XLIII.

TO ROBERT EARL OF SALISBURY.8

HAT need hast thou of me, or of my muse,
Whose actions so themselves do celebrate?
Which should thy country's love to speak

refuse,

Her foes enough would fame thee in their hate. Tofore, great men were glad of poets; now,

I, not the worst, am covetous of thee:
Yet dare not to my thought least hope allow
Of adding to thy fame; thine may to me,
When in my book men read but Cecil's name,
And what I write thereof find far, and free
From servile flattery, common poets' shame,
As thou stand'st clear of the necessity.

8 Robert earl of Salisbury.] Younger son of lord Burleigh. He and his elder brother, William, were both created earls in the same day. Robert in the morning; to give his descendants precedency of those of William.

"This man," Walpole says, "who had the fortune or misfortune" (why misfortune? but this poor stuff was meant for wit) "to please both Elizabeth and James the First; who like the son of the duke of Lerma had the uncommon fate of succeeding his own father as prime minister, and who unlike that son of Lerma did not, though treacherous to every body else, supplant his own father, is sufficiently known; his public story may be found in all our histories, his particular in the Biographia." Cat. of Royal and Noble Authors. In none of these, however, did Walpole look for the "story" of this eminent statesman; but in the ignorant, impure, and scandalous reports of the Weldons, Peytons, and other puritanical disseminators of falsehood, as better suited to the base and envious nature of his own spirit. When the time shall come for Walpole himself to be added to the number of" noble authors," by a sterner biographer than Mr. Parke, he will, if fairly represented, be found to be one of the most odious and contemptible of the whole "Catalogue."

XLIV.

ON CHUFFE, BANKS the Usurer's Kinsman.

HUFFE, lately rich in name, in chattels, goods,

And rich in issue to inherit all,

Ere blacks were bought for his own funeral, Saw all his race approach the blacker floods : He meant they thither should make swift repair, When he made him executor, might be heir.

XLV.

ON MY FIRST SON.

AREWELL, thou child of my right hand, and joy; 9

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy: Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

9 Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy.] The expression here must be explained: thou child of my right hand shews us his son's name was Benjamin; that word being usually taken as a compound of two Hebrew words, which imply that meaning. But some modern commentators more justly interpret the word Benjamin to signify the son of days, or of old age. Benjamin was the youngest son, and probably born when his father was advanced in years. WHAL.

My predecessor seems to write without reading what he is about to explain. The title declares the Epitaph to be written on his first son; Benjamin, says the critic, was the youngest son, and probably born when the father was advanced in years! This is sad trifling; but Whalley appears to me to have contented himself, upon all occasions, with second-hand authorities, which are commonly worse than none at all. In one of the spiteful attempts made to injure Jonson by his "friend" Drummond, he relates the following anecdote, which he had (he says) from the poet's own mouth. "While the plague raged in London, he was on a visit with Camden, at the house of sir Robert Cotton, in the country. Here he saw, in

O, could I lose all father, now! for why,
Will man lament the state he should envy ?
To have so soon scaped world's, and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age!

Rest in soft peace, and ask'd, say here doth lie
BEN JONSON his best piece of poetry :

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

XLVI.

TO SIR LUCKLESS WOO-All.

S this the sir, who, some waste wife to win, A knight-hood bought, to go a wooing in? 'Tis Luckless, he that took up one on band To pay at's day of marriage. By my hand. The knight-wright's cheated then! he'll never pay: Yes, now he wears his knighthood every day.

a dream, his eldest son, with the mark of a bloody cross (the token of the plague) on his forehead. Alarmed at this, he prayed to God for him, and went in the morning to Camden's room, and told him what he had seen. Camden desired him not to be dejected, for that it was merely the creation of his own fears: but there came a letter from his wife, to inform him that the child was dead of the plague. Jonson added, that his son appeared to him of a manly stature, and of such growth as he thought he would be at the Resurrection." There is enough in this narrative to convince any one but the vile calumniator who reports it, that the fond father was not, as he asserts, void of all religion :-but to the purpose of the note. The plague broke out in 1603, the child was then in his seventh year; he was born, therefore, in 1596, when Jonson, instead of being "advanced in years," was just turned of two and twenty! The last couplet contains a pretty allusion to the cheerless advice of Martial, in one of his melancholy moods:

Si vitare velis acerba quædam,
Et tristes animi cavere morsus,
Nulli te facias nimis sodalem,
Gaudebis minus, at minus dolebis.

XLVII.

TO THE SAME.

IR LUCKLESS, troth, for luck's sake pass by

one;

He that wooes every widow, will get none.

XLVIII.

ON MUNGRIL ESQUIRE.

IS bought arms Mung' not liked; for his first day

Of bearing them in field, he threw 'em away;' And hath no honour lost, our duellists say.

XLIX.

TO PLAYWRIGHT.

LAYWRIGHT me reads, and still my verses damns,

He says I want the tongue of epigrams;

I have no salt, no bawdry he doth mean;2

For witty, in his language, is obscene.

Of bearing them in field, he threw 'em away.] The arms were usually pourtrayed upon the shield; so that on his entering into battle, he flung away his shield, that he might not be encumbered in his flight. This marks him for his cowardice.

WHAL.

Jonson might have thrown his epigram after Mungril's arms, with no more loss of credit than the other of honour.

2 I have no salt, no bawdry he doth mean.] This expression sufficiently justifies Pope's emendation of the passage in Hamlet, "I remember one said there were no salts in the lines to make the matter savoury." The old copies read sallets, which being akin to nonsense is, according to custom, replaced in the text by the last

Playwright, I loath to have thy manners known
In my chaste book; profess them in thine own.

L.

TO SIR COD.

EAVE, Cod, tobacco-like, burnt gums to take,
Or fumy clysters, thy moist lungs to bake:
Arsenic would thee fit for society make.

LI.

TO KING JAMES.

Upon the happy false rumour of his death, the two and twentieth day of March, 1606.3

HAT we thy loss might know, and thou our love,
Great heaven did well to give ill fame free
wing;

Which though it did but panic terror prove,
And far beneath least pause of such a king;

editors; though, as Mr. Steevens adds, "the alteration of Pope may be, in some measure, supported by the following passage in Decker's Satiromastix-"a prepared troop of gallants, who shall distaste every unsalted line in their fly-blown comedies." If the change be in some measure supported by this quotation, it is altogether fixed by the line above, of which none of the commentators take the slightest notice.

3 The best comment upon this little piece is to be found in Winwood's State Papers, in a letter from Mr. Chamberlaine to that minister, dated April 5th, 1606; from which it appears that Jonson has not exaggerated the common feeling, which was the more alive as the story came so quickly upon the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. The report was that the king had been stabbed with a poisoned knife, at Woking, in Surrey, where he was hunting.