Ben Jonson [antikvár]

BEN JONSON was born in 1573, most probably in the city in which he lived and died, and to which more than any other of its poetic sons, more even than the author of the Canterbury Talesy he conse-crated his art. Like most eminent Londoners, how-ever, he came of a provinciai stock, and it would not be hard to recognise in his close-knitted, in-effusive intellect the stamp of the North Country, even if we did not know that his grandfather had come from Carlisle ( and he thought from Annandale thither) to enter the service of Henry VIII. He was a gentleman, this grandfather, as the poet himself, in this point entirely true to his lineage, told the young laird of Hawthornden ; of some wealth and position