Beheld what his high fancy once embraced, Virtue with colours, speech, and motion graced.

The sundry postures of thy copious muse, Who would express, a thousand tongues

must use:

Whose fate's no less peculiar than thy art;
For as thou couldst all characters impart,
So none can render thine, who still escapes,
Like Proteus in variety of shapes,
Who was nor this nor that, but all we find,
And all we can imagine in mankind.
E. WALLER.1

UPON THE POET OF HIS TIME

BENJAMIN JONSON,

HIS HONOURED FRIEND AND FATHER.

And is thy glass run out? is that oil spent, Which light to such tough sinewy labours lent?

Well, BEN, I now perceive that all the Nine, Though they their utmost forces should combine,

Cannot prevail 'gainst Night's three daughters, but

One still will spin, one wind, the other cut. Yet in despight of spindle, clue, and knife, Thou, in thy strenuous lines, hast got a life, Which, like thy bay, shall flourish every age, While sock or buskin move upon the stage. JAMES HOWELL.

AN OFFERTORY AT THE TOMB OF THE FAMOUS POET

BEN JONSON.

If souls departed lately hence do know How we perform the duties that we owe Their reliqués, will it not grieve thy spirit To see our dull devotion? thy merit Profaned by disproportioned rites? thy herse

Rudely defiled with our unpolished verse? Necessity's our best excuse: 'tis in

Our understanding, not our will, we sin; 'Gainst which 'tis now in vain to labour, we Did nothing know, but what was taught by thee.

The routed soldiers when their captains fall

Forget all order, that men cannot call
It properly a battle that they fight;
Nor we (thou being dead) be said to write.
'Tis noise we utter, nothing can be sung
By those distinctly that have lost their
tongue;

And therefore whatsoe'er the subject be,
All verses now become thy ELEGY:
For, when a lifeless poem shall be read,
Th' afflicted reader sighs, BEN JONSON'S
dead.

This is thy glory, that no pen can raise
A lasting trophy in thy honoured praise;
Since fate (it seems) would have it so ex-
prest,

Each muse should end with thine, who was

the best :

And but her flights were stronger, and so high,

That time's rude hand cannot reach her glory,

An ignorance had spread this age, as great As that which made thy learned muse so sweat,

And toil to dissipate; until, at length, Purged by thy art, it gained a lasting strength;

And now, secured by thy all-powerful writ, Can fear no more a like relapse of wit:

Though (to our grief) we ever must despair,

That any age can raise thee up an heir. JOHN VERNON.3 è Societ. In. Temp.

TO THE

MEMORY OF BEN JONSON.

The Muses' fairest light in no dark time; The wonder of a learned age; the line Which none can pass; the most proportioned wit

To nature, the best judge of what was fit; The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen; The voice most echoed by consenting men; The soul which answered best to all well said

By others, and which most requital made;

James Howell, the author of "Familiar Epistles," is so well known that it seems scarcely necessary to say more than that he was born at Abernant, in Carnarvonshire, educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and died in November, 1666

CHRIST.

Vernon, of Camberwell, in the county of Surrey, Knt.; he was admitted of the Inner Temple the 15th October, 2nd Charles I. (1626), and was called to the bar the 15th October, 1634.-GIL

3 John Vernon was the son and heir of Robert

We must be ravished first; thou must infuse

Thyself into us both the theme and muse. Else (though we all conspired to make thy herse

Our works), so that 't had been but one great verse,

Though the priest had translated for that time

The liturgy, and buried thee in rhyme,
So that, in metre we had heard it said,
Poetic dust is to poetic laid :
And though, that dust being Shakspeare's,
thou might'st have

Not his room, but the poet for thy grave; So that, as thou didst prince of numbers die

And live, so now thou might'st in numbers lie,

"Twere frail solemnity: verses on thee And not like thine, would but kind libels be;

And we (not speaking thy whole worth) should raise

Worse blots, than they that envied thy praise.

Indeed, thou need'st us not, since above all Invention, thou wert thine own funeral.

Hereafter, when time hath fed on thy tomb,

Th' inscription worn out, and the marble dumb,

So that 'twould pose a critic to restore Half words, and words expired so long before;

When thy maimed statue hath a sentenced face,

And looks that are the horror of the place,
That 'twill be learning, and antiquity,
And ask a SELDEN to say, this was thee,
Thou'lt have a whole name still, nor need'st
thou fear

That will be ruined, or lose nose, or hair.

Let others write so thin, that they can't be Authors till rotten, no posterity

Can add to thy works; they had their whole growth then

When first born, and came aged from thy pen.

person under restraint, the dignified and manly terms in which he remonstrated with Cromwell, and which under a meaner usurper would have put his life in jeopardy, extorted from the Protector his liberty. He was born at Loughborough in 1613, educated at Christ's and St. John's Colleges, Cambridge, and died in Gray's Inn, on the 29th April, 1658:-greatly lamented by the royalists.--GILCHRIST.

Whilst living thou enjoyedst the fame and

sense

Of all that time gives, but the reverence. When thou'rt of Homer's years, no man will say

Thy poems are less worthy, but more gray: 'Tis bastard poetry, and of false blood Which can't, without succession, be good. Things that will always last, do thus agree With things eternal; th' at once perfect be. Scorn then their censures, who gave out, thy wit

As long upon a comedy did sit

As elephants bring forth; and that thy blots

And mendings took more time than Fortune plots:

That such thy drought was, and so great thy thirst,

Since of some silken judgments we may say, They filled a box two hours, but saw no play.

So that th' unlearned lost their money; and Scholars saved only, that could understand. Thy scene was free from monsters; no hard plot

Called down a God t' untie th' unlikely knot: The stage was still a stage, two entrances Were not two parts o' the world, disjoined by seas.

Thine were land-tragedies, no prince was found

To swim a whole scene out, then o' the stage drowned;

Pitched fields, as Red Bull wars, still felt thy doom;

Thou laid'st no sieges to the music room; Nor wouldst allow, to thy best Comedies,

maid first;

That the king's yearly butt wrote, and his wine

Hath more right than thou to thy CATI

LINE.

Let such men keep a diet, let their wit
Be racked, and while they write, suffer a fit:
When they've felt tortures which out-pain
the gout,

Such as with less, the state draws treason out;

Though they should the length of consumptions lie

Sick of their verse, and of their poem die, 'Twould not be thy worse scene, but would at last

Confirm their boastings, and shew made in haste.

He that writes well, writes quick, since the rule's true,

Nothing is slowly done, that's always new. So when thy Fox had ten times acted been, Each day was first, but that 'twas cheaper seen ;1

And so thy ALCHEMIST played o'er and o'er, Was new o' the stage, when 'twas not at the door.

We, like the actors, did repeat; the pit The first time saw, the next conceived thy wit:

Which was cast in those forms, such rules, such arts,

That but to some not half thy acts were parts:

Yet was thy language and thy style so high, Thy sock to th' ancle, buskin reached to th' thigh;

And both so chaste, so 'bove dramatic clean, That we both safely saw, and lived thy

scene.

Hated Face acted than were such before. So did thy sting not blood, but humours draw,

So much doth satire more correct than law; Which was not nature in thee, as some call Thy teeth, who say thy wit lay in thy gall: That thou didst quarrel first, and then, in spite,

Didst 'gainst a person of such vices write; That 'twas revenge, not truth; that on the stage

And that when thou in company wert met, Carlo was not presented, but thy rage; Thy meat took notes, and thy discourse

was net.

Is not found scattered in thee here and there,

But, like the soul, is wholly everywhere. No strange perplexed maze does pass for plot,

Thou always dost untie, not cut the knot. Thy labyrinth's doors are opened by one thread

That ties, and runs through all that's done or said:

No power comes down with learned hat and rod,

Wit only, and contrivance is thy god.

'Tis easy to gild gold; there's small skill spent

Where even the first rude mass is ornament:

Thy muse took harder metals, purged and boiled,

Laboured and tried, heated, and beat and toiled,

Sifted the dross, filed roughness, then gave dress,

Vexing rude subjects into comeliness.
Be it thy glory then, that we may say,
Thou run'st where th' foot was hindered by
the way.

Nor dost thou pour out, but dispense thy vein,

Skilled when to spare, and when to entertain:

Not like our wits, who into one piece do Throw all that they can say, and their

friends too;

Pumping theinselves, for one term's noise so dry,

As if they made their wills in poetry. And such spruce compositions press the stage,

When men transcribe themselves, and not the age:

Both sorts of plays are thus like pictures Worshewn,

Thine of the common life, theirs of their Jown,

Thy models yet are not so framed, as we May call them libels, and not imag'ry; No name on any basis: 'tis thy skill To strike the vice, but spare the person still.

As he, who when he saw the serpent wreathed

About his sleeping son, and as he breathed, Drink in his soul, did so the shot contrive, To kill the beast, but keep the child alive: So dost thou aim thy darts, which, even when

They kill the poisons, do but wake the smen: