Face.Already, sir, have you found it? Lo thee, Abel!
Sub.And in right way toward riches —
Face.Sir!
Sub.This summer
He will be of the clothing of his company,
And next spring call'd to the scarlet;[1] spend what he can.
Face.What, and so little beard?
- ↑ This summer
He will be of the clothing of his company,
And next spring call'd to the scarlet;] i.e. be will, this year, be brought upon the livery of the Grocers company, and the next, be drank to as sheriff.
folly" on Jonson also, and to accuse him, in his Reflections on Originality, of "plagiarism, tediousness, and obscurity."
"A neat, spruce, honest fellow, and no goldsmith."
A quaint distinction—and no goldsmith! It means possibly that he had not the chrysosperme, (the philosopher's stone.) It is, however, by no means obvious that this is the real meaning, and therefore it must remain hardly intelligible, &c. p. 66. This egregious critic did not know that goldsmiths, in Jonson's age, were not only bankers, but brokers and money-lenders. Abel was a good, "honest fellow," and no usurer. This is the simple meaning of the passage, produced with such parade to convict Jonson of "obscurity." His "plagiarism" (for we may as well dismiss the critic at once) is proved by his taking a trite line from Martial—marked by the poet himself, be it observed, as a quotation; and—happily detected, after a lapse of two centuries, by this sagacious gentleman. The "tediousness" is thus brought home to him. Abel says, (p. 42,)
" Yes, I have a portague I have kept this half year."
"Holinshead mentions the portagne as a piece very solemnly kept of divers. This custom we are sure from hence continued in his time. But a reader of Jonson is continually teazed with these!" p. 65. Why these should be more teazing in the poet than the historian, it is difficult to conjecture—but enough of Mr. Bowle, on whom I should not have wasted a syllable, had not all his trash been transcribed for the press, on the margin of Whalley's corrected copy.
