The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

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  • From Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General (1604), ‘To the Author’

From Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General (1604), ‘To the Author’

From Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General, 1604

  To the Author

In picture, they which truly understand

Require (besides the likeness of the thing)

Light, posture, heightening, shadow, colouring,

All which are  parts commend the cunning hand;

And all your book (when it is  throughly scanned) 5

Will well confess; presenting,  limiting,

Each  subtlest passion, with her source and spring,

So bold, as shows your art you can command.

But now, your work is done, if they that view

The several figures languish in suspense 10

To judge which passion’s false, and which is true,

Between the   doubtful sway of reason and sense;

’Tis not your fault, if they shall sense prefer,

Being told there, reason cannot, sense may, err.

Italic in Wright.
To the Author Prefixed to the 1604 (second) edition of the treatise on how to control the passions by the former Jesuit Thomas Wright (c. 1561–1623). The first edition was entered in the Stationers’ Register 12 June 1601. The poem is on sig. A6v, following the only other dedicatory verse, which is signed ‘H. H.’, who is presumably Hugh Holland, dedicatee of the ‘Ode (Pancharis)’ (2.413–17). Wright’s Passions of the Mind was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. Wright had split from the Jesuit order as a result of his insistence that English Catholics should be loyal to the crown and that they could legitimately fight Spain. He may have been the priest who converted Jonson to Catholicism during his imprisonment in 1598; see Forest Introduction, Stroud (1947), and Wright, Passions of the Mind (1986), 61–2. The fullest biography is Newbold’s in Wright, Passions of the Mind, 1–16. For analogies between painting and writing, see Discoveries, 1074–95, Chapman’s dedicatory epistle to The Banquet of Sense (Chapman, Poems, 1962, 49), and Und. 84.3 headnote. On Jonson’s rare use of the sonnet form, see Epigr. 56 headnote.[Editor: Colin Burrow]
4 parts commend aspects of the art which bring praise to.
5 throughly thoroughly.
6 limiting defining (and so controlling).
7 subtlest] Wright (1604); subiect Wright (1620, 1621)
12 reason and sense] Wright (1604) (Reason’, and sense)
12 doubtful sway uncertain rule. Chapter 2 of Wright’s treatise presents human life as a battle between reason and sensuality for supremacy. Children and animals prefer sensuality.