INTRODUCTION



Ben Jonson's "Discoveries" are, as he says in the few Latin words
prefixed to them, "A wood--Sylva--of things and thoughts, in Greek
"[Greek text]" [which has for its first meaning material, but is also applied
peculiarly to kinds of wood, and to a wood], "from the multiplicity
and variety of the material contained in it. For, as we are
commonly used to call the infinite mixed multitude of growing trees
a wood, so the ancients gave the name of Sylvae--Timber Trees--to
books of theirs in which small works of various and diverse matter
were promiscuously brought together."

In this little book we have some of the best thoughts of one of the
most vigorous minds that ever added to the strength of English
literature. The songs added are a part of what Ben Jonson called
his "Underwoods."

Ben Jonson was of a north-country family from the Annan district
that produced Thomas Carlyle. His father was ruined by religious
persecution in the reign of Mary, became a preacher in Elizabeth's
reign, and died a month before the poet's birth in 1573. Ben
Jonson, therefore, was about nine years younger than Shakespeare,
and he survived Shakespeare about twenty-one years, dying in August,
1637. Next to Shakespeare Ben Jonson was, in his own different way,
the man of most mark in the story of the English drama. His mother,
left poor, married again. Her second husband was a bricklayer, or
small builder, and they lived for a time near Charing Cross in