benlowes

Updated: May 17, 2025

There is no feat of activity nor gambol of wit that ever was performed by man, from him that vaults on Pegasus to him that tumbles through the hoop of an anagram, but Benlowes has got the mastery in it, whether it be high-rope wit or low-rope wit. He has all sorts of echoes, rebuses, chronograms, &c., besides carwitchets, clenches, and quibbles.

Various - Character Writings of the 17th Century

There was one that lined a hatcase with a paper of Benlowes' poetry; Prynne bought it by chance and put a new demi-castor into it. The first time he wore it he felt only a singing in his head, which within two days turned to a vertigo.

Various - Character Writings of the 17th Century

There was a tobacco-man that wrapped Spanish tobacco in a paper of verses which Benlowes had written against the Pope, which, by a natural antipathy that his wit has to anything that's Catholic, spoiled the tobacco, for it presently turned mundungus.

Various - Character Writings of the 17th Century

To match that it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out of the author himself you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals say to Edward Benlowes himself. But this is nothing: it is at worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very like some things of Dickens's own transposed into another key. But take this opening of the fifteenth chapter of Diana of the Crossways:

George Saintsbury - The English Novel