first drank of it herself" From such a mother he must have derived no small part of his unconquerable spirit.

Having obtained a pardon,' Mr. A. Chalmers says, Jonson endeavored to conciliate his offended sovereign by taxing his genius to produce a double portion of flattery. He had, in the opening of this very paragraph, accused him of a rough and savage disposition which nothing could tame! The charge of "redoubled flattery," on this account, is also brought against him, but with much more virulence by the writers of the Bio. Brit. It happens, however, somewhat unluckily for these ingenious speculators, that the masque which he produced on his release was not written at all to flatter the king. The fact is, that there were at this period (1605) several noble and royal foreigners in this country; and to receive them in a manner worthy of the splendor and magnificence of the English court, the queen, who had not forgotten the exquisite entertainments of Althorpe and Highgate, "expressly injoined" the poet to prepare a masque in which she and the prime beauties of the land might bear a part. This gave rise to the Masque of Blackness, in which the king is scarcely noticed, and which those who accuse the writer of "taxing his genius for a double portion of flattery to soothe his offended sovereign" will do well to read before they procced to belie his character a second time.

"Jonson employed a year or two in composing a play." 2 This judicious remark, which Mr. Malone has introduced among the striking proofs of our author's "malevolence" to Shakspeare, is yet capable of some qualification. We have seen that this had been rather a busy year with Jonson; yet he found time to produce the comedy of the Fox, one of the dramas of which the nation may be justly proud. It was written, he says, "in five weeks,” and we cannot doubt the truth of his assertion, which was openly made on the stage. No human powers, however, could have completed such a work in such a time, unless the author's mind had been previously stored with all the treasure of ancient and modern learning, on which he might draw at pleasure. The triumph of Mr. Malone and others, therefore, over his slowness is somewhat like that of Mr. Thomas Thumb over the giants: "he made them first of all, and then he killed them." Before Jonson was three and twenty, he had mastered the Greek and Roman classics, and was, at the period of which we are now speaking, among the first scholars of the age. Did Mr. Malone think that his "studies lay in Green's Works"? He had written several of his Masques and Entertainments, and almost the whole of his Epigrams; he had translated Horace, and, as it would seem, Aristotle's Poetics, and prepared a voluminous body of notes to illustrate them; he had made prodigious collections in theology, history, and poetry, from the best writers, and, perhaps, drawn up his grammar; yet the charge is still repeated, as if it were entitled to full credit. To be just, however, it was first brought forward by the poet's contemporaries, and almost as soon as he began to write. It

1 [If Gifford had lived to reprint the present essay, he would have noticed here a second imprisonment, which, soor. after his release, Jonson underwent with Chapman, in consequence, it would seem, of supposed reflections cast upon some individual in a play of which they were the joint authors. The letter from Jonson to the Earl of Salisbury, which mentions these particulars, will be found at the end of a note on a later part of this memoir, having been put into Gifford's hands by Mr. D'Israeli, "since that note had gone to press."-A, DYCE.]

Shak., vol. i. p. 542.

* Jonson was in the laudable habit of making large extracts from the striking passages, and writing notes and observations of a critical nature on all the books which he read. His commonplace book, therefore, was a repository of every thing valuable. Lord Falkland seems to have been astonished at the extent and variety of his collections. He says,

"His learning such, no author, old or new,
Escaped his reading that deserved his view;
And such his judgment, so exact his taste,
Of what was best in books, or what books best,
That had he joined those notes his labors took
From each most-praised and praise-deserving book,
And could the world of that choice treasure boast,
It need not care though all the rest were lost."

"Mr. Ben Jonson and Mr. Wm. Shakspeare being merrie at a tavern, Mr. Jonson begins this for his epitaph :

Here lies Ben Jonson
Who was once one-

be gives it to Mr. Shakspeare to make up, who presently writte,—

gave him, however, no concern; indeed, he rather falls in with it. When the heroes of the Poetaster, which was written in fifteen weeks, maintained that he scarcely brought forth a play a year, he replied,

"tis true;

I would they could not say that I did that:
There's all the joy that I take in their trade!"-

The Fox was received, as it well deserved to be, with general applause. The author's c einies, however, were not inactive; they could not venture to question his talents; they therefore turned, as usual, their attacks against his character, and asserted that, under the person of Volpone, he had satirized Sutton, the founder of the Charter House, his friend and benefactor. It is not a little amusing to see the calumniators of our poet in that age driven to the same absurdities as those of the present day. Two characters more opposite in every respect than those of Sutton and Volpone are not to be found in the history of mankind. Sutton inherited a large estate. He was one of the greatest traders of his time; he had agents in every country, and ships on every sea; he had contracts, mines, mills, ploughs; he was a naval commissioner, and master of the ordnance in the north; in a word, one of the most active characters of an active period. Now mark the description of Volpone, as given by him self in the opening of the play :

"I glory

More in the cunning purchase of my wealth
Than in the glad possession, since I gain
No common way. I use no trade, no venture,

That, while he liv'd, was a slow thing,

And now, being dead, is no-thing."

This stuff is copied from the Ashmole papers, MS. 38. It is only an additional instance of what has been already observed, that the fabricators of these things invariably make Shakspeare the most severe.

It is said by Mr. Malone that the slowness of Jonson is admitted by his friends; but they do not mean by this word what he does. Mr. Malone applies it to a dulness of imagination, a want of power to bring forth without long and difficult labor; they use it of the patient revision of his productions. They speak of him as a prolific and rapid writer, whose respect for the public made him nicely weigh every word,

"and suffer nought to pass

But what could be no better than it was."

Ur, as another has it,

"Venture no syllable unto the ear,

Until the file would not make smooth, but wear."

lle was, in truth, too fastidious; and this couplet of Cartwright furnishes the key to that bareness and rigidity which we have so frequently to regret in some of his writings.

1 "Jonson justly spurns," Mr. Cumberland says, "at the critics and detractors of his day, who thought to convict him of dulness by testifying, in fact, to his diligence. But when he subsequently boasted of his poetical despatch, he forgot that he had noted Shakspeare with something less than friendly censure for the very quality he is vaunting him self upon." Observer, No. lxxv. What Mr. Cumberland had forgotten, it is hard to say; but this vaunt of Jonson was first made in 1601, while the allusion to Shakspeare occurs in the Discoveries, and is probably thirty years posterior to the passage which is here placed before it in point of time! Besides, it is not of the rapidity of Shakspeare's composition that Jonson speaks, but the carelessness. A man may write fast, and yet not wreck a vessel on the coast of Bohemia. The Fox was rapidly written; but it is not, therefore, incorrect; and what Mr. Cumberland adds of it is as creditable to his taste as learning. "It must on all hands be considered as the masterpiece of a very capital artist; a work that bears the stamp of elaborate design; a strong, and frequently a sublime, vein of poetry, much sterling wit, comic humor, happy character, moral satire, and unrivalled erudition; a work

Quod nec imber edaz, aut.Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere," &c.

↑ "Sutton's biographer, (S Herne,) after noticing this report, says, 'It is probable the poet never intended what they think; for in that age several other men were pointed at, and who was the true person was then a matter of doubt!'- Dom. Carthus., p. 42. It is no longer so. We are better judges of these matters than the contemporaries of Sutton, and decide without difficulty." I regret to find Mr. D'Israeli among the poet's accusers; for he is an anxious nquirer after truth, and brings, as far as I have been able to discover, an unprejudiced mind to his investigations. Hia fault is too great a deference for names unworthy of his trust. This is an evil which every day will contribute to abate. Twice in one page, (Quarrels of Authors, vol. iii. 134,) he charges Jonson with bringing Sutton on the stage

I wound no earth with ploughshares, fat no beasts
To feed the shambles; have no mills for iron,
Oil, corn, or men, to grind them into powder;
I blow no subtle glass, expose no ships

To threatenings of the furrow-faced seas;

I turn no moneys," &c. &c.

Sutton was a meek and pious man; Volpone is a daring infidel; Sutton was abstemious, but kind and charitable; Volpone is painted as the most selfish and unfeeling of voluptuaries : —

Sutton was

Again: Volpone is a creature of ungovernable lust- -a monster of seduction. the husband of one wife, to whose memory he was so tenderly attached, that upon her death, which took place about two years before the date of this piece, he had retired from the world to a life of strictness and reserve. He was at this time nearly fourscore, and bowed down to the grave with sorrow for his loss, while Volpone, in the full vigor of manhood, exclaims, —

"what should I do

But cocker up my genius, and live free
To all delights? See, I am now as fresh,
As hot, as high, and in as jovial plight,
As when, in that so celebrated scene,
For entertainment of the great Valois,
I acted young Antinous! "

In a word, the contrast is so glaring, that if the commentators on Shakspeare had not afforded us a specimen of what ignorance grafted on malevolence can do, we should be lost in wonder at the obliquity of intellect which could detect the slightest resemblance of Sutton in the features of Volpone.

The Fox is dedicated, in a strain of unparalleled elegance and vigor, to the two Universities, before whom it had been represented with all the applause which might be anticipated from such distinguished and competent judges of its worth.' The English stage had hitherto seen nothing so truly classical, so learned, so correct, and so chaste.

About this time, our author, who had deeply studied the grounds of the controversy between the reformed and Catholic churches, and convinced himself, by the aid of those wiser guides who followed truth alone, of the delusions of Popery, made a solemn recantation of his errors, and was readmitted into the bosom of the church which he had abandoned twelve years before." Drummond tells us that "he drank out the full cup of wine, at his first communion, in token of his true reconciliation." Jonson's feelings were always strong; and the energy of his character was impressed upon every act of his life; but this story is foisted into his conversations by his "friend," and has, perhaps, no better foundation than many others wantonly invented to discredit him. It may not, however, be irrelevant to observe, that more wine was drank at the altar in the poet's days, than in ours, and that the vestiges of this custom are not yet entirely obliterated in remote situations.

Jonson had not been inactive between the first representation of the Fox and its publication. The queen's brother (Christian of Denmark) paid her a visit in the summer of 1606, and our poet was called upon to furnish some of the pageantries prepared for his amusement. O!

There is an allusion to this circumstance in the verse of Jonson's friend, E. S. (Edward Scorey ?)

--"now he (the Fox) hath run his train and shown

His subtile body, where he best was known,

In both Minerva's cities, he doth yield

His well-formed limbs upon this open field," &c.

* Among the works of ur author, Wood inserts one printed in 1622, 8vo., and called His Motives. If Jonson realiy wrote such a book, it might be supposed to relate to this circumstance; but the probability is, that this industrious antiquary mistook the writer's name. Of the work itself I have no knowledge whatever.

these we have little remaining but a few epigrams in Latin verse, which were displayed round the walls of the inner court "at Theobald's," when the Earl of Salisbury received the royal brothers there on the 24th of July. In the subsequent summer (1607) Theobald's was delivered up to the queen in exchange for Hatfield Chase. A magnificent entertainment was prepared on the occasion, at which James and his qucen, the two princes, the Duke of Lorraine, and all the principal nobility were present; and the house was transferred to the new possessor in an elegant poetical apologue composed by Jonson, and distinguished by his usual felicity of appropriate character and language. Cecil had done himself honor by his early patronage of our author; and he who was one of the most grateful and affectionate of mankind, embalmed the ashes of his benefactor in strains that yet live.

Previously to this, however, Jonson had written his beautiful Masque and Barriers for the marriage of the Earl of Essex, which was celebrated at Whitehall with extraordinary magnificence, in the Christmas of 1606. The poet has entered with some complacency into the richness and variety of this exhibition, which seems to have astonished the beholders.' He drops a word too in justification of the strict regard to the pure models of antiquity, after which he usually constructed his fables. — P. 552.

"

Hitherto the " flattery to which Jonson betook himself immediately after his release," has not appeared so gross as his biographers choose to represent it. Unfortunately for them, his next Masque, which he calls the Queen's, is still less to their purpose. "Two years (ho says) being now passed that her majesty had intermitted those delights, it was her pleasure again to glorify the court, and command that I should think on some fit presentment," &c. This produced the "Masque of Beauty," (a counterpart to that of "Blackness,") which was performed at court during the Christmas of 1608. In this, as in the preceding one, the performers were the queen, the prince, and the prime nobility of both sexes. At present, we

1 We have other evidence than the poet's for this splendid display. The kindness of Mr. D'Israeli has furnished me with the following curious and interesting extract from a MS. letter of Mr. Pory to Sir Robert Cotton. Sir Robert, like most of the great men, at this time, when absent from court, had a correspondent (generally some secretary) there, who furnished them with regular accounts of the various occurrences of the day. Sir Robert was fortunate in his informant.*

"Inigo, Ben, and the actors, men and women, did their parts with great commendation. The conceit or soul of the Mask was Hymen bringing in a bride, and Juno Pronuba's priest, a bridegroom, proclaiming that those two should be sacrificed to Union; and here the poet made an apostrophe to the Union of the Kingdoms. But before the sacrifice could be performed, Ben Jonson turned the globe of the earth, standing behind the altar, (p. 553,) and within the concave sat the eight men-maskers, representing the Four Humors and the Four Affections, who leaped forth to disturb the sacrifice to Union. But amidst their fury, Reason, that sat above them all, crowned with burning tapers, came down and silenced them. These eight, with Reason, their mediator, sat somewhat like the ladies in the Scollopshell of the last year, (p. 544.) About the Globe hovered a middle region of clouds, in the centre whereof stood a grand concert of musicians, and upon the cantons sat the ladies, four at one corner and four at another, who descended upon the stage-not in the downright, perpendicular fashion, like a bucket in a well, but came gently sloping down.† These eight, after the sacrifice was ended, represented the Eight Nuptial Powers of Juno Pronuba, who came down to confirm their Union. The men were clad in crimson, and the women in white. They had every one a white plume of the richest hern's feathers, and were so rich in jewels upon their heads as was most glorious. I think they hired and borrowed all the principal jewels and ropes of pearls both in court and city. The Spanish ambassador seemed but poor to the meanest of them. They danced all variety of dances, both severally and promiscue, and then the women took the men as named by the Prince (Henry) who danced with as great perfection, and as settled a majesty, as could be devised. The Spanish ambassador, the Archduke's ambassador, the Duke, &c., led out the Queen, the bride, and the greatest of the ladies."— Cott. Lib. Julii. c. iii. It appears that Mr Pory was present at the performance of this Masque on Twelfthnight, 1605-6.

* Pory is mentioned with great respect by Hackluyt. He had travelled much, and seen a good deal of courts and public affairs. He was also an excellent scholar. As he was a member of parliament, he must have been a person of some property.

Here Milton found his-"smooth sliding without step: " in truth, he found much more in Jonson's Masques than lus editors appear to suspect, or are willing to acknowledge.

This was not wanted to prove the unaccountable folly of Hurd in maintaining that the Masque in the Tempest, which Capell, the mere idolater of Shakspeare, affirms to be “weak throughout, faulty in rimes, and faulty in mythology," &c., 'Notes on Temp. p. 68,) and which was danced and sung by the ordinary performers, to a couple of fiddles, perhaps, in the balcony of the stage, "put to shame all the Masques of Jonson not only in its construction, but in the splen lor of its show."

are only told of the rudeness and barbarity of Whitehall; and Hume is so strangely ignorant of the manners of those times, as to assert that "James affected a rustic contempt of the fair sex, and banished them from his court." Of his contempt I know nothing; but that the ladies were not banished from his court is proved beyond all possibility of doubt by the records of their names in the pages of our author. Year after year, and many times in the course of the same year, (for these masques were often repeated,) the court of James was thronged with all that was distinguished for birth and beauty, for rank and worth, for grace and elegance, and every female accomplishment.

The reputation of Jonson stood so high at this time, that few public solemnities were thought perfect without his assistance. The king had expressed a wish to dine with the Company of Merchant Tailors, who accordingly met to consult on the most honorable mode of receiving him. Stow has preserved the minutes of the court, which are not a little amusing: "Whereas the Company are informed that the King's most excellent majestie with our gratious Queene, and the noble prince and diuers honourable lords and others, determyne to dyne on the day of the eleccion of M. and Wardens, therefore the meeting was appointed to advise and consult how everie thinge may be performde for the reputacion and credit of the company, to his Majesties best lyking and contentment. And sir John Swynnerton" (afterwards lord mayor) "is intreated to confer with master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, about a speech to be made to welcome his Majestic, and about music and other invencions which may give lyking and delight; by reason that the company doubt that their schoolmaster and scholleres be not acquainted with such kinde of entertaynments." This was done; and Stow tells us that the "Speeches" were delivered on the 16th of July, 1607, in a chamber called "The King's Chamber."

It is well known that our author received periodical sums not only from public bodies, but from several of the nobility and gentry. These, it has been said, were not bestowed as free gifts, or as honorable testimonies of his superior talents, but extorted from reluctant hands by the dread of his satire. This is mera arugo. The ever active malice of his most determined enemies has hitherto been unable to discover, either in his own works or in those of others, a single syllable to justify the infamous calumny. The truth is, that the monarchs of those times, though approached with more awe, and served with more respect than at present, yet lived more among their people. A year seldom passed without some royal progress, and corporate bodies were frequently encouraged to feast their sovereign. On all these occasions, the custom of the time,

called for something more than a bare treat - some introductory compliment that might, as it were, ennoble the entertainment, and gratify at once the judgment and the taste. As these visits were irregular, and without much previous notice, it became an object of no small importance with those who were to receive them, to have a person always at command on whose abilities they could rely for an entertainment that should neither disgrace themselves

1 Hist. of England, vol. vi. p. 283.

* This is boldly advanced by Mr. A. Chalmers, and in the most offensive terms. "Disappointed (he says) in the hopes of wealth and independence which his high opinion of himself led him to form, Jonson degenerated even to the resources of a libeller, who extorts from fear what is denied to genius." To require from this calumniator of the poet's memory proof of his assertion would be to no purpose- FOR HE HAS NONE. He who produced in the page immediately preceding this a wicked interpolation by Shiels, and fathered it, in direct terms, on Drummond, cannot be complimented with the supposition of recurring to original documents. But the whole of the charge is false. Jonson was not disappointed in his hopes of riches. He gave himself no concern about them. Even his "friend" Drummond admits that he was "careless to gain." Wealth, in short, he heeded not, titles he rejected, and the only ambition which he ever felt was that of which Mr Chalmers seeks to deprive him-- an honest fame.

As to independence, Jonson relied on. his talents for it. His story, indeed, furnishes another melancholy proof of the instability of all human things. At the age of fifty-one, he probably felt neither doubts nor fears of his sufficiency; yet at this period, he was struck with the malady that finally carried him off. In the twelve sad years that followed, during which he did little more than move from his bed to his grave, he felt the evils of dependence; and let it not be charged on him as a crime that he sought to alleviate them--not by "libels," but by humble supplications for relief. Of these several are found; of the others, NOT ONE WORD was ever in existence.