my precepts into practice; for rules are ever of less force

and value than experiments. Yet with this purpose, rather to show the right way

to those that come after, than to detect any that have slipped before by error; and

I hope it will be more profitable. For men do more willingly listen, and with more 1250

favour, to precept than reprehension. Among divers opinions of an art (and most

of them contrary in themselves) it is hard to make election; and therefore, though

a man cannot invent new things after so many, he may do a welcome work yet

to help posterity to judge rightly of the old. But arts and precepts avail nothing,

except nature be beneficial and aiding. And therefore these things are no more 1255

written to a dull disposition than rules of husbandry to a barren soil. No precepts

will profit a fool, no more than beauty will the blind, or music the deaf. As we

should take care that our style in writing be neither dry nor empty, we should look

again it be not winding or wanton with far-fetched descriptions: either is a vice.

But that is worse which proceeds out of want than that which riots out of plenty. 1260

The remedy of fruitfulness is easy, but no labour will help the contrary. I will like

and praise some things in a young writer which yet if he continue in, I cannot but

justly hate him for the same. There is a time to be given all things for maturity;

and that even your country husbandman can teach, who to a young plant will not

put the pruning knife because it seems to fear the iron, as not able to admit the 1265

scar. No more would I tell a green writer all his faults, lest I should make him

grieve and faint, and at last despair. For nothing doth more hurt than to make

him so afraid of all things as he can endeavour nothing. Therefore youth ought

to be instructed betimes, and in the best things; for we hold those longest we take

soonest, as the first scent of a vessel lasts, and that tinct the wool first receives. 1270

Therefore a master should temper his own powers, and descend to the other’s

infirmity. If you pour a glut of water upon a bottle it receives little of it; but with

a funnel, and by degrees, you shall fill many of them, and spill little of your own;

to their capacity they will all receive, and be full. And as it is fit to read the best

authors to youth first, so let them be of the openest and clearest. As Livy before 1275

Sallust, Sidney before Donne. And beware of letting them taste Gower or Chaucer

at first, lest falling too much in love with antiquity, and not apprehending the

weight, they grow rough and barren in language only. When their judgements

are firm and out of danger, let them read both the old and the new; but no less

take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much corrupt, as the 1280

other’s dryness and squalor, if they choose not carefully. Spenser, in affecting

the ancients, writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter; but as

Virgil read Ennius. The reading of Homer and Virgil is counselled by Quintilian

as the best way of informing youth and confirming man. For besides that, the

mind is raised with the height and sublimity of such a verse, it takes spirit from 1285

the greatness of the matter, and is tincted with the best things. Tragic and lyric

poetry is good too, and comic with the best, if the manners of the reader be once

in safety. In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy and

disposition of poems better observed than in Terence and the later, who thought

the sole grace and virtue of their fable the sticking in of sentences, as ours do the 1290

forcing in of jests.

We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false

quarrel against nature, that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most

part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains, no less

than birds to fly, horses to run, etc.: which if they lose, it is through their own 1295

sluggishness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her children. I confess,

nature in children is more patient of labour in study, than in age; for the sense of

the pain, the judgement of the labour is absent: they do not measure what they

have done. And it is the thought, and consideration that affects us more than

the weariness itself. Plato was not content with the learning that Athens could 1300

give him, but sailed into Italy for Pythagoras’s knowledge; and yet not thinking

himself sufficiently informed, went into Egypt to the priests, and learned their

mysteries. He laboured, so must we. Many things may be learned together, and

performed in one point of time; as musicians exercise their memory, their voice,

their fingers, and sometime their head and feet at once. And so a preacher, in the 1305

invention of matter, election of words, composition of gesture, look, pronunciation,

motion, useth all these faculties at once. And if we can express this variety

together, why should not divers studies at divers hours delight, when the variety

is able alone to refresh and repair us? As when a man is weary of writing, to read;

and then again of reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do many things, yet 1310

are we (in a sort) still fresh to what we begin; we are recreated with change, as the

stomach is with meats. But some will say this variety breeds confusion and makes

that either we lose all, or hold no more than the last. Why do we not then persuade

husbandmen that they should not till land, help it with marl, lime, and compost,

plant hop-gardens, prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle 1315

at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do one thing long.

It is not the passing through these learnings that hurts us, but the dwelling

and sticking about them. To descend to those extreme anxieties and foolish cavils

of grammarians, is able to break a wit in pieces, being a work of manifold misery

and vainness, to be elementarii senes. Yet even letters are, as it were, the bank of 1320

words, and restore themselves to an author as the pawns of language. But talking

and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things. A fool

may talk, but a wise man speaks, and out of the observation, knowledge, and use of

things. Many writers perplex their readers and hearers with mere nonsense. Their

writings need sunshine. Pure and neat language I love, yet plain and customary. A 1325

barbarous phrase hath often made me out of love with a good sense, and doubtful

writing hath racked me beyond my patience. The reason why a poet is said that

he ought to have all knowledges is that he should not be ignorant of the most,

especially of those he will handle. And indeed when the attaining of them is

possible, it were a sluggish and base thing to despair. For frequent imitation of 1330

anything becomes a habit quickly. If a man should prosecute as much as could be

said of everything, his work would find no end.

Speech is the only benefit man hath to express his excellency of mind above

other creatures. It is the instrument of society. Therefore Mercury, who is the

president of language, is called deorum hominumque interpres. In all speech, words 1335

and sense are as the body and the soul. The sense is as the life and soul of

language, without which all words are dead. Sense is wrought out of experience,

the knowledge of human life and actions, or of the liberal arts, which the Greeks

called ᾽Εγκύκλοπαιδ∊ίαν. Words are the people’s, yet there is a choice of them to

be made; for verborum delectus origo est eloquentiae. They are to be chose according 1340

to the persons we make speak, or the things we speak of. Some are of the camp,

some of the council-board, some of the shop, some of the sheepcote, some of the

pulpit, some of the bar, etc. And herein is seen their elegance and propriety, when

we use them fitly and draw them forth to their just strength and nature, by way

of translation or metaphor. But in this translation we must only serve necessity 1345

(Nam temere nihil transfertur a prudenti) or commodity, which is a kind of necessity:

that is, when we either absolutely want a word to express by, and that is necessity,

or when we have not so fit a word, and that is commodity; as when we avoid

loss by it, and escape obsceneness, and gain in the grace and property, which

helps significance. Metaphors far-fet hinder to be understood; and affected, lose 1350

their grace. Or when the person fetcheth his translations from a wrong place: as

if a privy councillor should at the table take his metaphor from a dicing house,

or ordinary, or a vintner’s vault; or a justice of peace draw his similitudes from

the mathematics; or a divine from a bawdy house, or taverns; or a gentleman of

Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, or the Midland should fetch all his illustrations 1355

to his country neighbours from shipping, and tell them of the main sheet

and the bowline. Metaphors are thus many times deformed, as in him that said,

castratam morte Africani rempublicam. And another, stercus curiae Glauciam; and cana

nive conspuit Alpes. All attempts that are new in this kind are dangerous and somewhat

hard, before they be softened with use. A man coins not a new word without 1360

some peril, and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate;

if refused, the scorn is assured. Yet we must adventure, for things at first hard and

rough are by use made tender and gentle. It is an honest error that is committed,

following great chiefs.

Custom is the most certain mistress of language, as the public stamp makes 1365

the current money. But we must not be too frequent with the mint, every day

coining, nor fetch words from the extreme and utmost ages, since the chief virtue

of a style is perspicuity, and nothing so vicious in it as to need an interpreter.

Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not

without their delight sometimes. For they have the authority of years, and out 1370

of their intermission do win to themselves a kind of grace like newness. But the

eldest of the present and newest of the past language is the best. For what was the

ancient language which some men so dote upon but the ancient custom? Yet when

I name custom, I understand not the vulgar custom, for that were a precept no

less dangerous to language, than life, if we should speak or live after the manners 1375

of the vulgar; but that I call custom of speech, which is the consent of the learned,

as custom of life, which is the consent of the good. Virgil was most loving of

antiquity; yet how rarely doth he insert aquai, and pictai! Lucretius is scabrous

and rough in these: he seeks them, as some do Chaucerisms with us, which were

better expunged and banished. Some words are to be culled out for ornament and 1380

colour, as we gather flowers to strew houses, or make garlands; but they are better

when they grow to our style as in a meadow, where though the mere grass and

greenness delights, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and beautify. Marry,

we must not play or riot too much with them, as in paronomasies, nor use too

swelling or ill-sounding words; quae per salebras altaque saxa cadunt. It is true, there 1385

is no sound but shall find some lovers, as the bitterest confections are grateful

to some palates. Our composition must be more accurate in the beginning and

end, than in the midst; and in the end more than in the beginning, for through

the midst the stream bears us. And this is attained by custom more than care or

diligence. We must express readily and fully, not profusely. There is difference 1390

between a liberal and a prodigal hand. As it is a great point of art, when our

matter requires it, to enlarge, and veer out all sail; so to take it in, and contract

it, is of no less praise when the argument doth ask it. Either of them hath their

fitness in the place. A good man always profits by his endeavour, by his help, yea,

when he is absent; nay, when he is dead, by his example and memory. So good 1395

authors in their style. A strict and succinct style is that where you can take away

nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest. The brief style is that which

expresseth much in little. The concise style, which expresseth not enough, but

leaves somewhat to be understood. The abrupt style, which hath many breaches,

and doth not seem to end, but fall. The congruent and harmonious fitting of parts 1400

in a sentence hath almost the fastening and force of knitting and connection; as

in stones well squared, which will rise strong a great way without mortar.

Periods are beautiful when they are not too long, for so they have their strength

too, as in a pike or javelin. As we must take the care that our words and sense

be clear, so if the obscurity happen through the hearer’s or reader’s want of 1405

understanding, I am not to answer for them; no more than for their not listening

or marking: I must neither find them ears nor mind. But a man cannot put a

word so in sense but something about it will illustrate it, if the writer understand

himself; for order helps much to perspicuity, as confusion hurts. Rectitudo lucem

adfert: obliquitas et circumductio offuscat. We should therefore speak what we can, 1410

the nearest way, so as we keep our gait, not leap; for too short may as well be

not let into the memory, as too long not kept in. Whatsoever loseth the grace

and clearness, converts into a riddle; the obscurity is marked, but not the value.

That perisheth, and is passed by, like the pearl in the fable. Our style should be

like a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled, and 1415

perplexed: then all is a knot, a heap. There are words that do as much raise a

style as others can depress it. Superlation and overmuchness amplifies; it may be

above faith, but never above a mean. It was ridiculous in Cestius, when he said

of Alexander: fremit Oceanus, quasi indignetur, quod terras relinquas; but propitiously

from Virgil: 1420

. . . credas innare revolsas

Cycladas.

He doth not say it was so, but seemed to be so. Although it be somewhat incredible,

that is excused before it be spoken. But there are hyperboles which will become one

language, that will by no means admit another. As eos esse Populi Romani exercitus, 1425

qui coelum possint perrumpere: who would say this with us, but a madman? Therefore

we must consider in every tongue, what is used, what received. Quintilian warns

us that in no kind of translation, or metaphor, or allegory, we make a turn from

what we began; as if we fetch the original of our metaphor from sea and billows,

we end not in flames and ashes: it is a most foul inconsequence. Neither must 1430

we draw out our allegory too long, lest either we make ourselves obscure, or fall

into affectation, which is childish. But why do men depart at all from the right

and natural ways of speaking? Sometimes for necessity, when we are driven, or

think it fitter, to speak that in obscure words or by circumstance, which uttered

plainly would offend the hearers. Or to avoid obsceneness, or sometimes for 1435

pleasure and variety; as travellers turn out of the highway, drawn either by the

commodity of a footpath, or the delicacy or freshness of the fields. And all this is

called ἐσχηματισμένη, or figured language.

Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of

the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the 1440

mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech. Nay, it is

likened to a man; and as we consider feature and composition in a man, so words

in language: in the greatness, aptness, sound, structure, and harmony of it. Some

men are tall and big, so some language is high and great. Then the words are

chosen, their sound ample, the composition full, the absolution plenteous and 1445

poured out, all grave, sinewy, and strong. Some are little, and dwarfs; so of speech,

it is humble and low, the words poor and flat, the members and periods thin and

weak, without knitting or number. The middle are of a just stature. There the

language is plain and pleasing, even without stopping, round without swelling; all

well-turned, composed, elegant, and accurate. The vicious language is vast and 1450

gaping, swelling and irregular; when it contends to be high, full of rock,

mountain, and pointedness; as it affects to be low, it is abject, and creeps, full of bogs

and holes. And according to their subject, these styles vary, and lose their names:

for that which is high and lofty, declaring excellent matter, becomes vast and

tumorous, speaking of petty and inferior things; so that which was even and apt 1455

in a mean and plain subject, will appear most poor and humble in a high argument.

Would you not laugh to meet a great councillor of state in a flat cap, with his

trunk-hose, and a hobby-horse cloak, his gloves under his girdle, and yond

haberdasher in a velvet gown, furred with sables? There is a certain latitude in these

things, by which we find the degrees. The next thing to the stature is the figure 1460

and feature in language: that is, whether it be round and straight, which consists

of short and succinct periods, numerous, and polished; or square and firm, which

is to have equal and strong parts everywhere answerable and weighed. The third

is the skin and coat, which rests in the well-joining, cementing, and coagmentation

of words: when as it is smooth, gentle, and sweet, like a table upon which 1465

you may run your finger without rubs, and your nail cannot find a joint; not

horrid, rough, wrinkled, gaping, or chapped. After these the flesh, blood, and bones

come in question. We say it is a fleshy style, when there is much periphrasis, and

circuit of words; and when with more than enough, it grows fat and corpulent:

arvina orationis, full of suet and tallow. It hath blood and juice, when the words are 1470

proper and apt, their sound sweet, and the phrase neat and picked: oratio uncta, et

bene pasta. But where there is redundancy, both the blood and juice are faulty and

vicious: redundat sanguine, quae multo plus dicit, quam necesse est. Juice in language

is somewhat less than blood; for if the words be but becoming and signifying,

and the sense gentle, there is juice; but where that wanteth, the language is thin, 1475

flagging, poor, starved; scarce covering the bone, and shows like stones in a sack.

Some men to avoid redundancy, run into that; and while they strive to have no

ill blood, or juice, they lose their good. There be some styles again that have not

less blood but less flesh and corpulence. These are bony, and sinewy: ossa habent,

et nervos. 1480

It was well noted by the late Lord St Albans, that the study of words is the first

distemper of learning: vain matter the second; and a third distemper is deceit, or

the likeness of truth: imposture held up by credulity. All these are the cobwebs

of learning, and to let them grow in us is either sluttish or foolish. Nothing is

more ridiculous than to make an author a dictator, as the schools have done 1485

Aristotle. The damage is infinite knowledge receives by it. For to many things a

man should owe but a temporary belief, and a suspension of his own judgement,

not an absolute resignation of himself, or a perpetual captivity. Let Aristotle

and others have their dues, but if we can make farther discoveries of truth and

fitness than they, why are we envied? Let us beware, while we strive to add, we 1490

do not diminish, or deface; we may improve, but not augment. By discrediting

falsehood, truth grows in request. We must not go about like men anguished

and perplexed for vicious affectation of praise, but calmly study the separation

of opinions, find the errors have intervened, awake antiquity, call former times into

question; but make no parties with the present, nor follow any fierce undertakers, 1495

mingle no matter of doubtful credit with the simplicity of truth, but gently stir

the mould about the root of the question, and avoid all digladiations, facility

of credit, or superstitious simplicity; seek the consonancy and concatenation of

truth; stoop only to point of necessity, and what leads to convenience. Then make

exact animadversion where style hath degenerated, where flourished and thrived 1500

in choiceness of phrase, round and clean composition of sentence, sweet falling of

the clause, varying an illustration by tropes and figures, weight of matter, worth

of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, and depth of judgement.

This is monte potiri, to get the hill. For no perfect discovery can be made upon a

flat or a level. 1505

Now that I have informed you in the knowing these things, let me lead you by

the hand a little farther in the direction of the use, and make you an able writer

by practice. The conceits of the mind are pictures of things, and the tongue is

the interpreter of those pictures. The order of God’s creatures in themselves is

not only admirable and glorious, but eloquent; then he who could apprehend 1510

the consequence of things in their truth, and utter his apprehensions as truly,

were the best writer or speaker. Therefore Cicero said much when he said dicere

recte nemo potest, nisi qui prudenter intelligit. The shame of speaking unskilfully were

small, if the tongue only thereby were disgraced; but as the image of a king in

his seal ill-represented is not so much a blemish to the wax, or the signet that 1515

sealed it, as to the prince it representeth; so disordered speech is not so much

injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of

things in themselves, so negligently expressed. Neither can his mind be thought

to be in tune, whose words do jar; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is

preposterous; nor his elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself 1520

into fragments and uncertainties. Were it not a dishonour to a mighty prince, to

have the majesty of his embassage spoiled by a careless ambassador? And is it not

as great an indignity, that an excellent conceit and capacity by the indiligence of

an idle tongue should be disgraced? Negligent speech doth not only discredit the

person of the speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgement; 1525

it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter and substance. If it be

so then in words, which fly and escape censure, and where one good phrase begs

pardon for many incongruities and faults, how shall he then be thought wise

whose penning is thin and shallow? How shall you look for wit from him, whose

leisure and head, assisted with the examination of his eyes, yield you no life or 1530

sharpness in his writing?

In writing there is to be regarded the invention and the fashion. For the

invention, that ariseth upon your business; whereof there can be no rules of more

certainty, or precepts of better direction given, than conjecture can lay down from

the several occasions of men’s particular lives and vocations. But sometimes men 1535

make business of kindness: as ‘I could not satisfy myself, till I had discharged

my remembrance, and charged my letters with commendations to you’; or, ‘My

business is no other than to testify my love to you, and to put you in mind of

my willingness to do you all kind offices’; or, ‘Sir, have you leisure to descend to

the remembering of that assurance you have long possessed in your servant, and 1540

upon your next opportunity, make him happy with some commands from you?,

or the like; that go a-begging for some meaning, and labour to be delivered of

the great burden of nothing. When you have invented, and that your business

be matter, and not bare form or mere ceremony but some earnest, then are you

to proceed to the ordering of it, and digesting the parts, which is had out of two 1545

circumstances. One is the understanding of the persons to whom you are to write;

the other is the coherence of your sentence. For men’s capacity to weigh what

will be apprehended with greatest attention or leisure, what next regarded and

longed for especially, and what last will leave satisfaction, and, as it were, the

sweetest memorial and brief of all that is past in his understanding, whom you 1550

write to. For the consequence of sentences, you must be sure that every clause do

give the cue one to the other, and be bespoken ere it come. So much for invention

and order.

Now for fashion: it consists in four things, which are qualities of your style.

The first is brevity. For they must not be treatises or discourses, your letters, except 1555

it be to learned men. And even among them there is a kind of thrift and saving of

words. Therefore you are to examine the clearest passages of your understanding,

and through them to convey the sweetest and most significant words you can

devise, that you may the easier teach them the readiest way to another man’s

apprehension, and open their meaning fully, roundly, and distinctly, so as the 1560

reader may not think a second view cast away upon your letter. And though

respect be a part following this, yet now here, and still I must remember it: if

you write to a man whose estate and senses you are familiar with, you may the

bolder – to set a task to his brain – venture on a knot. But if to your superior,

you are bound to measure him in three farther points. First, your interest in him; 1565

secondly, his capacity in your letters; thirdly, his leisure to peruse them. For your

interest or favour with him, you are to be the shorter or longer, more familiar or

submiss, as he will afford you time. For his capacity you are to be quicker and

fuller of those reaches and glances of wit or learning, as he is able to entertain

them. For his leisure, you are commanded to the greater briefness, as his place is 1570

of greater discharges and cares. But with your betters you are not to put riddles of

wit, by being too scarce of words; nor to cause the trouble of making breviates, by

writing too riotous and wastingly. Brevity is attained in matter by avoiding idle

compliments, prefaces, protestations, parentheses, superfluous circuit of figures,

and digressions; in the composition, by omitting conjunctions, ‘not only . . . but1575

also’, ‘both the one and the other’, ‘whereby it cometh to pass’, and suchlike idle

particles, that have no great business in a serious letter, but breaking of sentences;

as oftentimes a short journey is made long by unnecessary baits.

But as Quintilian saith, there is a briefness of the parts sometimes that makes

the whole long, as ‘I came to the stairs, I took a pair of oars, they launched out, 1580

rowed apace, I landed at the court gate, I paid my fare, went up to the presence,

asked for my lord, I was admitted.’ All this is but ‘I went to the court and spake

with my lord.’ This is the fault of some Latin writers, within these last hundred

years, of my reading, and perhaps Seneca may be appeached of it; I accuse him

not. 1585

The next property of epistolary style is perspicuity, and is oftentimes

endangered by the former quality (brevity), oftentimes by affectation of some

wit ill-angled for, or ostentation of some hidden terms of art. Few words they

darken speech, and so do too many, as well too much light hurteth the eyes, as

too little; and a long bill of chancery confounds the understanding as much as 1590

the shortest note. Therefore let not your letters be penned like English statutes,

and this is obtained. These vices are eschewed by pondering your business well,

and distinctly conceiving yourself, which is much furthered by uttering your

thoughts, and letting them as well come forth to the light and judgement of your

own outward senses, as to the censure of other men’s ears; for that is the reason 1595

why many good scholars speak but fumblingly; like a rich man, that for want of

particular note and difference can bring you no certain ware readily out of his

shop. Hence it is that talkative shallow men do often content the hearers more

than the wise. But this may find a speedier redress in writing, where all comes

under the last examination of the eyes. First mind it well, then pen it, then examine 1600

it, then amend it, and you may be in the better hope of doing reasonably well.

Under this virtue may come plainness which is not to be curious in the order, as

to answer a letter, as if you were to answer to interrogatories: as to the first, first,

and to the second, secondly, etc. But both in method and word to use (as ladies do

in their attire) a diligent kind of negligence, and their sportive freedom; though 1605

with some men you are not to jest, or practise tricks, yet the delivery of the most

important things may be carried with such a grace as that it may yield a pleasure

to the conceit of the reader. There must be store, though no excess of terms; as if

you are to name ‘store’, sometimes you may call it ‘choice’, sometimes ‘plenty’,

sometimes ‘copiousness’, or ‘variety’: but ever so, that the word which comes in 1610

lieu have not such difference of meaning as that it may put the sense of the first

in hazard to be mistaken. You are not to cast a ring for the perfumed terms of the

time, as ‘accommodation’, ‘compliment’, ‘spirit’, etc., but use them properly in

their place, as others.

There followeth life and quickness, which is the strength and sinews (as it 1615

were) of your penning by pithy sayings, similitudes, and conceits, allusions to

some known history, or other commonplace, such as are in The Courtier, and the

second book of Cicero, De oratore.

The last is: respect to discern what fits yourself, him to whom you write, and

that which you handle, which is a quality fit to conclude the rest, because it doth 1620

include all. And that must proceed from ripeness of judgement, which as one

truly saith, is gotten by four means: God, nature, diligence, and conversation.

Serve the first well, and the rest will serve you.

We have spoken sufficiently of oratory; let us now make a diversion to poetry.

Poetry, in the primogeniture, had many peccant humours, and is made to have 1625

more now through the levity and inconstancy of men’s judgements. Whereas,

indeed, it is the most prevailing eloquence, and of the most exalted charact. Now

the discredits and disgraces are many it hath received through men’s study of

depravation or calumny; their practice being to give it diminution of credit, by

lessening the professors’ estimation, and making the age afraid of their liberty: 1630

and the age is grown so tender of her fame, as she calls all writings aspersions. That

is the state-word, the phrase of court, Placentia College, which some call Parasites’

Place, the Inn of Ignorance.

Whilst I name no persons, but deride follies, why should any man confess or

betray himself? Why doth not that of St Jerome come into their mind: ubi generalis 1635

est de vitiis disputatio, ibi nullius esse personae iniuriam? Is it such an inexpiable crime

in poets, to tax vices generally; and no offence in them who, by their exception,

confess they have committed them particularly? Are we fallen into those times

that we must not

Auriculas teneras mordaci rodere vero? 1640

Remedii votum semper verius erat, quam spes.

If men may by no means write freely, or speak truth, but when it offends not, why

do physicians cure with sharp medicines or corrosives? Is not the same equally

lawful in the cure of the mind that is in the cure of the body? Some vices (you will

say) are so foul, that it is better they should be done than spoken. But they that 1645

take offence where no name, character or signature doth blazon them seem to

me like affected as women who, if they hear anything ill spoken of the ill of their

sex, are presently moved, as if the contumely respected their particular; and on

the contrary, when they hear good of good women, conclude that it belongs to

them all. If I see anything that toucheth me, shall I come forth a betrayer of myself 1650

presently? No, if I be wise, I’ll dissemble it; if honest, I’ll avoid it, lest I publish

that on my own forehead, which I saw there noted without a title. A man that is on

the mending hand will either ingeniously confess or wisely dissemble his disease;

and the wise and virtuous will never think anything belongs to themselves that

is written, but rejoice that the good are warned not to be such, and the ill to leave 1655

to be such. The person offended hath no reason to be offended with the writer,

but with himself; and so to declare that properly to belong to him, which was so

spoken of all men, as it could be no man’s several but his that would wilfully and

desperately claim it. It sufficeth I know what kind of persons I displease, men

bred in the declining and decay of virtue, betrothed to their own vices, that have 1660

abandoned or prostituted their good names; hungry and ambitious of infamy,

invested in all deformity, enthralled to ignorance and malice, of a hidden and

concealed malignity, and that hold a concomitancy with all evil.

What is a poet?

A poet is that which by the Greeks is called κατ᾿ ἐζ᾿οχὴν, ὁ Ποιητὴς, a maker, or 1665

a feigner; his art, an art of imitation, or feigning; expressing the life of man in fit

measure, numbers, and harmony, according to Aristotle: from the word ποι∊ιν,

which signifies to make or feign. Hence he is called a poet, not he which writeth

in measure only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the

truth. For the fable and fiction is (as it were) the form and soul of any poetical 1670

work or poem.

What mean you by a poem?

A poem is not alone any work or composition of the poet’s in many or few

verses; but even one alone verse sometimes makes a perfect poem. As when Aeneas

hangs up and consecrates the arms of Abas with this inscription: 1675

Aeneas haec de Danais victoribus arma,

and calls it a poem, or carmen. Such are those in Martial:

Omnia, Castor, emis: sic fiet, ut omnia vendas,

and

Pauper videri Cinna vult, et est pauper. 1680

So were Horace’s odes called Carmina, his lyric songs. And Lucretius designs

a whole book in his sixth:

Quod in primo quoque carmine claret.

And anciently all the oracles were called carmina; or whatever sentence was

expressed, were it much or little, it was called an epic, dramatic, lyric, elegiac, or 1685

epigrammatic poem.

But how differs a poem from what we call poesy?

A poem, as I have told you, is the work of the poet, the end and fruit of his

labour and study. Poesy is his skill or craft of making; the very fiction itself, the

reason, or form of the work. And these three voices differ, as the thing done, the 1690

doing, and the doer; the thing feigned, the feigning, and the feigner; so the poem,

he poesy, and the poet. Now the poesy is the habit or the art; nay, rather the queen

of arts, which had her original from heaven, received thence from the Hebrews,

and had in prime estimation with the Greeks, transmitted to the Latins, and all

nations that professed civility. The study of it (if we will trust Aristotle) offers to 1695

mankind a certain rule and pattern of living well and happily, disposing us to all

civil offices of society. If we will believe Tully, it nourisheth, and instructeth our

youth, delights our age, adorns our prosperity, comforts our adversity, entertains

us at home, keeps us company abroad, travails with us, watches, divides the times

of our earnest and sports, shares in our country recesses and recreations, insomuch 1700

as the wisest and best learned have thought her the absolute mistress of manners

and nearest of kin to virtue. And whereas they entitle philosophy to be a rigid

and austere poesy, they have, on the contrary, styled poesy a dulcet and gentle

philosophy, which leads on and guides us by the hand to action with a ravishing

delight and incredible sweetness. But before we handle the kinds of poems, with 1705

their special differences, or make court to the art itself as a mistress, I would lead

you to the knowledge of our poet by a perfect information what he is or should

be by nature, by exercise, by imitation, by study; and so bring him down through

the disciplines of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the ethics, adding somewhat out

of all peculiar to himself and worthy of your admittance or reception. 1710

First, we require in our poet or maker – for that title our language affords him

legantly with the Greek – a goodness of natural wit. For whereas all other arts

consist of doctrine and precepts, the poet must be able by nature, and instinct to

pour out the treasure of his mind, and as Seneca saith, aliquando secundum Anacreontem

insanire, iucundum esse: by which he understands, the poetical rapture. And 1715

according to that of Plato, frustra poeticas fores sui compos pulsavit; and of Aristotle,

nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. Nec potest grande aliquid, et supra

caeteros loqui, nisi mota mens. Then it riseth higher, as by a divine instinct, when

it contemns common and known conceptions. It utters somewhat above a mortal

mouth. Then it gets aloft, and flies away with his rider, whither before it 1720

was doubtful to ascend. This the poets understood by their Helicon, Pegasus, or

Parnassus; and this made Ovid to boast:

Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo:

Sedibus aetheriis spiritus ille venit.

And Lipsius to affirm: scio poetam neminem praestantem fuisse, sine parte quadam 1725

uberiore divinae aurae. And hence it is that the coming up of good poets (for I mind

not mediocres, or imos) is so thin and rare among us. Every beggarly corporation

affords the state a mayor or two bailiffs yearly, but solus rex aut poeta non quotannis

nascitur.

To this perfection of nature in our poet we require exercise of those parts, and 1730

frequent. If his wit will not arrive suddenly at the dignity of the ancients, let him

not yet fall out with it, quarrel, or be over-hastily angry, offer to turn it away from

study in a humour; but come to it again upon better cogitation, try another time

with labour. If then it succeed not, cast not away the quills yet, nor scratch the

wainscot, beat not the poor desk, but bring all to the forge and file again; turn it 1735

anew. There is no statute law of the kingdom bids you be a poet against your will

ere the first quarter; if it come in a year or two it is well. The common rhymers

pour forth verses, such as they are, extempore, but there never comes from them

one sense worth the life of a day. A rhymer and a poet are two things. It is said

of the incomparable Virgil, that he brought forth his verses like a bear, and after 1740

formed them with licking. Scaliger, the father, writes it of him that he made a

quantity of verses in the morning which afore night he reduced to a less number.

But that which Valerius Maximus hath left recorded of Euripides, the tragic poet,

his answer to Alcestis, another poet, is as memorable as modest: who, when it was

told to Alcestis that Euripides had in three days brought forth but three verses, 1745

and those with some difficulty, and throes; Alcestis, glorying he could with ease

have sent forth a hundred in the space; Euripides roundly replied, ‘Like enough.

But here is the difference: thy verses will not last those three days; mine will to

all time.’ Which was as to tell him he could not write a verse. I have met many of

these rattles that made a noise and buzzed. They had their hum, and no more. 1750

Indeed, things wrote with labour deserve to be so read, and will last their age.

The third requisite in our poet or maker is imitation, to be able to convert

the substance or riches of another poet to his own use. To make choice of one

excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him till he grow very he, or so like

him as the copy may be mistaken for the principal. Not as a creature that swallows 1755

what it takes in crude, raw, or indigested, but that feeds with an appetite, and

hath a stomach to concoct, divide, and turn all into nourishment. Not to imitate

servilely, as Horace saith, and catch at vices, for virtue: but to draw forth out of

the best and choicest flowers with the bee, and turn all into honey, work it into

one relish, and savour, make our imitation sweet; observe how the best writers 1760

have imitated, and follow them. How Virgil and Statius have imitated Homer,

how Horace, Archilochus; how Alcaeus, and the other lyrics; and so of the rest.

But that which we especially require in him is an exactness of study, and

multiplicity of reading, which maketh a full man, not alone enabling him to

know the history or argument of a poem and to report it, but so to master the 1765

matter and style as to show he knows how to handle, place, or dispose of either,

with elegancy when need shall be. And not think he can leap forth suddenly a

poet by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus, or having washed his lips (as they

say) in Helicon. There goes more to his making, than so. For to nature, exercise,

imitation, and study, art must be added, to make all these perfect. And though 1770

these challenge to themselves much in the making up of our maker, it is art

only can lead him to perfection, and leave him there in possession, as planted

by her hand. It is the assertion of Tully, if to an excellent nature there happen

an accession, or confirmation of learning and discipline, there will then remain

somewhat noble and singular. For as Simylus saith in Stobaeus, 1775

Οὔτ∊ φύσις ἰκσνὴ γίν∊ται τέχνης ἄτ∊ρ,

οὔτ∊ πᾶν τέχνη μὴ φύσιν κ∊κτημένη

‘without art, nature can ne’er be perfect; and without nature, art can claim no

being’. But our poet must beware that his study be not only to learn of himself;

for he that shall affect to do that confesseth his ever having a fool to his master. He 1780

must read many, but ever the best and choicest: those that can teach him anything,

he must ever account his masters, and reverence: among whom Horace, and he

that taught him, Aristotle, deserved to be the first in estimation. Aristotle was

the first accurate critic and truest judge, nay, the greatest philosopher, the world

ever had, for he noted the vices of all knowledges in all creatures, and out of many 1785

men’s perfections in a science he formed still one art. So he taught us two offices

together, how we ought to judge rightly of others, and what we ought to imitate

specially in ourselves. But all this in vain without a natural wit and a poetical

nature in chief. For no man, so soon as he knows this, or reads it, shall be able to

write the better; but as he is adapted to it by nature, he shall grow the perfecter 1790

writer. He must have civil prudence and eloquence, and that whole, not taken

up by snatches or pieces, in sentences or remnants, when he will handle business

or carry counsels, as if he came then out of the declaimers’ gallery, or shadow,

but furnished out of the body of the state, which commonly is the school of men.

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator, and expresseth all his virtues, 1795

though he be tied more to numbers; is his equal in ornament, and above him in

his strengths. And of the kind the comic comes nearest, because in moving the

minds of men and stirring of affections – in which oratory shows and especially

approves her eminence – he chiefly excels. What figure of a body was Lysippus ever

able to form with his graver, or Apelles to paint with his pencil, as the comedy 1800

to life expresseth so many and various affections of the mind? There shall the

spectator see some insulting with joy, others fretting with melancholy, raging

with anger, mad with love, boiling with avarice, undone with riot, tortured with

expectation, consumed with fear; no perturbation in common life but the orator

finds an example of it in the scene. And then for the elegancy of language, read 1805

but this inscription on the grave of a comic poet:

Immortales mortales, si fas esset, flere,

Flerent divae Camoenae Naevium poetam;

Itaque postquam est Orcino traditus thesauro,

Obliti sunt Romae, lingua loqui Latina. 1810

Or that modester testimony given by Lucius Aelius Stilo upon Plautus, who

affirmed, Musas, si Latine loqui voluissent, Plautino sermone fuisse locuturas. And that

illustrious judgement by the most learned Marcus Varro of him, who pronounced

him the prince of letters and elegancy in the Roman language.

I am not of that opinion to conclude a poet’s liberty within the narrow limits 1815

of laws, which either the grammarians or philosophers prescribe. For before they

found out those laws there were many excellent poets that fulfilled them; amongst

whom none more perfect than Sophocles, who lived a little before Aristotle. Which

of the Greeklings durst ever give precepts to Demosthenes? Or to Pericles, whom

the age surnamed ‘heavenly’, because he seemed to thunder and lighten with his 1820

language? Or to Alcibiades, who had rather nature for his guide, than art for his

master? But whatsoever nature at any time dictated to the most happy, or long

exercise to the most laborious, that the wisdom and learning of Aristotle hath

brought into an art because he understood the causes of things, and what other

men did by chance or custom, he doth by reason; and not only found out the way 1825

not to err, but the short way we should take, not to err.

Many things in Euripides hath Aristophanes wittily reprehended: not out of

art, but out of truth. For Euripides is sometimes peccant, as he is most times

perfect. But judgement when it is greatest, if reason doth not accompany it, is not

ever absolute. 1830

To judge of poets is only the faculty of poets; and not of all poets, but the

best. Nemo infoelicius de poetis iudicavit, quam qui de poetis scripsit. But some will say

critics are a kind of tinkers, that make more faults than they mend ordinarily. See

their diseases, and those of grammarians. It is true, many bodies are the worse for

the meddling with; and the multitude of physicians hath destroyed many sound 1835

patients, with their wrong practice. But the office of a true critic or censor is not

to throw by a letter anywhere, or damn an innocent syllabe, but lay the words

together, and amend them; judge sincerely of the author and his matter, which

is the sign of solid and perfect learning in a man. Such was Horace, an author of

much civility, and – if any one among the heathen can be – the best master, both 1840

of virtue and wisdom; an excellent and true judge upon cause and reason: not

because he thought so; but because he knew so, out of use and experience.

Cato the grammarian, a defender of Lucilius.

Cato grammaticus, Latina Siren,

Qui solus legit et facit poetas. 1845

Quintilian of the same heresy, but rejected. Horace his judgement of

Choerilus, defended against Joseph Scaliger, and of Laberius against Julius. But

chiefly his opinion of Plautus, vindicated against many that are offended, and say

it is a hard censure upon the parent of all conceit and sharpness. And they wish it

had not fallen from so great a master and censor in the art, whose bondmen knew 1850

better how to judge of Plautus than any that dare patronize the family of learning

in this age; who could not be ignorant of the judgement of the times in which he

lived, when poetry and the Latin language were at the height; especially being a

man so conversant and inwardly familiar with the censures of great men that did

discourse of these things daily amongst themselves. Again, a man so gracious and 1855

in high favour with the emperor, as Augustus often called him his witty manling,

for the littleness of his stature; and, if we may trust antiquity, had designed him

for a secretary of estate, and invited him to the palace, which he modestly prayed

off, and refused. Horace did so highly esteem Terence his comedies, as he ascribes

the art in comedy to him alone among the Latins, and joins him with Menander. 1860

Now let us see what may be said for either, to defend Horace his judgement to

posterity, and not wholly to condemn Plautus.

The parts of a comedy are the same with a tragedy, and the end is partly the

same. For they both delight and teach; the comics are called διδάσκαλοι of the

Greeks, no less than the tragics. 1865

Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy; that is rather a fowling

for the people’s delight, or their fooling. For as Aristotle says rightly, the moving

of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude, that depraves some part of a

man’s nature without a disease. As a wry face without pain moves laughter, or a

deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady’s habit and using her actions; 1870

we dislike and scorn such representations, which made the ancient philosophers

ever think laughter unfitting in a wise man. And this induced Plato to esteem

of Homer as a sacrilegious person, because he presented the gods sometimes

laughing. As also it is divinely said of Aristotle that to seem ridiculous is a part of

dishonesty, and foolish. 1875

So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in the language

or actions of men, is awry, or depraved doth strangely stir mean affections, and

provoke for the most part to laughter. And therefore it was clear that all insolent

and obscene speeches, jests upon the best men, injuries to particular persons,

perverse and sinister sayings – and the rather unexpected – in the Old Comedy 1880

did move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty; and scurrility

came forth in the place of wit; which who understands the nature and genius of

laughter cannot but perfectly know.

Of which Aristophanes affords an ample harvest, having not only outgone

Plautus or any other in that kind, but expressed all the moods and figures of what 1885

is ridiculous, oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good until the wine be

corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter with the beast,

the multitude. They love nothing that is right and proper. The farther it runs

from reason or possibility with them, the better it is. What could have made them

laugh like to see Socrates presented – that example of all good life, honesty, and 1890

virtue – to have him hoisted up with a pulley, and there play the philosopher in a

basket; measure how many foot a flea could skip geometrically by a just scale, and

edify the people from the engine? This was theatrical wit, right stage-jesting, and

relishing a playhouse invented for scorn and laughter; whereas if it had savoured

of equity, truth, perspicuity, and candour, to have tasted a wise or a learned palate, 1895

spit it out presently. This is bitter and profitable, this instructs, and would inform

us! What need we know anything, that are nobly born, more than a horse race, or

a hunting match, our day to break with citizens, and such innate mysteries?

This is truly leaping from the stage to the tumbrell again, reducing all wit to

the original dung cart. 1900

Of the magnitude and compass of any fable, epic, or dramatic.

To the resolving of this question, we must first agree in the definition of the

fable. The fable is called the imitation of one entire and perfect action, whose

parts are so joined and knit together as nothing in the structure can be changed

or taken away without impairing or troubling the whole, of which there is a 1905

proportionable magnitude in the members. As for example, if a man would build

a house, he would first appoint a place to build it in, which he would define within

certain bounds; so in the constitution of a poem, the action is aimed at by the poet,

which answers place in a building; and that action hath his largeness, compass,

and proportion. But, as a court or king’s palace requires other dimensions than 1910

a private house, so the epic asks a magnitude from other poems. Since what is

place in the one, is action in the other, the difference is in space. So that by this

definition we conclude the fable to be the imitation of one perfect and entire

action; as one perfect and entire place is required to a building. By perfect, we

understand that to which nothing is wanting; as place to the building, that is 1915

raised, and action to the fable, that is formed. It is perfect, perhaps not for a court

or king’s palace, which requires a greater ground, but for the structure we would

raise; so the space of the action may not prove large enough for the epic fable, yet

be perfect for the dramatic, and whole.

Whole we call that, and perfect, which hath a beginning, a midst, and an end. 1920

So the place of any building may be whole, and entire, for that work; though

too little for a palace. As to a tragedy or a comedy, the action may be convenient

and perfect, that would not fit an epic poem in magnitude. So a lion is a perfect

creature in himself, though it be less than an elephant. The head of a lion is a

whole, though it be less than that of a buffalo, or a rhinocerote. They differ but 1925

in specie; either in the kind is absolute. Both have their parts, and either the

whole. Therefore, as in every body; so in every action, which is the subject of a just

work, there is required a certain proportionable greatness, neither too vast, nor

too minute. For that which happens to the eyes when we behold a body, the same

happens to the memory, when we contemplate an action. I look upon a monstrous 1930

giant, as Tityus, whose body covered nine acres of land, and mine eye sticks upon

every part; the whole that consists of those parts, will never be taken in at one

entire view. So in a fable, if the action be too great we can never comprehend

the whole together in our imagination. Again, if it be too little, there ariseth no

pleasure out of the object, it affords the view no stay; it is beheld and vanisheth 1935

at once. As if we should look upon an ant or pismire, the parts fly the sight and

the whole considered is almost nothing. The same happens in action, which is

the object of memory, as the body is of sight. Too vast oppresseth the eyes and

exceeds the memory; too little scarce admits either.

Now, in every action it behoves the poet to know which is his utmost bound, 1940

how far with fitness, and a necessary proportion, he may produce and determine

it; that is, till either good fortune change into the worse or the worse into the

better. For as a body without proportion cannot be goodly, no more can the

action, either in comedy or tragedy without his fit bounds. And every bound, for

the nature of the subject is esteemed the best that is largest, till it can increase 1945

no more; so it behoves the action in tragedy or comedy, to be let grow, till the

necessity ask a conclusion; wherein two things are to be considered: first, that it

exceed not the compass of one day; next, that there be place left for digression

and art. For the episodes and digressions in a fable are the same that household

stuff and other furniture are in a house. And so far for the measure and extent of 1950

a fable dramatic.

Now that it should be one and entire. One is considerable two ways: either,

as it is only separate, and by itself, or as being composed of many parts, it begins

to be one as those parts grow, or are wrought together. That it should be one

the first way alone, and by itself, no man that hath tasted letters ever would say, 1955

especially having required before a just magnitude, and equal proportion of the

parts in themselves. Neither of which can possibly be, if the action be single and

separate, not composed of parts, which laid together in themselves, with an equal

and fitting proportion, tend to the same end; which thing out of antiquity itself

hath deceived many, and more this day it doth deceive. 1960

So many there be of old that have thought the action of one man to be one: as of

Hercules, Theseus, Achilles, Ulysses, and other heroes, which is both foolish and

false; since by one and the same person many things may be severally done which

cannot fitly be referred or joined to the same end: which not only the excellent

tragic poets, but the best masters of the epic, Homer and Virgil, saw. For though 1965

the argument of an epic poem be far more diffused and poured out than that of

tragedy, yet Virgil, writing of Aeneas, hath pretermitted many things. He neither

tells how he was born, how brought up, how he fought with Achilles, how he was

snatched out of the battle by Venus; but that one thing, how he came into Italy,

he prosecutes in twelve books. The rest of his journey, his error by sea, the sack of 1970

Troy, are put not as the argument of the work, but episodes of the argument. So

Homer laid by many things of Ulysses and handled no more than he saw tended

to one and the same end.

Contrary to which and foolishly those poets did, whom the philosopher taxeth;

of whom one gathered all the actions of Theseus, another put all the labours of 1975

Hercules in one work. So did he, whom Juvenal mentions in the begining, ‘hoarse

Codrus’, that recited a volume compiled, which he called his Theseid, not yet

finished, to the great trouble both of his hearers and himself; amongst which

there were many parts had no coherence, nor kindred one with other, so far

they were from being one action, one fable. For as a house, consisting of diverse 1980

materials, becomes one structure and one dwelling, so an action, composed of

diverse parts, may become one fable epic, or dramatic. For example, in a tragedy

look upon Sophocles’s Ajax: Ajax deprived of Achilles’ armour, which he hoped

from the suffrage of the Greeks, disdains; and, growing impatient of the injury,

rageth, and turns mad. In that humour he doth many senseless things; and at last 1985

falls upon the Grecian flock, and kills a great ram for Ulysses. Returning to his

sense, he grows ashamed of the scorn, and kills himself; and is by the chiefs of

the Greeks forbidden burial. These things agree and hang together, not as they

were done, but as seeming to be done, which made the action whole, entire, and

absolute. 1990

For the whole, as it consisteth of parts, so without all the parts it is not the

whole; and to make it absolute is required not only the parts, but such parts as are

true. For a part of the whole was true, which if you take away, you either change

the whole, or it is not the whole. For if it be such a part as being present or absent

nothing concerns the whole, it cannot be called a part of the whole; and such are 1995

the episodes, of which hereafter. For the present, here is one example: the single

combat of Ajax with Hector, as it is at large described in Homer, nothing belongs

to this Ajax of Sophocles.

You admire no poems, but such as run like a brewer’s cart upon the stones,

hobbling, 2000

Et quae per salebras altaque saxa cadunt.

Accius et quidquid Pacuviusque vomunt.

Attonitusque legis ‘terrai, frugiferai’.

FINIS

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

Discoveries (printed 1641)

Edited by Lorna Hutson

INTRODUCTION

SILVA

EXPLORATA, OR DISCOVERIES