Fuller.

He did not long remain a bricklayer, however, for he could not endure the life, and next we find him a soldier in the Netherlands.  We know very little of what he did as a soldier, and soon he was home again in England.  Here he married.  His wife was a good woman, but with a sharp tongue, and the marriage does not seem to have been very happy.  And although they had several children, all of them died young.

And now, like Shakespeare, Jonson became an actor.  Like Shakespeare too, he wrote plays.  His first play is that by which he is best known, called Every Man in His Humour.  By a man’s humor, Jonson means his chief characteristic, one man, for instance, showing himself jealous, another boastful, and so on.

It will be a long time before you will care to read Every Man in His Humour, for there is a great deal in it that you would neither understand nor like.  It is a play of the manners and customs of Elizabethan times which are so unlike ours that we have little sympathy with them.  And that is the difference between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare.  Shakespeare, although he wrote of his own time, wrote for all time; Jonson wrote of his own time for his own time.  Yet, in Every Man in His Humour there is at least one character worthy to live beside Shakespeare’s, and that is the blustering, boastful Captain Bobadill.  He talks very grandly, but when it comes to fighting, he thinks it best to run away and live to fight another day.  If only to know Captain Bobadill it will repay you to read Every Man in His Humour when you grow up.

Here is a scene in which he shows his “humor” delightfully:—­

“BOBADILL.  I am a gentleman, and live here obscure, and to myself.  But were I known to Her Majesty and the Lords—­ observe me—­I would undertake, upon this poor head and life, for the public benefit of the State, not only to spare the entire lives of her subjects in general, but to save the one half, nay, three parts, of her yearly charge in holding war, and against what enemy soever.  And how would I do it, think you?

EDWARD KNOWELL.  Nay, I know not, nor can I conceive.

BOBADILL.  Why thus, sir.  I would select nineteen more, to myself, throughout the land.  Gentlemen, they should be of good spirit, strong and able constitution.  I would choose them by an instinct, a character that I have.  And I would teach these nineteen the special rules, as your punto,* your reverso, your stoccata, your imbroccata, your passada, your montanto; till they could all play very near, or altogether, as well as myself.  This done, say the enemy were forty thousand strong, we twenty would come into the field the tenth of March, or thereabouts, and we would challenge twenty of the enemy.  They could not in their honour refuse us.  Well, we would kill them.  Challenge twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them too.  And thus would we kill every man