The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

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To Master Ben Jonson in his Journey by Master Craven, [and] This Was Master Ben Jonson’s Answer of the Sudden (1618)

   To  Master Ben Jonson in his Journey By Master Craven

When wit and learning are so  hardly set

That from their needful  means they must be barred,

Unless by  going hard they maintenance get,

Well may Ben Jonson say the world goes hard.

This Was Master Ben Jonson’s Answer of the Sudden

Ill may Ben Jonson slander so his feet:

For when the profit with the pain doth meet,

Although the  gate were hard, the gain is sweet.

This pair of poems is found only in the Newcastle MS (BL MS Harley 4955), fol. 47v (first printed in W. D. Briggs, 1913d, 470), which is a reliable witness to authorship, despite the fact that the exchange here is similar to some of those which came unreliably to be ascribed to Jonson in seventeenth-century jest books. The lines must date from Jonson’s walk to Scotland in 1618–19. If the author of the first four lines was educational philanthropist and Mayor of London Sir William Craven, they must have been composed on Jonson’s departure in June 1618, since Craven was buried on 11 Aug. of that year. This is probable, since the lines seem to imply that Jonson had made a bet that he could complete the journey on foot. See Donaldson (1993), 15; Loxley (2009) and ‘Foot-Voyage’, Electronic Edition.
To Master Ben Jonson
Master] JnB 472 (Mr)
1 hardly set beset by difficulties.
2 means Both of material support and of transport.
3 going hard i.e. going the hard way, on foot.
3 gate Puns on OED, n.2: ‘road’ or ‘journey’ and ‘gait’, ‘manner of walking’. No similar proverb is recorded in Tilley.