well too much light hurteth the eyes as too little; and a long bill of chancery confounds the understanding as much as the shortest note; therefore let not your letters be penned like English statutes, and this is obtained.
Passing from the subjects of oratory and letter-writing to the subject of poetry, the Laureate at once falls foul of his personal assailants. '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.' That is a tolerably harsh phrase for a wearer of courtly laurels to allow himself; but it is gentle and temperate compared with this effusion of divine wrath on the heads of victims now indiscernible and secure from fame or shame.
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 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.
The general and historical notes on poetry which follow are of less interest than they assuredly must have been if Jonson had given us
