Timber; Or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter; Ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Felix E. Schelling

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General Books, 2013 - Biography & Autobiography - 66 pages
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ... NOTES. 1. Tecum habita, etc. Persius, Satires, 4. 52. Thus translated by Gifford: To your own breast in quest of worth repair, And blush to find how poor a stock is there. 2 1. Silva rerum et sententiarum, etc. Silva, the raw material of facts and thoughts, v i, wood, as it were, so called from the multiplicity and variety of the matter contained therein. For just as we are commonly wont to call a vast number of trees growing indiscriminately "a wood" {timber); so also did the ancients call those of their books, in which were collected at random articles upon various and diverse topics, a wood (timber-trees). Cf. Jonson's Underwoods. Preface to the Reader: "With the same leave the ancients called that kind of body sylva, or in which there were works of divers nature and matter congested; as the multitude called timber-trees promiscuously growing, a wood or forest, so I am bold to entitle these lesser poems of later growth by this of Underwood, out of the analogy they hold to the Forest in my former book, and no otherwise." See also The Alchemist, 3. 2: "The whole family or wood of you." Sylva is often opposed to supellex. See the quotation from Persius, above, and the following of Bacon: "Minds empty and unfraught with matter, and which have not gathered that which Cicero {Orator, 80) calleth sylva and supellex (stuff and variety) to begin with those arts," etc. {Advancement of Learning, Bk. II. p. 72, ed. 1819). 3 5. As. That. As is used for that after so in Elizabethan English. Cf. 13 32, 26 1, 27 8, 34 18, 36 25, 36 28, 37 25, 41 26, 49 29, 57 6, 69 20, 72 15, 81 24, and 83 21; and see Shakespeare Grammar, 109. Occasionally Jonson uses so -- that, as in modern English, 7 10 and 72 34; and even the pleonastic as that, but there...

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About the author (2013)

Born in 1572, Ben Jonson rejected his father's bricklaying trade and ran away from his apprenticeship to join the army. He returned to England in 1592, working as an actor and playwright. In 1598, he was tried for murder after killing another actor in a duel, and was briefly imprisoned. One of his first plays, Every Man Out of His Humor (1599) had fellow playwright William Shakespeare as a cast member. His success grew with such works as Volpone (1605) and The Alchemist (1610) and he was popular at court, frequently writing the Christmas masque. He is considered a very fine Elizabethan poet. In some anti-Stratfordian circles he is proposed as the true author of Shakespeare's plays, though this view is not widely accepted. Jonson was appointed London historian in 1628, but that same year, his life took a downward turn. He suffered a paralyzing stroke and lost favor at court after an argument with architect Inigo Jones and the death of King James I. Ben Jonson died on August 6, 1637.

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