him an injury at court. As to Jonson's envying Shakspeare, men, otherwise candid and laborious in the search of truth, seem to have had the curse of the Philistines imposed on their understandings and charities the moment they approached the subject. The fame of Shakspeare himself became an heir-loom of traditionary calumnies against the memory of Jonson; the fancied relics of his envy were regarded as so many pious donations at the shrine of the greater poet, whose admirers thought they could not dig too deeply for trophies of his glory among the ruins of his imaginary rival's reputation. If such inquirers as Reed and Malone went wrong upon this subject, it is too severe to blame the herd of literary labourers for plodding in their footsteps; but it must excite regret as well as wonder that a man of pre-eminent living genius+ should have been one of those quos de tramite recto Impia sacrilega flexit contagio turbæ, and should have gravely drawn down Jonson to a parallel with Shadwell, for their common traits of low society, vulgar dialect, and intemperance. Jonson's low society comprehended such men as Selden, Camden, and Cary. Shadwell (if we may trust to Rochester's account of him) was probably rather profligate than vulgar; while either of Jonson's vulgarity or indecency in his recorded conversations there is not a trace. But they both wore great-coats-Jonson drank canary, and Shadwell swallowed opium. "There is a river in Macedon, and there is, moreover, a river at Monmouth." The grandfather of Ben Jonson was originally of Annandale, in Scotland, from whence he removed to Carlisle, and was subsequently in the service of Henry VIII. The poet's father, who lost his estate under the persecution of Queen Mary, and was afterwards a preacher, died a month before Benjamin's birth, and his widow married a master bricklayer of the name of Fowler. Benjamin, through the kindness of a friend, was educated at Westminster, and obtained an exhibition to Cambridge; but it proved insufficient for his support. He therefore returned from the university to his father-inlaw's house and humble occupation; but disliking the latter, as may be well conceived, he repaired as a volunteer to the army in Flanders, and in the campaign which he served there distinguished himself, though yet a stripling, by killing an enemy in single combat, in the presence of both armies. From thence he came back to * [Their enmity began in the very early part of their connexion; for in the complete copy of Drummond's Notes there are several allusions to this hostility. Inigo had the best retaliation in life-but Jonson has it now, and for ever.] [t Sir Walter Scott. See Gifford's Ben Jonson, vol. ip. clxxxi., and Scott's replies in Misc. Prose Works, vol. i. p. 27, and vol. vii. p. 374-382.] England, and betook himself to the stage for support; at first, probably, as an actor, though undoubtedly very early as a writer. At this period he was engaged in a second single combat which threatened to terminate more disastrously than the former; for having been challenged by some player to fight a duel with the sword, he killed his adversary indeed, but was severely wounded in the encounter, and thrown into prison for murder. There the assiduities of a catholic priest made him a convert to popery, and the miseries of a gaol were increased to him by the visitation of spies; sent, no doubt in consequence of his change to a faith of which the bare name was at that time nearly synonymous with the suspicion of treason. He was liberated however, after a short imprisonment, without a trial. At the distance of twelve years, he was restored to the bosom of his mother church. Soon after his release, he thought proper to marry, although his circumstances were far from promising, and he was only in his twentieth year. In his two-and-twentieth year he rose to considerable popularity, by the comedy of Every Man in his Humour, which, two years after, became a still higher favourite with the public, when the scene and names were shifted from Italy to England, in order to suit the manners of the piece, which had all along been native. It is at this renovated appearance of his play (1598) that his fancied obligations to Shakspeare for drawing him out of obscurity have been dated; but it is at this time that he is pointed out by Meres as one of the most distinguished writers of the age. The fame of his Every Man out of his Humour drew Queen Elizabeth to its representation, whose early encouragement of his genius is commemorated by Lord Falkland. It was a fame, however, which, according to his own account, had already exposed him to envy-Marston and Dekker did him this homage. He lashed them in his Cynthia's Revels, and anticipated their revenge in the Poetaster. Jonson's superiority in the contest can scarcely be questioned; but the Poetaster drew down other enemies on its author than those with whom he was at war. His satire alluded to the follies of soldiers, and the faults of lawyers. The former were easily pacified, but the lawyers adhered to him with their wonted tenacity; and it became necessary for the poet to clear himself before the lord chief justice. In our own days, the fretfulness of resenting professional derision has been deemed unbecoming even the magnanimity of tailors. Another proof of the slavish subjection of the stage in those times is to be found soon after the accession of King James, when the authors of Eastward Hoe were committed to prison for some satirical reflections on the Scotch nation, which that comedy contained. Only Marston and Chapman, who had framed the offensive passages, were seized; but Jonson, who had taken a share in some other part of the composition, conceived himself bound in honour to participate their fate, and voluntarily accompanied them to prison. It was on this occasion that his mother, deceived by the rumour of a barbarous punishment being intended for her son, prepared a lusty poison, which she meant to have given him, and to have drunk along with him. This was maintaining in earnest the consanguinity of heroism and genius. The imagined insult to the sovereign being appeased, James's accession proved, altogether, a fortunate epoch in Jonson's history. A peaceable reign gave encouragement to the arts and festivities of peace; and in those festivities, not yet degraded to mere sound and show, poetry still maintained the honours of her primogeniture among the arts. Jonson was therefore congenially employed, and liberally rewarded, in the preparation of those masques for the court, which filled up the intervals of his more properly dramatic labours, and which allowed him room for classical impersonations, and lyrical trances of fancy, that would not have suited the business of the ordinary stage. The reception of his Sejanus, in 1603, was at first unfavourable; but it was remodelled, and again presented with better success, and kept possession of the theatre for a considerable time. Whatever this tragedy may want in the agitating power of poetry, it has a strength and dramatic skill that might have secured it, at least, from the petulant contempt with which it has been too often spoken of. Though collected from the dead languages, it is not a lifeless mass of antiquity, but the work of a severe and strong imagination, compelling shapes of truth and consistency to rise in dramatic order from the fragments of Roman eloquence and history; and an air not only of life but of grandeur is given to those curiously adjusted materials. The arraignment of Caius Silius before Tiberius, is a great and poetical cartoon of Roman characters; and if Jonson has translated from Tacitus, who would not thank him for embodying the pathos of history in such lines as these, descriptive of Germanicus ? What his funerals lack'd In images and pomp, they had supplied By his three succeeding plays, Volpone (in 1605), the Silent Woman (in 1609), and the Alchemist (in 1610), Jonson's reputation in the comic drama rose to a pitch which neither his own nor any other pen could well be expected to surpass. The tragedy of Catiline appeared in 1611, prefaced by an address to the Ordinary Reader, as remarkable for the strength of its style, as for the contempt of popular judgments which it breathes. Such an appeal from ordinary to extraordinary readers ought at least to have been made without insolence; as the difference between the few and the many, in matters of criticism, lies more in the power of explaining their sources of pleasure than in enjoying them. Catiline, it is true, from its classical sources, was chiefly to be judged of by classical readers; but its author should have still remembered, that popular feeling is the great basis of dramatic fame. Jonson lived to alter his tone to the public, and the lateness of his humility must have made it more mortifying. The haughty preface, however, disappeared from later editions of the play, while its better apology remained in the high delineation of Cicero's character, and in passages of Roman eloquence which it contains ; above all, in the concluding speech of Petreius. It is said, on Lord Dorset's authority, to have been Jonson's favourite production. In 1613 he made a short trip to the Continent, and, being in Paris, was introduced to the Cardinal du Perron, who, in compliment to his learning, showed him his translation of Virgil. Ben, according to Drummond's anecdotes, told the cardinal that it was nought: a criticism, by all accounts, as just as it was brief. Of his two next pieces, Bartholomew Fair (in 1614), and the Devil is an Ass (in 1616), the former was scarcely a decline from the zenith of his comic excellence, the latter certainly was: if it was meant to ridicule superstition, it effected its object by a singular process of introducing a devil upon the stage. After this he made a long secession of nine years from the theatre, during which he composed some of his finest masques for the court, and some of those works which were irrecoverably lost in the fire that consumed his study. Meanwhile he received from his sovereign a pension of 100 marks, which, in courtesy, has been called making him poet laureat. The title, till then gratuitously assumed, has been since appropriated to his successors in the pension. The poet's journey to Scotland (1619), awakens many pleasing recollections, when we conceive him anticipating his welcome among a people who might be proud of a share in his ancestry, and setting out, with manly strength, on a journey of 400 miles, on foot. We are assured, by one who saw him in Scotland, that he was treated with respect and affection among the nobility and gentry; nor was the romantic scenery of Scotland lost upon his fancy. From the poem which he meditated on Lochlomond, it is seen that he looked on it with a poet's eye. But, unhappily, the meagre anecdotes of Drummond have made this event of his life too prominent by the overimportance which have been attached to them. Drummond, a smooth and sober gentleman, seems to have disliked Jonson's indulgence in that conviviality which Ben had shared with his Fletcher and Shakspeare at the Mermaid. In consequence of those anecdotes, Jonson's memory has been damned for brutality, and Drummond's for perfidy. Jonson drank freely at Hawthornden, and talked big—things neither incredible nor unpardonable. Drummond's perfidy amounted to writing a letter, beginning "Sir," with one very kind sentence in it, to the man whom he had described unfavourably in a private memorandum, which he never meant for publication. As to Drummond's decoying Jonson under his roof with any premeditated design on his reputation, no one can seriously believe it*. By the continued kindness of King James, our poet was, some years after [Sept. 1621,] presented with the reversionary grant of the mastership of the revels, but from which he derived no advantage, as the incumbent, Sir John Astley, survived him. It fell, however, to the poet's son, by the permission of Charles I.+ King James, in the contemplation of his laureat's speedy accession to this office, was desirous of conferring on him the rank of knighthood; but Jonson was unwilling to accept the distinction, and prevailed on some of his friends about the court to dissuade the monarch from his purpose. After the death of his patron James, necessity brought him again upon the theatre, and he produced the Staple of News, a comedy of no ordinary merit. Two evils were at this time rapidly gaining on him, "Disease and poverty, fell pair." He was attacked by the palsy in 1625, and had also a tendency to dropsy, together with a scorbutic affection inherent from his youth, which pressed upon the decaying powers of his constitution. From the first stroke of the palsy he gradually recovered so far as to be able to write, in the following year, the antimasque of Sophiel. For the three succeeding years his biographer I suspects that the court had ceased to call upon him for his customary contributions, a circumstance which must have aggravated his poverty; and his salary, it appears, was irregularly paid. Meanwhile his infirmities increased, and he was unable to leave his room. In these circumstances he produced his New Inn, a comedy that was driven from the stage with violent hostility. The epilogue to this piece forms a melancholy contrast to the tone of his former addresses to the audience. [*. The furious invective of Gifford against Drummond for having written private memoranda of his conversations with Ben Jonson, which he did not publish, and which, for aught we know, were perfectly faithful, is absurd. Any one else would have been thankful for so much literary anecdote."--HALLAM, Lit.Hist.vol.iii. p. 505.] [ This is not quite correct: the son died in 1635, Ben himself in 1637, and Astley a year or so after. Astley thus survived the father, to whom the reversion had been granted, and the son, to whom the transfer had been made. See GIFFORD, p. exliv. and COLLIER's Annals, vol. ii. p. 89. Sir Henry Herbert was Astley's successor.] He "whom the morning saw so great and hight," was now so humble as to speak of his "faint and faultering tongue, and of his brain set round with pain." An allusion to the king and queen in the same epilogue awoke the slumbering kindness of Charles, who instantly sent him 1007. and, in compliance with the poet's request, also converted the 100 marks of his salary into pounds, and added, of his own accord, a yearly tierce of canary, Jonson's favourite wine. His majesty's injunctions for the preparation of masques for the court were also renewed till they were discontinued at the suggestion of Inigo Jones, who preferred the assistance of one Aurelian Townsend to that of Jonson, in the furnishing of those entertainments. His means of subsistence were now, perhaps, both precariously supplied and imprudently expended. The city in 1631, from whom he had always received a yearly allowance of 100 nobles, by way of securing his assistance in their pageants, withdrew their pensions. He was compelled by poverty to supplicate the Lord Treasurer Weston for relief. On the rumour of his necessities, assistance came to him from various quarters, and from none more liberally than from the Earl of Newcastle. On these and other timely bounties his sickly existence was propped up to accomplish two more comedies, the Magnetic Lady, which appeared in 1632, and the Tale of a Tub, which came out in the following year. In the last of these, the last, indeed, of his dramatic career, he endeavoured to introduce some ridicule on Inigo Jones, through the machinery of a puppet-show. Jones had distinguished himself at the representation of the Magnetic Lady, by his boisterous derision. The attempt at retaliation was more natural than dignified; but the court prevented it, and witnessed the representation of the play at Whitehall with coldness. Whatever humour its manners contain, was such as courtiers were not likely to understand. In the spring of 1633 Charles visited Scotland, and on the road was entertained by the Earl of Newcastle with all the luxury and pageantry of loyal hospitality. To grace the entertainment, Jonson sent, in grateful obedience to his benefactor the Earl, a little interlude, entitled, Love's Welcome at Welbeck, and another of the same kind for the king and queen's reception at Bolsover. In despatching the former of these to his noble patron, the poet alludes to his past bounties, which had "fallen, like the dew of Heaven, on his necessities." In his unfinished pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd, his biographer traces one bright and sunny ray that broke through the gloom of his setting days. Amongst his papers were found the plot and opening of a domestic tragedy on the + Sejanus. [Yesterday the barbarous Court of Aldermen have withdrawn their chandlerly pension for verjuice and mustard, £33. 6. 8."—Jonson to the Earl of Newcastle, 20 Dec. 1631. It was, however, soon restored.] Ꮮ story of Mortimer Earl of March, together with the Discoveries, and Grammar of the English Tongue; works containing, no doubt, the philological and critical reflections of more vigorous | years, but which, it is probable that he must have continued to write till he was near his dissolution. That event took place on the 6th of August, 1637. SONG OF HESPERUS. IN CYNTHIA'S REVELS. QUEEN, and huntress, chaste and fair, Earth, let not thy envious shade Lay thy bow of pearl apart, Space to breathe, how short soever : SONG. IN THE SILENT WOMAN. STILL to be neat, still to be drest, Give me a look, give me a face, They strike mine eyes, but not my heart. If all the air my Flora drew, To dance their wilder rounds about, SONG OF NIGHT. IN THE MASQUE OF THE VISION Of delight. BREAK, Phant'sie, from thy cave of cloud, And various shapes of things; It must have blood, and nought of phlegm; And though it be a waking dream, Cho. Yet let it like an odour rise To all the senses here, And fall like sleep upon their eyes, CHORUS. IN THE SAME. In curious knots and mazes so, ON LUCY, COUNTESS OF BEDFORD. FROM HIS EPIGRAMS. THIS morning, timely rapt with holy fire, I thought to form unto my zealous Muse, What kind of creature I could most desire, To honour, serve, and love; as poets use. I meant to make her fair, and free, and wise, Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great; I meant the day-star should not brighter rise, Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat. I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride; I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside. Only a learned, and a manly soul I purposed her; that should, with even powers, The rock, the spindle, and the sheers control Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. Such when I meant to feign, and wish'd to see, My Muse bade, Bedford write, and that was she! EPITAPH ON ELIZABETH, L. H. WOULD'ST thou hear what man can say In a little reader, stay. Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die : Which in life did harbour give To more virtue than doth live. If at all she had a fault, Leave it buried in this vault. The other let it sleep with death : TO CELIA. FROM "THE FOREST," KISS me, sweet! the wary lover Or the stars that gild his streams, SONG. FROM THE SAME, FOLLOW a shadow, it still flies you; Seem to fly it, it will pursue : So court a mistress, she denies you; Let her alone, she will court you. Say are not women truly, then, Styled but the shadows of us men? At morn and even shades are longest ; But grant us perfect, they're not known. [* "Pembrok and his Lady discoursing, the Earl said, The woemen were men's shadowes, and she maintained them. Both appealing to Jonson, he affirmed it true, for which my Lady gave a pennance to prove it in verse; hence his epigram."-DRUMMOND'S Informations, Arch. Scot. iv. 95.] |