Hippolyte Taine - History of English Literature (Vol. 1-3)

"If you expect more than you had to-night,

The maker is sick and sad....

All that his faint and fait'ring tongue doth crave,

Is, that you not impute it to his brain,

That's yet unhurt, altho, set round with pain,

It cannot long hold out."

His enemies brutally insulted him:

"Thy Pegasus...

He had bequeathed his belly unto thee,

To hold that little learning which is fled

Into thy guts from out thy emptye head."

Inigo Jones, his colleague, deprived him of the patronage of the court. He was obliged to beg a supply of money from the Lord Treasurer, then from the Earl of Newcastle:

"Disease, the enemy, and his engineers,

Want, with the rest of his concealed compeers,

Have cast a trench about me, now five years....

The muse not peeps out, one of hundred days;

But lies blocked up and straitened, narrowed in,

Fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win

Health, or scarce breath, as she had never been."[520]

His wife and children were dead; he lived alone, forsaken, waited on by an old woman. Thus almost always sadly and miserably is dragged out and ends the last act of the human comedy. After so many years, after so many sustained efforts, amid so much glory and genius, we find a poor shattered body, drivelling and suffering, between a servant and a priest.

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