Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/203

BEN JONSON 187 In drumming tunes. Or, living, I could stamp Their foreheads with those deep and public brands. That the whole company of barber-surgeons Should not take off, with all their art and plasters. And these my prints should last, still to be read In their pale fronts ; when what they write 'gainst me Shall, like a figure drawn in water, fleet, And the poor wretched papers be employed To clothe tobacco, or some cheaper drug : This I could do, and make them infamous. But to what end ? when their own deeds have mark'd 'em ; And that I know, within his guilty breast Each slanderer bears a whip that shall torment him Worse than a million of these temporal plagues : Which to pursue were but a feminine humour, And far beneath the dignity of man." So Ben in pure scorn refrains from branding them, the while his red-hot irons are hissing in their blood ! In "Volpone; or, The Fox" (1605), whose scene is Venice, tobacco, I think, is mentioned but once, Act ii., So. I. In order to obtain sight of the beauti- ful Celia, the chaste spouse of the jealous and in- famous Corvino, that crafty old Fox, Volpone, whose monstrous avarice ministers to more monstrous lusts, disguises himself as a mountebank doctor, and has his stage erected in front of her house in a retired corner of the Piazza of St. Mark. Here he dis- courses in first-rate quack or cheap-jack style, with that voluble and impressive eloquence which leaves the pulpit, the bar, and the senate quite out of the race, on his unique panacea, " this blessed unguento, this rare extraction," surnamed Oglio del Scoto (he appears in the character of Scoto Mantuano), and on his also unique powder —