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CHAPTER VI.

SURVEY OF BRITISH LITERATURE.

1632.

As, in political history, we reckon by the reign of the kings, so in our literary history, for the last two hundred and fifty years, we may reckon by the reigns of the laureates. The year 1632 was (nominally) the thirteenth year of the laureateship of Ben Jonson. He had succeeded to the honorary post in 1619, on the death of Samuel Daniel, who is considered to have held it, or something equivalent to it, from Spenser's death in 1599. In the case of Ben, however, the office had been converted into something more definite and substantial than it had been before. Prior to his appointment, a pension of a hundred merks a-year had been conferred on him by James. This pension had come to be regarded as his official income as laureate, and, as such, had been raised to a hundred pounds by Charles in 1630. With the office of laureate, or court poet, thus enhanced in value, Ben conjoined that of chronologer to the city of London, having been appointed by the Corporation on the death of Thomas Middleton in 1628, at a yearly salary of a hundred nobles.

It is not always, whether in the civil commonwealth, or in the republic of letters, that the right by title accords, so well as it did in Ben's case, with the right by merit. It was now some six-andthirty years since, returning from his campaign in Flanders, a bigboned youth of two-and-twenty, he had attached himself to the cluster of dramatists and playwrights who then constituted the professional literary world of London, and begun to cobble plays, like the rest of them, at from £5 to £10 each. Borrowing, as most of them had to do, a pound or five shillings at a time from Henslowe and other managers on the faith of work in progress, "the bricklayer," as he was called and yet he had been Camden's favorite pupil at Westminster School, and had been at Cambridge!), had made his way gradually, always with a quarrel on his hands;

1 Memoir of Middleton, prefixed to Mr. Dyce's edition of his works.

till at length, having shown what he could do in one way, by killing one of Henslowe's players in a duel in Hoxton Fields, and being “almost at the gallows” for it, and what he could do in another by writing his “Every Man in his Humor," and four standard plays besides, he had fairly, even while Elizabeth was yet alive, taken his place as, next to Shakspeare, the great dramatist of the age. This position he had retained till Shakspeare's death in 1616; confirming it by six or seven more of his plays, including “Volpone,” “The Alchemist,” and “Bartholomew Fair,” and by seventeen or eighteen of his masques at court. During these first thirteen years of James's reign, indeed, others of the Elizabethan seniors besides Shakspeare had divided public attention with him, and younger candidates for dramatic applause had appeared in Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, and Massinger. Jonson's place among these rivals had by no means been unquestioned. Some of his plays had had but a moderate success; in all of them there had been a vein of dogmatism, a spirit of satire and social invective, and a parade of a new and scholarly art of construction, which had prevented them from being thoroughly popular on the stage; and, conscious of this, Ben had invariably, either in the plays themselves or in prefaces to them when they were published, announced himself as a man of a new school, taken the public by the throat as a blatant beast that knew not the right or the wrong in poetry or in anything else, and appealed in the high Odi profanum vulgus strain from their judgment to that of the learned. Thus, in the opening of "Every Man out of bis Humor”

." (1599) :

“O how I hate the monstrousness of time,
Where every servile imitating spirit,
Plagued with an itching leprosy of wit,
In a mere halting fury strives to fling
His ulcerous body in the Thespian spring,
And straight leaps up a poet, – but as lame
As Vulcan or the founder of Cripplegate.”

Again, in the lines appended to “The Poetaster,” when that merciless attack on Decker, Marston, and others, was published in 1602 :

That these base and beggarly conceits
Should carry it by the multitude of voices,
Against the most abstracted work, opposed
To the stuff'd nostrils of the drunken rout-
Oh! this would make a learn'd and liberal soul

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I, that spend half my nights and all my days
Here in a cell to get a dark pale face,

To come forth worth the ivy and the bays,

And in this age can hope no other grace!

Leave me! There's something come into my thought
That must and shall be sung high and aloof,

Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof!"

Not liking to be so bullied, the public had persisted in their instinctive preference of other plays, and, above all, of those of Shakspeare and of Beaumont and Fletcher. On the other hand, the scholarly and academic critics, pleased at being appealed to, had made the cause of Ben their own, and had championed him as the poet of the most learned art.

Thus situated between the public and the learned, Ben had acted accordingly. In the very year of Shakspeare's death, he had, as if with the intention of quitting the stage altogether, collected and published in a folio volume the greater part of his plays, masques, and other compositions up to that date. During the nine remaining years of James's reign he had not written a single new play, but had contented himself with the composition of some ten additional masques, and with those translations from Aristotle and Horace, those occasional effusions of epistolary or epigrammatic verse, and those more elaborate exercises in historical prose, the greater part of which perished in the fire which consumed his library. This was also the time of his wife's death, of his famous journey to Scotland and visit to Drummond of Hawthornden (1618-19), of his short residence at Oxford, of his rambles as a widower at large among his friends' houses in other parts of England, and, finally, of his supposed second marriage and his elevation to the laureateship. After the accession of Charles, however, he had returned to the stage in his comedy of "The Staple of News" (1625). His reäppearance had by no means moved the public to enthusiasm; but his necessities had obliged him to be patient, and in 1629 he had made another trial in his "New Inn." This comedy having been driven from the stage on the first night of its performance, he had risen in his usual fury:

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Where pride and impudence, in faction knit,

Usurp the chair of wit,

Indicting and arraigning every day

Something they call a play!

Let their fastidious, vain

Commission of the brain

Run on and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn!
They were not made for thee, nor thou for them.

Say that thou pour'st them wheat,

And they will acorns eat;

'T were simple fury still thyself to waste
On such as have no taste,-

To offer them a surfeit of pure bread
Whose appetites are dead!

No, give them grains their fill,
Husks, draff to drink and swill:

If they love lees, and leave the lusty wine,

Envy them not; their palate's with the swine."

Acting on this resolution, Ben had again made his formal appeal to the learned in a second volume of his "Works," published in 1631; and Charles, humoring him in his hour of ill luck, had goodnaturedly presented him with a hundred pounds out of his private purse, besides raising his salary and adding the boon of the annual tierce of Ben's favorite wine.

Such was Ben's literary life, as he and others could look back upon it from the year 1632. He was then in his fifty-ninth year; no longer the lean, thin youth that he had been six-and-thirty years before, but a huge, unwieldy veteran, weighing twenty stones all but two pounds, with gray hair, and a visage, never of captivating beauty, now scarred and seamed and blotched into a sight among ten thousand.

"My mountain belly and my rocky face,"

is his own well-known description. Latterly, too, this corpulent mass had been sadly wrecked by disease. Palsy had attacked him in 1628, and, though still able to move about, "in a coat like a coachman's with slits under the arm-pits," he was more frequently to be seen in bed or in his big straw chair in his house in Westminster-"the house under which you pass," says Aubrey, "as you go out of the churchyard into the old palace." Here, according to all the authorities, his style of housekeeping was none of the most orderly. His children by his first marriage were dead or dispersed; he had never been of economic habits; and now that

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he was old his besetting sin of Canary had grown upon him. "His pension, so much as came in," says Izaak Walton, "was given to a woman that governed him, with whom he lived and died; and neither he nor she took much care for next week, and would be sure not to want wine; of which he usually took too much before he went to bed, if not oftener and sooner." In and about 1632 he seems to have been in deeper distress than usual-confined to his house for some months, if not actually bedridden; and in great want of money. "Nov. 10, 1631: It is ordered by this Court [the Court of Aldermen] that Mr. Chamberlain shall forbear to pay any more fee or wages unto Benjamin Jonson, the City's Chronologer, until he shall have presented unto this Court some fruits of his labors in that his place." In Ben's poems and correspondence there are allusions to the loss of this part of his income. "Yesterday," he says, in a letter to the Earl of Newcastle, "the barbarous Court of Aldermen have withdrawn their chandlery pension for verjuice and mustard, £33 68 8d.;" and he goes on to solicit the earl's bounty against Christmas. And so in an "Epistle Mendicant" to the Lord Treasurer Weston:

"Disease, the enemy, and his engineers,

Want, with the rest of his concealed compeers,

Have cast a trench about me now five years,

And made those strong approaches by false braies,

Redoubts, half-moons, horn-works, and such close ways,

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."

And yet, poor, palsied, mendicant, and gross with wine as he was, Ben was an actual and no nominal laureate. The very men from whom he borrowed feared him and felt his weight. When he was able to go out and roll his ill-girt body down Fleet Street, heads would be turned to look at him, or raised for the honor of his recognition; and, with the exception of Dryden at a later time, and of Samuel Johnson at a still later, no man can be named who, while he lived, exercised so imperiously the sovereignty of literary London.

London, which in the days of Samuel Johnson numbered 700,000.

1 Quoted by Chalmers (Life of Jonson: English poets) from Zouch's Life of Walton.

2 Mr. Dyce's account of Middleton, prefixed to his edition of his works.

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