The story of English literature for young readers . r as his last days drewnear. The efforts of a rival had lost him the favor ofthe Court, but when he was in dire distress, ill, almostdying, the Duke of New Castle gave him some help;he wrote for a special performance his last play, TheNew Inn, which was not a success, but the epiloguecontains these touching lines: If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad . . All that his faint and faltring tongue doth crave, Is that you not impute it to his brain, Thats yet unhurt, altho set round with pain, It cannot long hold out.
The story of English literature for young readers . r as his last days drewnear. The efforts of a rival had lost him the favor ofthe Court, but when he was in dire distress, ill, almostdying, the Duke of New Castle gave him some help;he wrote for a special performance his last play, TheNew Inn, which was not a success, but the epiloguecontains these touching lines: If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad . . All that his faint and faltring tongue doth crave, Is that you not impute it to his brain, Thats yet unhurt, altho set round with pain, It cannot long hold out. Is not this a very sad picture ? It was some yearsafter Shakespeares death, or we may be sure poorJonson would not have been so lonely, and sick atheart in his last hours. He had lived and written hislast lines in a house close to Westminster Abbey,which, an old writer (Aubrey) tells us, you pass ingoing from the church-yard to the old palace ; therein 1637, he died, and was buried in the Abbey. While the stone mason was fitting the slab to the. For Young Readers, 151 tomb, Jack Young, one of Jonsons obscure admir-ers passed by and gave him eighteen pence (aboutthirt}^-seven cents) for carving upon it the now fa-mous words : O Rare Ben Jonson. The works of Shakespeare show us a genius of thehighest type. They combine so much that it wouldbe impossible to criticise or even characterize them ina few words. The coarseness of the age in which hewrote was likely to influence any author but it affectedShakespeare only slightly. Whatever coarseness wefind in his writings we must look upon as due to theperiod ; words and phrases then commonly used arenow considered vulgar and even gross, but, passingover this, we must think only of the wonderful combi-nation of the genius. His plays give evidence ofevery phase of thought and feeling possible to thehuman mind. His characters represent every typeof human nature. No writer ever has excelledShakespeare in imagination, in tenderness, patho
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectenglishliterature
