Excerpt from Studies in Ben JonsonNeither is of course satisfactory from our modern point of View, though here we have to be careful in our judgment, since we know that what was apparently the final and annotated version perished in the fire of 1623. As to accuracy, I cannot see that either text has greatly the advantage of the other. In the case of particular passages one would cast one's vote now for the one, now for the other, and often refuse to vote at all. This may be said for the Folio that occasionally one feels certain that an inferiority in accuracy was the price deliberately paid for a desired improvement in expression.Emphatic corroboration of this view as to the authority of the 12mo is to be found in the poem To the Queen on her Birthday, above, p. 97. The 12mo tells us in the last line that the queen was one-and-twenty, the Folio that she was two-and-twenty. Moreover, the Folio adds a stanza not to be found in the other version, and distributes the stanzas among the Muses. What this means is of course fairly obvious. Jonson wrote the song in the form found in the 12mo and in the following year revised it. Benson got hold of the earlier version.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.