Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/147

BEN JONSON 131 But lies blocked up and straitened, narrowed in, Fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win Health, or scarce breath, as she had never been ; Unless some saving honour of the crown, Dare think it, to relieve, no less renown, A bed-rid wit, than a besieged town." This places the commencement of his disease and want in 1626. The want would have been much less had he not been not only liberal but lavish, with table ever free and purse ever open to his friends. And he was himself a generous liver : " Wine he always considered as necessary— and perhaps it was so — to counteract the occasional influence of that morbid tendency to melancholy generated by a constitutional affection of the scurvy, which also rendered society desirable and in some measure indis- pensable to him." This sad " Mendicant Epistle " appears to have brought him help from various quarters, and especially from the munificent Earl of Newcastle, one short letter to whom may be quoted : "My Noblest Lord and Best Patron, — I send no borrowing epistle to provoke your lordship, for I have neither fortune to repay, nor security to engage, that will be taken ; but I make a most humble petition to your lordship's bounty to succour my present necessities this good time [festival] of Easter, and it shall conclude all begging requests hereafter on the behalf of your truest beadsman and most thankful servant, " B. J." Though his maladies continually increased, he bravely struggled on, and in 1632 a contemporary records: