# Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.")/Ben Jonson

BEN JONSON
I
It is now threescore years since Gifford brought out and dedicated to Canning his edition of the works of Ben Jonson, with the text carefully revised and annotated, and elaborate introductory Memoirs. These Memoirs made a new era in the posthumous history of Rare Ben, tearing to shreds and tatters all the slanders against him, whether woven of errors or of malignant inventions, which had been handed down from one careless writer to another, and particularly all the foul calumnies of his envying and traducing Shakespeare, which the commentators on the latter—Malone, Steevens, and the rest—had fabricated out of the flimsiest and most incongruous yarns of suspicion and prejudice. It was a work well suited to Gifford's mind and temper—keen, vigilant, honest, and somewhat acrid; and he is quite at his best in it, inspired with a generous passion to redeem a great and venerable name from unmerited obloquy. I don't know whether his version of Juvenal still survives; I fancy very few of this generation have read his "Baviad" and "Mæviad," which young Byron termed the first satires of the day, calling aloud, "Why slumbers Gifford?" and, "Arouse thee, Gifford!" but if his ​name lives not by itself, it will at any rate go down to remote posterity honourably associated with that of Massinger, associated more honourably yet with that of Ben Jonson. So thoroughly, indeed, has he wrought his labour of love that, so far as I am aware, he has left nothing of any importance, as regards either the life or the text, to be done by those who come after him. About four years ago Hotten pub- lished a cheap and handy reprint (why undated?), in three volumes, of Gifford's edition, under the care of that excellent editor, the late Lieut. -Col. Francis Cunningham (son of Allan), who made a few slight corrections, added a very few notes, together with some short pieces discovered since Gifford's time; and included a copy of the complete transcript, also unknown to Gifford, of Drummond of Hawthornden's celebrated notes of Ben Jonson's conversations with him, which was found by Mr. David Laing in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh. This latest edition I use for the present article. Benjamin, or (as he usually styled himself) Ben Jonson, was born about a month after his father's death, early in 1573, in the city of Westminster. He told Drummond that "his Grandfather came from Carlisle, and, he thought, from Annandale to it; he served King Henry VHL, and was a gentleman;" whence we may presume that he was one of the Johnstones who abound in Annandale. " His Father losed all his estate under Queen Marie, having been cast in prisson and forfaitted ; at last turned minister : so he was a minister's son," His mother seems soon to have made a second marriage with a master brick- layer. Ben was first sent to a private school in the F ​82 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and afterwards, at the expense of the famous Camden, who was then the second master, to Westminster School. Camden's great work, the " Britannia," was pubHshed in 1586, during the time he was befriending Jonson, and passed through eight editions before 1590. Jonson was ever grateful for his generosity and instruction. " Every Man in his Humour " is dedicated to him ; he is mentioned with honour in two of the "Masques," and to him No. 14 of the "Epigrams" is addressed, well worth citing for the sake of both : — " Camden I most reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in arts, all that I know ; (How nothing's that !) to whom my country owes The great renown and name with which she goes ! Than thee the age sees not that thing rndre grave, More high, more holy, that she more would crave. What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things ! What sight in searching the most antique springs ! What weight, and what authority in thy speech I Men scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst teach. Pardon free truth, and let thy modesty, Which conquers all, be once o'ercome by thee. Many of thine this better could than I ; But for their powers, accept my piety." It is said that from Westminster he went to Cam- bridge, an exhibition having been procured for him ; but there is no clear evidence on the point. If he did go, he did not matriculate, for he told Drummond that he was Master of Arts in both the Universities by their favour, not his study. When he returned home his stepfather took him into his own business, and many a mean sneer was afterwards flung at Ben for his bricklaying, by those of his contemporaries with whom he was at feud. He seems to have kept, ​BEN JONSON 83 or been kept, to the trade only about a twelvemonth, for he could not endure it ; and, when eighteen, went off as a volunteer to the English army in Flanders. Though he served but one campaign, he was always proud of his soldiering. Drummond reports from his owns lips : " In his service in the Low Countries, he had, in the face of both the campes, killed ane enemie and taken opima spo/ia from him." As Gifford remarks, in those days, when great battles were rarely fought, and armies lay for half a cam- paign in sight of each other, it was not unusual for champions to advance into the midst and challenge their adversaries ; and he thinks it probable that at that particular time such challenges were encouraged by Vere, the English general, who was undertaking the most daring enterprises, in order to animate the troops, dispirited by the tame surrender of a fort by Stanley. In his Epigram 108, "To True Soldiers," Ben writes loftily : — " I swear by your true friend, my Muse, I love Your great profession, which I once did prove ; And did not shame it with my actions then, No more than I dare now do with my pen." It is probable that Jonson returned to England be- cause of his stepfather's death. He says that on his return he resumed his wonted studies. His story at this time is very obscure; but he appears, like so many of his educated contemporaries, to have resorted to writing for the stage. It is said that he also tried acting and failed, but there is no evidence for this save Decker's " Satiromastix," which, as a rabid attack on Jonson, cannot be trusted in anything that concerns him. He had at least one qualification ​84 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES for the stage, according to the Duchess of Newcastle, who says in her " Letters " (Charles Lamb's delight) : * " I never heard any man read well but my husband, and I have heard him say that he never heard any man read well but Ben Jonson, and yet he hath heard many in his time ; " as well he might, his house for half-a-century being open to every man of genius or learning. It was then the custom of managers to hire authors to write new pieces or re-write old, advancing them money on the credit of their talents, or in proportion to the progress of the work; and they encouraged young authors to write in conjunction with those already in possession of the stage. Jonson's earliest efforts were made in this manner, but it is not known in what dramas he took part. The first we are sure of, and this is by him alone, is " Every Man in his Humour," which was popular in 1596, having been acted eleven times between November of that year and May of the year following. It is remarkably mature for a writer but little over twenty. Before this was pro- duced he had married, and must have been in con- siderable straits. Drummond reports : '* He maried a
importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle ?— knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious folio ;— what but the mere spirit of contra- diction, and childish love of getting the better of thy friend ? Then, worst cut of all ! to transport it with thee to the Gallican Land — " Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwell, Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder." —Eli A, on The Two Races of Men . ​BEN JONSON 85 wyfe who was a shrew, yet honest [chaste] ; five yeers he had not bedded with her, but remayned with my Lord Aulbanie." This was Esme, Lord Aubigny, afterwards Duke of Lenox, to whom " Sejanus " was dedicated, and Epigram 127 addressed, beginning — " Is there a hope that man would thankful be, If I should fail in gratitude to thee, To whom I am so bound, loved Aubigny ? " By this marriage he had several children, of whom none is known to have survived him. There is a record, which may refer to him, of another marriage in 1623. In 1597 there are memorandums of ad- vances by Henslowe and his son-in-law, Alleyn (the founder of Dulwich College), to Ben Jonson, on account of works in progress, which, however, are not specified : ;^4 twice, twenty shillings, and as low as five shillings. One of these notes calls him ** player," so that there is some foundation for the story that he tried acting at first. The scene of " Every Man in his Humour" was at first laid in Italy, and as the manners were almost wholly English, there were of course many incongruities. Jonson was, therefore, well advised when he transferred the action to London, turned the Italian names into English, made all altera- tions necessary, and introduced circumstances appro- priate to the new scene. According to the custom of the times, these numerous changes made the revised piece his own, although he had sold it in its first form right out, reserving no interest in it whatever; and in 1598 this revised piece was acted for the first time at the Black Friars Theatre (Henslowe and Alleyn had the Rose), and at the head of the list of the prin- cipal performers in it stands the name of Shakespeare, ​86 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES whose first acquaintance with Ben Jonson is com- monly assigned to this period. This fine comedy estabUshed the author's reputation, and placed him at once, though only twenty-five, among the foremost dramatists of the age. From this period, says Gifford, he perceptibly grew into acquaintance and familiarity with tfie wise and great ; and from this period he was pursued by the envious detraction of some of the less fortunate playwrights with whom he had been accus- tomed to work, particularly Decker and Marston. Poor as he was when the first version was brought out (probably in 1595), the Prologue is remarkable for the high freedom of its strain, commencing — " Though need make many poets, and some such As art and nature have not bettered much ; Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage, As he dare serve the ill customs of the age, Or purchase your delight at such a rate, As, for it, he himself must justly hate." And near the end was a very lofty passage, not in the current version, but retained by Gifford in a note — - " You see How abjectly your poetry is ranked. In general opinion. . . . I can refell opinion, and approve The state of poesy, such as it is, Blessed, eternal, and most true divine : Indeed, if you will look on poesy, As she appears in many, jioor and lame, Patched up in remnants and old worn-out rags, Half-starved for want of her peculiar food, Sacred invention — then I must confirm Both your conceit and censure of her merit : But view her in her glorious ornaments. Attired in the majesty of art. ​I BEN JONSON , 87 Set high in spirit with the precious taste Of sweet philosophy; and, which is most, Crowned with the rich traditions of a soul. That hates to have her dignity prophaned With any relish of an earthly thought, Oh ! then how proud a presence doth she bear ! Then is she like herself, fit to be seen Of none but grave and consecrated eyes." In the words of Gifford : " These lines, which were probably written before he had attained his twenty- second [twenty-third] year, do not discredit him ; and let it be added to his honour, that he invariably sup- ported, through every period of his chequered life, the lofty character with which his youthful fancy had invested the Muse." It may be noticed also, with regard to the "sacred invention," poesy's "peculiar food," that he always insisted on this, calling " versers," not poets, such as had not manifested this high faculty, whatever their merits. Keats thought in like manner. When about the same age as Jonson he wrote thus : " Besides, a long poem is a test of Invention, which I take to be the polar- star of poetry, as Fancy is the sails, and Imagination the rudder. . . . This same Invention seems, indeed, of late years to have been forgotten as a poetical excellence." This year, i598,^in which he made his first decisive step towards fame and fortune, had almost brought his career to an abrupt close. He informed Drummond that, " being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversarie, which had hurt him in the arme, and whose sword was i o inches longer than his ; for the which he was emprissoned, and almost at the gallowes. Then took he his religion by trust, of a priest who visited him in prisson. Thereafter he was 12 yeares ​88 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES a Papist. ... In the tyme of his close imprisonment under Queen Elizabeth, his judges could get nothing of him to all their demands but I [Ay] and No. They placed two damn'd villains to catch advantage of him, with him, but he was advertized by his keeper: of the Spies he hath ane epigrame." Which is No. 59:— " Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff, Who, when you've burnt yourselves down to the snuff. Stink, and are thrown away. End fair enough." Gifford antedates these events about three years, while exposing " maggoty-pated" Aubrey, who writes : " He killed Mr. Marlowe, the poet, on Bunhill, coming from the Green Curtain playhouse [a low- class theatre in Shoreditch] ; " Marlowe, whom Jonson highly esteemed, witness his *' Marlowe's mighty line," having been killed in a tavern brawl at Deptford, in May 1593: a tragical loss to English poetry, only surpassed by the drowning of Shelley at nearly the same age. Col. Cunningham, however, quotes from Collier's "Life of AUeyn," a letter of Henslowe, dated 26th September 1598: "Sence you weare with me I have lost one of my company which hurteth me greatley, that is Gabrell, for he is slayen in Hogesden fylldes by the hands of bergemen [bengemen, for Benjamin? Henslowe spelling the name thus else- where] Jonson, bricklayer." The " bricklayer " was probably added in bitterness of spirit for the loss of a friend and actor not easy to replace; perhaps, also, in spleen, because Jonson had taken the revised, " Every Man in his Humour," to another house. The spies, we may presume, were set upon him simply because of his communication with the priest. ​BEN JONSON 89 Plots against the life of the Queen abounded, as did spies to counteract them ; several Romish priests educated abroad were convicted of attempting to poison her, and executed; and new converts, such as Jonson then was, were among the most zealous and daring tools of the Jesuits. It is not known how long he was kept in prison on this occasion, nor how he procured his release. The facts that he was the challenged and not the challenging party, and that his adversary acted unfairly in using a sword so much the longer, must have weighed in his favour. In 1599 his Comical Satire, "Every Man out of his Humour," was first acted at the Globe on the Bank Side, by the Lord Chamberlain's servants, who, being licensed by King James soon after his accession, took the title of His Majesty's Servants. All the principal members of the company, except Shake- speare, had parts in this piece. When published, in the following year, Jonson dedicated it to "The noblest Nurseries of Humanity and Liberty in the Kingdom, the Inns of Court," stating : " When I wrote this poem I had friendship with divers in your societies ; who, as they were great names in learning, so they were no less examples of living." In the introductory dialogue, which is substituted for the ordinary prologue, Jonson, under the name of Asper, is fiercely passionate in his denunciation of prevalent vices. Thus he exclaims — " my soul Was never ground into such oily colours, To flatter vice, and daub iniquity : But, with an armed and resolved hand, I'll strip the ragged follies of the time Naked as at their birth." ​90 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES And again : —
When I am pleased t' unmask a public vice. I fear no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's stab, Should I detect their hateful luxuries : No broker's, usurer's, or lawyer's gripe, Were I disposed to say, they are all corrupt. I fear no courtier's frown should I applaud The easy flexure of his supple hams. " And, when he turns to the audience, he addresses them thus, courtly, yet careful to reserve his inde- pendence and self-esteem : —
Apollo and the Muses feast your eyes With graceful objects, and may our Minerva Answer your hopes, unto their largest strain ! Yet here mistake me not, judicious friends ; I do not this to beg your patience, Or servilely to fawn on your applause, Like some dry brain, despairing in his merit. Let me be censured by the austerest brow. Where I want art or judgment tax me freely : Let envious censors, with their broadest eyes, Look through and through me : il pursue no favour ; Only vouchsafe me your attentions, And I will give you music worth your ears." "Every Man out of his Humour" was well re- ceived. "Queen Elizabeth, drawn by its fame, honoured the play with her presence ; and Jonson, to pay a respectful compliment to his sovereign, altered the conclusion of his play into an elegant panegyric. Mr. Collins, the poet," Gifford cites from Davies, "Dram. Miscel.," "first pointed out to me the peculiar beauties of this address." This stands ​3EN JONSON 91 now as the epilogue at the presentation before the Queen, who was one of the first encouragers of the youthful poet : " Three distinct notices of Jonson appear in Mr. Henslowe's memorandum-book for the year 1599. The sum of forty shillings was advanced to him and Decker, for a play which they were writing in conjunction ; a like sum for another, in which Chettle was joined with them ; and a third sum of twenty shillings for a tragedy ('The Scotts Tragedy') which he was probably writing alone. None of these are now extant, but ' Cynthia's Revels,' on which he was at this time employed, was lyought out in the following year." When one reads of such small advances, even allowing for the greater value of money at that time, one understands why some of the dramatists were so exceedingly prolific ; for a man could not have sustained life on slow, careful, play-writing, unless eked out by acting or a share in a theatre ; and one agrees with GifFord that Jonson must have written much more than has come down to us with his name, and mended many plays, in order to support his family. It is true that he was assisted by patrons, such as the Lord Aubigny already mentioned, and the Earl of Pembroke, who, as he told Drummond, every first day of the new year sent him ;i^2o to buy books ; it is also true that Drummond reports : " Sundry tymes he hath devoured his bookes, i.e., sold them for necessity P And also: "He dissuaded me from Poetrie, for that she had beggered him, when he might have been a rich lawer, physitian or marchant." " Cynthia's Revels : a Comical Satire," was first pri- vately acted by the children (all boys) of the Queen's ​92 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Chapel, a well-trained, well-established, and popular company, who shared the Blackfriars with the Lord Chamberlain's servants. It is a satire on the cour- tiers of the day, infected with the high-flown, fantastic, and pedantic affectations of euphuism made fashion- able by John Lyly. II In the first year of the seventeenth century we find " Bengemy " employed by Henslowe in writing addi- tions to " Jeronymo," and Alleyn advancing him forty shillings on account of them. As Gifford remarks, had the records of any other theatres been preserved, we should probably have found the name of our poet among their supporters, for he must have produced much more at this time than has reached us. In this same year the " Poetaster " was brought out, also at the Blackfriars and by the children of the Queen's Chapel. In this play Marston and Decker were satirised, under the names of Crispinus and Demetrius. Jonson, in the " Apologetical Dialogue" affixed to the piece, thus vindicates and explains his purpose —
The law and lawyers, captains and the players, By their particular names. Author. It is not so. I used no name. My books have still been taught To spare the persons and to speak the vices. Sure I am, three years They did provoke me with their petulant styles . On every stage : and I at last, unwilling, But weary, I confess, of so much trouble, ​BEN JONSON 93 Thought I would try if shame could win upon 'em ; And therefore chose Augustus Caesar's times, When wit and art were at their height in Rome, To shew that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master-spirits, did not want Detractors then, or practicers against them." As for the soldiers, he cleared himself with them by the " Address to True Soldiers," already quoted from ; but that much more ferocious class, the lawyers, gave him more trouble, and it needed the influence of a powerful friend among them (Mr. Richard Martin, Recorder of the City of London, to whom he grate- fully dedicated the piece when published) to save him from prosecution. The general public was favour- able to it. Decker retorted with " Satiromastix ; or, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet," produced in the following year. He was a rapid and vigorous writer, with a vein of passionate poetry richer than any in Jonson's richer mine ; but this play is by no means a favourable specimen of his powers. As Gifford says : " Jonson played with his subject ; but Decker writes in downright passion, and foams through every page." In the " Apologetical Dialogue," we read : — ' ' Author. What they have done 'gainst me I am not moved with : if it gave them meat, Or got them clothes, 'tis well, that was their end. Only amongst them, I am sorry for Some better natures, by the rest so drawn To run in that vile line. Pol. And is this all ! Will you not answer, then, the libels ? Aut. No. Pol. Nor the Untrussers ? Aut. Neither. ​94 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Pol. You're undone then. Aut. With whom ? Pol. The world, Aut. The bawd ! Pol. It will be taken To be stupidity or tameness in you. Aut. But they that have incensed me can in soul Acquit me of that guilt." A few more lines of this "Dialogue" are worth quoting here : — > " Pol. They say you are slow, And scarce bring forth a play a year. Aut. 'Tis true. I would they could not say that I did that ! There's all thrf joy that I take in their trade, Unless such scribes as these might be proscribed Th' abused theatres." In effect, he says the "Poetaster" was written in fifteen weeks. Jonson told Drummond that "he had .many quarrels with Marston, beat him and took his pistol from him, wrote his 'Poetaster' on him; the beginning of them were, that Marston represented him in the stage, in his youth given to venerie." At the end of the " Dialogue " he says — " And since the Comic Muse Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try If Tragedy have a more kind aspect. ... 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." Accordingly, " Sejanus : His Fall " was brought out at the Globe, in 1603, with Shakespeare, Burbage, Hemings, and others in the principal parts. It was well received by the more educated of the audience, ​BEN JONSON 95 but proved "caviare to the general." It was after- wards remodelled, and acquired considerable popu- larity. Jonson says, in the Dedication to Esme, Lord Aubigny : " It is a poem that, if I well remember, in your lordship's sight, suffered no less violence from our people here, than the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome ; but with a different fate, as, I hope, merit ; for this hath outlived their malice, and begot itself a greater favour than he lost, the love of good men." Jonson's continual references to Latin authorities throughout the piece prove how comprehensive and exact was his learning in that department, as in others. He told Drummond : "Northampton was his mortall enimie for beating, on a St. George's day, one of his attenders : He was called before the Councell for his 'Sejanus,' and accused both of poperie and treason by him." This, as Col. Cunningham notes, was Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, the very man against whom Lady Bacon warns her sons Anthony and Francis, as a "dangerous intelligencing man, and no doubt a subtile papist inwardly; a very instrument of the Spanish papists." About the time he was working on this tragedy he had other work in hand, as appears by a note in Henslowe's memorandum-book : " Lent unto Bengemy Johnsone at the appoyntment of E. AUeyn and Wm. Birde, the 22 June, 1602, in earnest of a boocke called * Richard Crookback,' and for new adycions for Jeronymo, the sum of x lb." It would have been interesting to compare or contrast Jonson's " Richard Crookback " with Shakespeare's " Richard III. ;" but the former has perished, like most of the pieces brought out and bought out by the same ​96 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES managers, because they kept them in their own hands as long as possible. With the accession of James I., in 1603, when Ben Jonson was thirty, we enter upon our poet's golden prime. Now begins that splendid series of entertain- ments and masques, stately, fantastic, humorous, composed for princes (as Lord Bacon says) and by princes performed; wherein ** the supposed rugged old bard " lavished such inexhaustible stores of exquisite invention and lyrical grace. Now shall come forth — "The 'Fox,' the 'Alchemist' and 'Silent Woman,' Done by Ben Jonson, and outdone by no man." Now we find him at the Mermaid, whose very name is a thrill of inspiration ; in that Club founded by Sir Walter Raleigh, and composed of Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Donne, and others only less illustrious, a constellation of genius perhaps un- equalled before or since, save by the Periclean guests of the Banquet of Plato. In these reunions occurred those friendly wit-combats between Shakespeare and Jonson, so excellently characterised by Fuller, who, however, must have been guided by tradition, as he was too young at the time to witness them himself. Beaumont's lines on the subject are so hackneyed that one is rather ashamed to quote them once more, but also so fine and apposite that one can scarcely omit them from a notice of Rare Ben, to whom they are specially addressed from the dull-witted country : — " What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been So nimV)le, and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came ​BEN JONSON 97 Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life ; then where there hath been thrown Wit able enough to justify the town For three days past : wit that might warrant be For the whole city to talk foolishly Till that were cancelled." But these splendid years were ushered in by domestic calamity and political persecution. In 1603 the plague is said to have carried off 30,000 persons in London alone. Drummond, to whose notes we must continually recur, as they were taken down fresh from Jonson's own lips, reports : " When the King came in England at that tyme the pest was in London, he [our poet] being in the country at Sir Robert Cotton's house with old Cambden, he saw in a vision his eldest sone, then a child [seven years old] and at London, appear unto him with the mark of a bloodie crosse on his forehead, as if it had been cutted with a sword, at which amazed he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came to Mr. Cambden's chamber to tell him ; who persuaded him it was but ane apprehension of his fantasie, at which he sould not be disjected; in the mean tyme comes there letters from his wife, of the death of that boy in the plague. He appeared to him (he said) of a manlie shape, and of that grouth that he thinks he shall be at the resurrection."* Epigram 45 is dedicated to
earlier, in reference to what appears the rather incongruous spelling of some of these notes, that what is termed the " literal transcript " may be not quite literal, although strictly verbal, having been made by the well-known Edinburgh antiquary and physician. Sir Robert Sibbald, probably about the end of the eighteenth century. He may have sometimes modernised, sometimes not. G ​98 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES the memory of this his first son, who was named after him ; it contains the distich — " Rest in soft peace, and asked, say here doth lie Ben Jonson, his best piece of Poetry." Continuing from Drummond : " He was delated by Sir James Murray to the King, for writing something against the Scots, in a play 'Eastward Hoe,' and voluntarily imprissoned himself with Chapman and Marston, who had written it amongst them. The report was, that they should then [have] had their ears cut [i.e., slit] and noses. After their delivery, he banqueted all his friends ; there was Camden, Selden, and others; at midst of the feast his old mother dranke to him, and shew him a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prisson among his drinke, which was full of lustie strong poison, and that she was no churle, she told, she minded first to have drunk of it herself." High-hearted old dame ! lofty as the loftiest of Sparta or Rome ! Can we wonder at the indomitableness of the son of such a mother ? Nor must we pass without notice his own magnanimity in joining of his own free will his colleagues in pri- son, when secure in court-favour, and although he had no hand in the incriminated passage. " East- ward Hoe ! " " an uncommonly sprightly and good- natured comedy," seems to have been brought out in 1604 ; and, as the passage was suppressed in most of the copies printed in 1605, it may be well to give it, as quoted by Gifford from " Old Plays," vol. iv., p. 250: "You shall live freely there [in the then new settlement of Virginia] without Serjeants, or courtiers, ​BEN JONSON 99 or lawyers, or intelligencers : only a few industrious Scots, perhaps, who indeed are dispersed over the face of the whole earth. But as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England when they are out on't, in the world, than they are : and, for my part, I would a hundred thousand of them were there, for we are all one countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort of them there than here." It would be a perfervid Scot indeed who in our days could not smile with serene superio- rity at such banter as this. In the following year, 1605, Jonson was again in prison with Chapman for some other play in which they had been jointly concerned, as appears by his manly letter to the Earl of Salisbury, begging his influence— not for pardon, as he denied any guilt — but for a speedy hearing, which they obtained, and were released. In this year the magnificent comedy, " Volpone ; or. The Fox," was produced at the Globe, Shake- speare's name not appearing this time in the list of the chief performers. It was soon afterwards acted with great applause at both the Universities, to which, when first printed, it was inscribed: "To the most noble and most equal sisters the two famous Univer- sities, for their love and acceptance shown to this Poem in the presentation ; Ben Jonson, the grateful acknowledger, dedicates both It and Himself." The subscription is : " From my House in the Black- Friars, this nth day of February, 1607." The whole Dedication is a model of stately and vigorous eloquence, vindicating true poetry from the disgrace which has been brought upon it by vile pretenders, and vindicating himself from any fellowship with ​100 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES those who pandered to the coarse and profane lusts of the populace. Here are a few of its weighty sentences : " But it will here be hastily answered, that the writers of these days are other things ; that not only their manners, but their natures are inverted, and nothing remaining with them of the dignity of poet, but the abused name, which every scribe usurps ; that now, especially in dramatic, or, as they term it, stage-poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, all license of offence to God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great part of this, I am sorry I dare not, because in some men's abortive features (and would they had never boasted the light) it is over true : but that all are embarked in this bold adventure for hell is a most uncharitable thought, and, uttered, a more malicious slander. For my particular, I can, and from a most clear conscience, affirm, that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness ; have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed bawdry, as is now made the food of the scene : and, howsoever I cannot escape from some, the imputation of sharpness, but that they will say, I have taken a pride, or lust to be bitter, and not my youngest infant but hath come into the world with all his teeth ; I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order or state I have provoked? What public person? Whether I have not in all these preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? My works are read, allowed (I speak of those that are entirely mine), look into them, what broad reproofs have I used ? where have I been particular ? where personal ? except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon, crea​tures, for their insolencies, worthy to be taxed ? Yet to which of these so pointingly, as he might not either ingenuously have confest, or wisely dissembled his disease?" In the Prologue he answers those who said that he was a year about a play :— " To this there needs no lie, but this his creature, Which was two months since no feature ; And though he dares give them five lives to mend it, 'Tis known, five weeks fully penned it, From his own hand, without a coadjutor, Novice, journeyman, or tutor." Gifford well observes : " No human powers 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. . . . 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 ; " and Lord Falkland (Clarendon's Falk- land, killed at the battle of Newbury, in that great civil war which was breaking his heart), writes in his excellent and earnest " Eglogue on the Death of Ben Jonson " : * — " His learning such, no author old nor new, Escaped his reading that deserved his view. And such his judgment, so exact his test. Of what was best in books, as what books best,
the hint for a famous passage in one of his prose works, contemning the authority of the Fathers : — "And Time, like what our brooks act in our sight, Oft sinks the weighty, and upholds the light." ​102 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES That had he joined those notes his labours 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 : And such his wit, he writ past what he quotes, And his productions far exceed his notes." His reputation now stood so high that he was con- tinually being called upon to assist in writing and inventing, usually in conjunction with Inigo Jones, the superb and imaginative masques and entertain- ments, which were the delight of the court, the city, the gentry, in those barbarous times : public page- ants and solemnities how inferior, intellectually and artistically, to the dishevelled scramble of our royal drawing-rooms and levees, to the danceless crush of our state balls, to our Mansion House and Guildhall feasts, with their gorgeous gorging and vinous after- eloquence ! He received periodical sums, not only from public bodies, but from several of the nobility and gentry, as a sort of retaining fees to command his services whenever they might be required. In 1609 appeared, "Epiccene; or, the Silent Woman," first performed by the Children of His Majesty's Revels. When printed it soon ran through several editions, and as a stage-play was long the most popular of his works. This was followed, in 1610, by the third — and, I think, with Gifford, the greatest of the supreme three — "The Alchemist." It is dedi- cated " To the Lady most deserving her Name and Blood, Lady Mary Wroth," one of the noble Sidneys (niece of Sir Philip) he so worthily loved and honoured, and who so worthily loved and honoured him. Epigrams 103 and 105 are addressed to her, of which the former may be in part cited here : — ​BEN JONSON 103 " How well, fair crown of your fair sex, might he That but the twilight of your sprite did see, And noted for what flesh such souls were framed, Know you to be a Sidney, though unnamed ! And being named, how little doth that name Need any Muse's praise to give it fame ; Which is itself the imprese of the great, And glory of them all, but to repeat ! " To her husband, Sir Robert Wroth, the third piece in the " Forest " is addressed. From the quarto of 161 2 Gifford retrieved a pregnant advertisement to the reader : " If thou beest more, thou art an Understander, and then I trust thee. . . . But how out of purpose and place do I name art? When the professors are grown so obstinate contemners of it, and presumers on their own naturals, as they are deriders of all diligence that way, and by simple mocking at the terms, when they understand not the things, think to get off wittily with their ignorance. Nay, they are esteemed the more learned and sufficient for this, by the many, through their excellent vice of judgment. For they commend writers as they do fencers or wrestlers ; who, if they come in robustu- ously, and put for it with a great deal of violence, are received for the braver fellows : when many times their own rudeness is the cause of their disgrace, and a little touch of their adversary gives all that boisterous force the foil. [This sentence is reproduced in his " Discoveries," in the section Censura de Foetisi I deny not that these men, who always seek to do more than enough, may some time happen on some thing that is good and great — but very seldom ; and when it comes it doth not recompense the rest of their ill. It sticks out, perhaps, and is more eminent, ​104 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES because all is sordid and vile about it, as lights are more discerned in a thick darkness than a faint shadow." About this time Jonson, who had deeply studied the grounds of the controversy between the Reformed and Roman Churches, and convinced him- self of the delusions of Popery, made a solemn recantation of his errors, and was re-admitted into the bosom of the Church, which he had abandoned twelve years before. Drummond reports : " After he was reconciled with the Church, and left of to be a recusant, at his first communion, in token of true reconciliation, he drank out all the full cup of wyne," whereon Gifford remarks that his feelings were always strong, and the energy of his character was impressed upon every act of his life. Yet, without any pretence or authority, Gifford goes on to assert that this story is foisted into the Conversations by Drummond ! and then, with another inconsistency, he observes that more wine was drunk at the altar in the poet's day than ours, as if to make an act common which Drummond records because peculiar. But whenever Church and State are in question — the Church and State of most narrow and insular England — Gifford's logical acuteness and clear judgment desert him ; he is possessed by the demon of the Quarterly — not the old Lady of our times, with wig and false teeth and well-pared nails, and voice that quavers in its scolding, but the young Fury of the young century, brandishing fiery torches, agitating her serpent locks. ​BEN JONSON 105 III In 161 1 "Catiline, his Conspiracy," was brought out; a noble tragedy of its class, being what Jonson termed "a legitimate Poem" full-charged from the ancient authorities, and abounding with a truly Roman energy, from the opening speech of the Ghost of Sylla, terrific in its imprecations and its introduction of the ferocious and atrocious conspirator, to the final narrative of his defeat and death delivered by Petreius. Macaulay, it appears, has written some- where that " Ben's heroic couplets resemble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand with a blunt hatchet," and that they are "jagged, mis-shapen distiches." This judgment, like most others of his absolute lordship, is a great deal too sweeping. Jonson, in common with nearly all his contempo- raries, has, indeed, many very rude heroic couplets; but he has likewise many quite harmonious and stately in rhythm, while informed, moreover, with such vigour as is scarcely found after Dryden. Thus, in this proemium of the Ghost of Sylla : — "Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet ! is night So heavy on thee, and my weight so light ? Can Sylla's ghost arise within thy walls, Less threatening than an earthquake the quick falls Of thee and thine ? Shake not the frighted heads Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds ? Or, as their ruin the large Tyber fills. Make that swell up and drown thy seven proud hills ? What sleep is this doth seize thee so like death, And is not it ? Wake, feel her in my breath : ​Behold, I come, sent from the Stygian sound, As a dire vapour that had cleft the ground, To ingender with the night, and blast the day ; Or like a pestilence that should display Infection through the world : which thus I do " [The curiam drmvs, and Catiline is discovered in his siudj:] If this trumpet-blast be uttered in "jagged, mis-shapen distiches," I make over my ears to the man who does the doleful elegies for Punch, that he may have a suitable second pair ready in case he should lose his own, which are generally recognised as the worst in the three kingdoms. This work, which is said to have been the author's favourite, was published in quarto in the same year, with a dedication, " To the Great Example of Honour and Virtue, the Most Noble William, Earl of Pem- broke," the son of Sir Philip Sidney's sister, to whom he also dedicated the Epigrams, and addressed No. 1 02. There were also prefixed characteristic ad- dresses to the Reader in Ordinary and to the Reader Extraordinary. To the first he says : " The muses forbid that I should restrain your meddling, whom I see already busy with the title and tricking over the leaves : it is your own. I departed with my right when I let it first abroad ; and now, so secure an interpreter I am of my chance, that neither praise nor dispraise from you can affect me. Though you commend the two first acts, with the people, because they are the worst ; and dislike the oration of Cicero [Act iv., Sc. 2], in regard you read some pieces of it at school and understand them not yet : I shall find the way to forgive you. Be anything you will at your own charge. . . . But I leave you to your exercise. ​BEN JONSON 107 Begin." To the other he says briefly : " You I would understand to be the better man, though places in court go otherwise : to you I submit myself and work. Farewell." In 1612 the death of Prince Henry put a stop for the time to all festivities at court, and Jonson took advantage of this interval, when his services were not required for masques or entertainments, to visit the Continent. Drummond reports : " S. W. Raulighe sent him governour with his Son, anno 16 13, to France. This youth being knavishly inclyned, among other pastimes . . . caused him to be drunken, and dead drunk, so that he knew not wher he was, ther- after laid him on a carr, which he made to be drawen by pioners through the streets, at every corner show- ing his governour stretched out, and telling them that was a more lively image of the Crucifix than any they had : at which sport young Raughlie's mother delyghted much (saying, his father young was so inclyned) though the Father abhorred it." This young scapegrace Walter, as Col. Cunningham notes, accompanied his father on his last fatal expedi- tion, and was killed in an ambush on the banks of the Orinoco, on New Year's Day, 16 18, in his twenty- third year. In 1614 *' Bartholomew Fair" was produced at the Hope Theatre, on the Bank-side, Its subject, its multitude of familiar characters, its broad humour, its ridicule of the Puritans (most delectable to GifTord), combined to make it extremely popular; and it is said to have first called forth the " O rare Ben Jonson ! " afterwards placed for all epitaph upon his tombstone. It was followed, in 1616, by "The ​Devil is an Ass." a capital comedy, satirising mono- polists and projectors, and exposing pretended de- moniacs and witch-finders. Neither of these is in the excellent folio of 1616, which was carefully revised by the author, and contains, in addition to the other dramas already mentioned, several masques and entertainments, the Epigrams, and the collection of poems called the " Forest." The two last-named comedies may have been excluded by the fact that the volume was carried through the press some con- siderable time before its publication. Gifford says : " He seems to have meditated a complete edition of all his works ; but he apparently grew weary towards the conclusion of the volume, and never (unless peculiarly called upon) had recourse to the press afterwards. The second folio is a wretched con- tinuation of the first, printed from MSS. surrepti- tiously obtained during his life, or ignorantly hurried through the press after his death. It bears a variety of dates, from 1631 to 1641 inclusive. It is probable that he looked forward to a period of retirement and ease, when he might be enabled to collect, revise, and publish his works at leisure ; but the loss of all his MSS. by fire, and the fatal illness which almost immediately afterwards seized him, rendered all such views abortive. It is remarkable that he calls his Epigrams ' Book the First : ' he had, therefore, others in his hand ; but they have perished." On which it may be observed that in the course of the nine years following, during which he produced nothing for the stage proper, though he wrote some masques, it seems likely that he had leisure enough for carrying out such a plan, if he had been bent upon doing so. It ​BEN JONSON 109 was at this period that James conferred upon him, by letters patent, a yearly pension of one hundred marks, thus constituting him the first regular Poet Laureate, in the modern sense. " Hitherto the laureateship appears to have been a mere title, adopted at pleasure by those who were employed to write for the court, but conveying no privileges, and establishing no claim • to a salary. Occasional gratuities were undoubtedly bestowed on occasional services, but an annual deter- minate sum seems to have been issued for the first time in favour of Jonson." In the summer of 16 18, in response to a warm invitation, he made his celebrated journey to Scotland, where he had many friends, especially among the connections of the Duke of Lenox, whom we have already met with as Lord Aubigny. His journey was made on foot, and he appears to have spent several months with the nobility and gentry in the neighbour- hood of Edinburgh. Taylor, the Water-Poet, in his " Pennyless Pilgrimage," writes : " Now the day before I came from Edenborough I went to Leeth, where I found my long approved and assured good friend. Master Benjamin Johnson, at one Master John Stuart's house. I thanke him for his great kindnesse towards me : for at my taking leave of him, he gave me a piece of gold of two-and-twenty shillings to drink his health in England ; and withall willed me to remember his kind commendations to all his friends. So with a friendly farewell I left him as well as I hope never to see him in a worse estate ; for he is amongst Noblemen and Gentlemen that knowe his true worth, and their own honours, where with much respective [respectful] love he is worthily entertained." ​This was about the 20th September. He paid many other visits, including one to the elegant and scholarly poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden, near Edinburgh.* This, according to Gifford, occu- pied the greater part of April 1619 ; but, as Col. Cunningham shows, it clearly occurred before January 17, 1619.1 Drummond, as we are all aware, took notes of his conversations ; and of these I can dis- cover no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy, in spite of the furious raging of Gifford ; nor can I see that the conversations thus reported derogate in any degree from the character or judgment of Jonson. But Drummond pretended a cordial amity for his guest, writing after the visit, on the 17th January, 161 9 : "If there be any other thing in this country (unto which my power can reach), command it ; there is nothing 1 wish more than to be in the calendar of
says : ' ' Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least — than that of Milton or of Shakespeare? It may be that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are. Kit Marlowe [Lamb, as an intimate, had the right to call him Kit], Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley." In the same essay, by-the-bye, he says of the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess, concerning which I have already quoted him : " No casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable to honour and keep safe such a jewel." t Col. Cunningham points out that Gifford errs in some dates relating to this visit or depending upon the "Conversations," through ignorance of the fact that in Scotland the year began on the ist January after A.u. 1600. Thus he places Drummond's letter of January, 1619, after Jonson's letters of May and July, 1619 — which, of course, would have been the proper order had Drummond been an Englishman, dating in the then English style. ​them who love you ; " and signing, " Your loving friend, W. D." Yet, as an appendix to the Notes, which are dated only two days after this, we find that bitter character of Ben Jonson which has, naturally enough, given rise to so much controversy and to so much obloquy on one side and the other. Having been long chiefly quoted for detraction of the guest, it is now principally applied to the disgrace of the host ; and I must confess that, all things considered, the latter use seems to me more just than the former. Col. Cunningham attempts to mitigate judgment, but not without faltering : " I have no doubt that Drummond, a valetudinarian and ' minor poet,' was thoroughly borne down by the superior powers, physical and mental, of Jonson, and heartily glad when he saw the last of his somewhat boisterous and somewhat arrogant guest. The picture drawn by one who thus felt himself ' sat upon ' at every turn was not likely to be a flattering one ; and yet there is nothing in the Conversations to lead us to expect that the portrait given at the end of them would be composed entirely of shadows. But may we not suppose that on the 24th of January 16 19, on his way to Leith, Jonson may have passed the night at Hawthornden, and, full of the idea of returning home, and warmed with the generous liquors, for the abundance and quality of which — • The heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye,' has always been famous, have forgotten that he was at the table of a prim Scotch laird, and dreaming himself already in the Apollo or at the Mermaid, given vent to each feeling as it rose ; whether vanity, ​112 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES scorn, contempt, ridicule, mistrust, boasting, love of country and friends, passionate kindness, regardless- ness of money and gain, eagerness to conquer, and readiness to own himself vanquished ? Had Drum- mond waited till time and distance had mellowed his feelings, he would, I am persuaded, have employed some such terms as I have here substituted for the harsher sounding synonyms actually recorded." The explanation is plausible ; but, in answer to the kindly- meant palliation, we are constrained to ask the simple question : Why, then, did Drummond preserve un- altered this "portrait composed almost entirely of shadows," to be found at his death, thirty years after- wards, and when Jonson had been long dead, among his papers, and exhibited to the world as the true likeness of the great man to whom he signed him- self, " Your loving friend ? " To myself the conduct of Drummond in this instance appears marked by meanness and tainted with duplicity ; and open- hearted Ben seems to have fared about as badly at his hands as Blake would have fared at the hands of Hayley, had the latter noted down his conversa- tions and drawn his portrait after his residence at Felpham. The portrait itself will find its fitting place when I come to discuss the character of Jonson ; here it will be sufficient to give a few of the more interest- ing notes not already cited : " He had ane intention to perfect ane Epick Poeme intitled 'Heroologia, or the Worthies of this Country rowsed by Fame ; ' and was to dedicate it to his Country : it is all in couplets, for he detesteth all other rimes. For a Heroik poeme, he said, ther was no such ground as King Arthur's fiction " — a judgment in which he was followed by ​BEN JONSON 113 Milton and Dryden. " That Sir R. Aiton loved him dearly. That Chapman and Fletcher were loved of him. That next himself, only Fletcher and Chapman could make a Mask. That Sir John Roe loved him ; and when they two were ushered by my lord Suffolk from a Mask, Roe wrott a moral Epistle to him, which began, ' That next to playes, the Church and the State were the best. God threateneth Kings, Kings Lords^ as Lords do us.^ — Sir John Roe was an infinite spender, and used to say, when he had no more to spende he could die. He died in his armes of the pest, and he furnished his charges 20 lb. ; which was given him back. — S. W. [Raleigh] heth written the lyfe of Queen Elizabeth, of which ther is copies extant. — He was Master of Arts in both the Universities by their favour, not his studie. — He can set horoscopes, but trusts not in them. He with the consent of a friend cousened a lady, with whom he had made ane appointment to meet ane old Astrologer, in the suburbs, which she keeped ; and it was himself dis- gysed in a longe gowne and a whyte beard at the light of dimm burning candles, up in a little cabinet reached unto by a ledder. — Being at the end of my Lord Salisburie's table with Inigo Jones, and de- manded by my Lord, Why he was not glad ? ' My Lord,' said he, 'yow promised I should dine with yow, bot I doe not,' for he had none of his meate ; he esteemed only that his meate which was of his own dish. — He heth consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, feight in his own imagination. [Col. Cunningham notes : Jonson was a free liver, and loved generous wines. H ​114 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES He seems to be describing sleepless nights during a well-earned attack of gout.] — He heth a minde to be a churchman, and so he might have favour to make one sermon to the King, he careth not what therafter sould befall him : for he would not flatter though he saw Death. — At his hither comniing [on foot] Sr. Francis Bacon said to him. He loved not to sie Poesy goe on other feet than poeticall Dactylus and Spondus. — He never esteemed of a man for the name of a Lord. — Queen Elizabeth never saw herself, after she became old, in a true glass; they painted her, and sometymes would vermilion her nose. She had allwayes about Christmass evens set dice that threw sixes or five, and she knew not they were other, to make her win and esteame herself fortunate. That she had a membrana on her, which made her incapable of man, though for her delight she tried many. At the comming over of Monsieur, ther was a French chirurgion who took in hand to cut it, yett fear stayed her and his death. King Philip had intention by dispensation of the Pope to have married her. — It were good that the half of the preachers of England were plain ignorants, for that either in their sermons they flatter, or strive to shew their own eloquence. — That he wrott all his [verses] first in prose, for so his Master, Cambden, had learned him. — That the half of his Comedies were not in print. — He hath a pastorall intitled The May Lord. . . . — He hath intention to writt a fisher or pastorall play, and set the stage of it in the Lowmond lake. He is to writt his foot Pilgrimage hither and to call it a Dis- coverie. In a poem he calleth Edinborough — ' The heart of Scotland, Britaines other eye.' ​BEN JONSON 115 — A play of his, upon which he was accused, The Divell is ane Ass; according to 'Comedia Vetus,' in England the Divel was brought in either with one Vice or other : the play done, the Divel carried away the Vice, he brings in the Divel so overcome with the wickedness of this age that thought himself ane Ass. Parergous is discoursed of the Duke of Drounland [Act ii., Sc. i] : the King desired him to conceal it. — He hath commented and translated Horace Art of Poesie : it is in Dialogue wayes ; by Criticus he understandeth Dr. Done. — He had ane intention to have made a play like Plautus Amphitrio, but left it of, for that he could never find two so like others [each other] that he could persuade the spectators they were one. — He said to Prince Charles of Inigo Jones, that when he wanted words to express the greatest villaine in the world, he would call him ane Inigo. Jones having accused him for naming him, behind his back, A foole : he denied it ; but, says he, I said. He was ane arrant knave, and I avouch it. — Of all his Playes he never gained two hundreth pounds. — His Impressa was a compass with one foot in center, the other broken, the word, Deesf quod diiceret orbem. — He said to me, that I was too good and simple, and that oft a man's modestie made a fool of his witt. — His armes were three spindles or rhombi ; his own word about them, Percunct- abor or Perscrutator. His Epitaph, by a companion written, is — ' Here lyes Benjamin Johnson dead, And hath no more wit than [a] goose in his head : That as he was wont, so doth he still, Live by his wit, and evermore will.' ​Ane other : — ' Here lyes honest Ben, That had not a beard on his chen.' [As Col. Cunningham observes, in the best portrait Jonson has thin black whiskers, and hardly any beard. In compensation, he had a huge fell of jet black hair, which, in his younger days, must have given great dignity to his manly and thoughtful face.] — In his Sejanus he hath translated a whole oration of Tacitus. — J. Selden liveth on his owne, is the Law Book of the Judges of England, the bravest man in all languages. — He dissuaded me from Poetrie, for that she had beggered him, when he might have been a rich lawer, physitian, or marchant. [Already cited.] — He was better versed, and knew more in Greek and Latin, than all the Poets in England, and quint- essence their brains [meaning, probably, that in his notes and extracts he had the quintessence of the classical authors, as remarked by Lord Falkland in the hnes before quoted]. — Of all styles he loved most to be named Honest, and hath of that ane hundredth letters so naming him. He went from Lieth home- ward the 25 January 1619, in a pair of shoes which, he told, lasted him since he came from Darnton [Darlington ?], which he minded to take back that farr againe : they were appearing like Coriat's : the first two dayes he was all excoriate. [In 161 1, the "Alchemist" year, in kindly jest Jonson had arranged "that immense farrago of burlesque 'testimonies to the author's merit ' which accompanied the first appearance of * Coryat's Crudities.' In this he seems to have engaged at the desire of Prince Henry, who ​BEN JONSON 117 found entertainment in laughing at the simple vanity of ' The Odcombian Traveller.' "] — If he died by the way, he promised to send me his papers of this Country, hewen as they were. I have to send him descriptions of Edinborough, Borrow Lawes, of the Lowmond. — He sent to me this Madrigal: 'On a Lover's Dust, made Sand for ane Houre Glasse,' and that which is (as he said) a Picture of himselfe. — When his play of a Silent Woman was first acted, ther was found verses after on the stage against him, concluding that that play was well named the Silent Woman ther was never one man to say Plaudite to it." [This follows the character and concludes the notes.] On the tenth of May, 16 19, Jonson writes : " To my worthy, honoured, and beloved friend, Mr. W. Drummond. Most loving and beloved sir, — I am arrived safely, with a most catholic welcome, and my reports not unacceptable to his Majesty. He professed (I thank God) some joy to see me, and is pleased to hear of the purpose of my book : to which I most earnestly solicit you for your promise of the inscriptions at Pinky, some things concerning the Loch of Lomond, touching the government of Edin- burgh, to urge Mr. James Scot, and what else you can procure for me with all speed (especially I make it my request that you will enquire for me whether the Students method at St. Andrews be the same with that of Edinburgh, and so to assure me, or wherein they differ). . . . Salute the beloved Fentons, the Nisbets, the Scots, the Levingstons, and all the honest and honoured names with you, especially Mr. James Writh, his wife, your sister, &c. And if you forget yourself, you believe not in Your most true ​friend and lover, Ben Jonson." Drummond answers in July : " Worthy Friend [a cold-blooded address !], The uncertainty of your abode was a cause of my silence this time past — I have adventured this packet upon hopes that a man so famous cannot be in any place either of the City or Court, where he shall not be found out. In my last (the missing letter) I sent you a description of Loch Lomond, with map of Inch- merionach, which may, by your book, be made most famous," &c. The book was never published, the MS. being destroyed by fire. As the poem " My Picture left in Scotland " is not only very beautiful, but of special interest for its brave uncompromising self-portraiture, I quote it in Drummond's version, which appears rather superior than inferior to that in the text, " Underwoods," ' I doubt that Love is rather deaf than blind, For else it could not be That she Whom I adore so much should so slight me, And cast my suit behind : I'm sure my language to her is as sweet, And all my closes meet In numbers of as subtile feet As makes the youngest he That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree. O ! but my conscious fears. That fly my thoughts between, Prompt me that she hath seen My hundred of grey hairs, Told six and forty years, Read so much waste as she cannot embrace My mountain belly and my rocky face, And all these, through her eyes, have slept her ears." ​BEN JONSON 119 IV As already mentioned, during the nine years from 16 16 to 1625, Jonson produced nothing for the stage. " It is probable that Jonson spent much of his time at the country seats of the nobility and gentry, as he has allusions to several visits of this kind, and we know that he attended on the court in some of the royal progresses. He was at Burleigh on the Hill, and at Belvoir Castle, and at Windsor when his masque of the 'Gipsies Metamorphosed' was per- formed at these places respectively, and introduced several little compliments into the piece, as new candidates arrived and claimed admission into the list of the drafnatis persona. He must also have been at Newmarket with the court, where his masques were occasionally represented." In 1618 he had an opportunity of serving his old and firm friend, Selden, who had grievously offended James by the indirect tendency of his arguments on the Divine right of tithes. In the " Life of Selden " it is stated : " The storm was blown over by the interest of his friend Ben Jonson with the king." Fresh offence, however, was taken soon afterwards, and Selden was summoned to Theobalds, where his Majesty then was : " Not being as yet acquainted with the court or with the king, he got Master Ben Jonson, who was then at Theobalds, to introduce him." In the summer of 161 9, after his return from Scotland, he went to Oxford at the invitation of Dr. (afterwards Bishop) Corbet, still remembered for some graceful verses, then senior scholar of Christ Church. He remained there some time, and the ​degree of Master of Arts was conferred on him in July. In October, 162 1, the king, who seems to have been unusually pleased with the "Gipsies Metamorphosed," in which he himself, with Prince Charles and Buckingham, took part, bestowed on Ben the reversion of the office of Master of the Revels. The letters patent grant to "our beloved servant Benjamin Jonson, gentleman, the said office, to be held and enjoyed by him and his assigns, during his life, from and after the death of Sir George Buc and Sir John Astley, or as soon as the office shall become vacant by resignation, forfeiture, or sur- render." He received no benefit from this grant, as Sir John Astley survived him ; but when in his last illness he felt himself incapable of fulfilling the duties of the office should it devolve on him, was allowed by Charles to transfer the patent to his son, who, however, died before himself, in 1635. Gifford quotes from a letter of the celebrated Joseph Mead, of C. Col., Cambridge, to Sir Martin Stuteville : " A friend told me this Faire time (Stourbridge) that Ben Jonson was not knighted, but scaped it narrowly, for that his Majestie would have done it, had there not been means made (himself not unwilling) to avoyd it. Sep 15, 1821." Probably about 1623 occurred the fire recorded in his "Execration upon Vulcan" ("Underwoods," Ixii.), beginning — " And why to me this ? thou lame Lord of Fire ! What had I done that might call on thine ire ? Or urge thy greedy flame thus to devour So many my years' labour in an hour ? ​BEN JONSON 121 Was it because thou wert of old denied, By Jove, to have Minerva for thy bride ; That since, thou tak'st all envious care and pain To ruin every issue of the brain ? " After enumerating many sorts and samples of literature which would have made a fit meal for Vulcan to lick up, he specifies his own chief manuscript losses : — " But in my desk what was there to accite So ravenous and vast an appetite ? I dare not say a body, but some parts There were of search, and mastery in the arts. All the old Venusine, in poetry. And lighted by the Stagerite, could spy. Was there made English : with a grammar too, To teach some that their nurses could not do, The purity of Language ; and, among The rest, my journey into Scotland sung, Wilh all the adventures : three books, not afraid To speak the fate of the Sicilian maid, To our own ladies : and in story there Of our fifth Henry, eight of his nine year ; Wherein was oil, beside the succours spent, Which noble Carew, Cotton, Selden lent : And twice twelve years stored up humanity ; With humble gleanings in divinity, — After the fathers, and those wiser guides Whom faction had not drawn to study sides." It is probable that the pastoral of the " May Lord," which he mentioned to Drummond, as well as other dramas, were likewise destroyed. As Gifford remarks : " There is a degree of wit and vivacity in these verses [the whole of the " Execration "] which does no little credit to the equanimity of the poet, who speaks of a loss so irreparable to him, not only with forbearance, but with pleasantry and good humour." Of these ​122 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES works and notes nothing remains except the version of Horace's " Art of Poetry," and dislocated fragments of the English Grammar. The translation was made so early as 1604, but not published until 1640, after his death, from transcripts which Gifford tells have variations in almost every line, while all, perhaps, vary from the original manuscript destroyed in the fire. The commentary from Aristotle's '* Poetics " is wholly lost, unless a few of its notes be preserved in the " Discoveries." The journey into Scotland, with all the adventures, must have been specially interest- ing ; more interesting even, on account of the period at which it was performed, than that of his namesake to the Hebrides. " The ' Rape of Proserpine ' (the Sicilian maid) may not, perhaps, be much regretted ; but the destruction of the 'History of Henry V.,' which was so nearly completed, must ever be con- sidered as a serious misfortune. The vigorous and masculine elegance of Jonson's style, the clearness of his judgment, the precision of his intelligence, aided by the intimate knowledge of domestic and general history possessed by Carew (George, Lord Carew), Cotton, and Selden, three of the most learned men of that or any other age, could not have been exerted without producing a work of which, if spared to us, we might be justly proud." And the immense value of the stored up humanity of twice twelve years, and the humble gleanings in divinity, irretrievably perished, may be estimated by the lines already quoted (p. 101), from Lord Falkland, to whom it is now proposed to raise a memorial near the spot where he was killed, and of whom Lord Clarendon, in his '* History of the Rebellion," writes : " Thus fell that incomparable ​BEN JONSON 123 young man, in the four-and-thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the business of Ufe, that the oldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enter not into the world with more innocence; and whosoever leads such a life needs not care upon how short warning it be taken from him." Jonson had an excellent library, having begun very early to collect the best editions of the classics and all sorts of rare and valuable works. Thus, as cited by Gifford, Selden, whose sole testimony on this point is more than sufficient, writes to him in 1615 : "With regard to what the Greeks and Latins have of Andargatis, Deresto, Atargata, Derce (all one name), &c., you best know, being more conversant in the recondite parts of human learning." And he con- cludes, after a variety of extracts from the Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, &c. : " In the connection of these no vulgar observations, if they had been to a common learned reader, there had been often room for divers pieces of theology dispersed in Latin and Greek authors, and fathers of the Church; but your own most choice and able store cannot but furnish you with whatever is fit that way to be thought. What- ever I have here collected, I consecrate to your love, and end with hope of your instructing judgment." And in the "Titles of Honour" he introduced a chapter, " On the custom of giving crowns of laurel to poets," at the end of which he says : "Thus have I, by no unseasonable digression, performed a promise to you, my beloved Ben Jonson. Your curious learn- ing and judgment may correct where I have erred, and add where my notes and memory have left me short." And in the same work (first ed., fol., 16 14) ​124 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES he states : " I presume that I have sufficiently mani- fested this out of Euripides his Orestes, which, when I was to use, not having the schoHast, out of whom I hoped some aid, I went for this purpose to see it in the well furnisht librarie of my beloved friend, that singular poet, Master Ben Jonson, whose special worth in literature, accurate judgment, and perform- ance, known only to that few which are truly able to know him, hath had from me, ever since I began to learn, an increasing admiration." How cordially Jonson reciprocated this affection and esteem of " the Law Book of the Judges of England, the bravest man in all languages," may be read in his *' Epistle to Master John Selden" ("Underwoods," xxxi.) pre- fixed to the first edition of " Titles of Honour." I have space for but a few lines : — " You that have been Ever at home, yet have all countries seen ; And like a compass, keeping one foot still Upon your centre, do your circle fill Of general knowledge ; watched men, manners too, Heard what times past have said, seen what ours do ! I wondered at the richness, but am lost To see the workmanship so exceed the cost ! To mark the excellent seasoning of your style, And manly elocution 1 not one while With horror rough, then rioting with wit ; But to the subject still the colours fit, In sharpness of all search, wisdom of choice, Newness of sense, antiquity of voice ! I yield, I yield. The matter of your praise Flows in upon me, and I cannot raise A bank against it : nothing but the round Large clasp of Nature such a wit can bound. Monarch in letters ! 'mongst the Titles shown Of others* honours, thus enjoy thy own." ​I BEN JONSON 125 James I. died early in 1625, and in him our poet "lost the most indulgent of masters, and most bene- volent of sovereigns. Charles, indeed, both knew and valued Jonson ; but he was not so competent a judge of literary talents, nor was he, either by nature or habit, so familiar with his servants, or so con- descending to their affairs, as the easy and good- natured James. . . . Two evils were at this time rapidly gaining upon the poet — want and disease. The first he certainly might have warded off, at least for some time, had he been gifted with the slightest portion of economy ; but he was altogether thoughtless and profuse, and his long sickness, therefore, overtook him totally unprovided. From the accession to the death of James, nothing is to be found respecting his necessities — not a complaint, not a murmur; but other times were at hand, and we shall soon hear of peti- tionary poems and supplications for relief. The disease which attacked him about the end of this year was the palsy. He seems to have laboured from his youth under a scorbutic affection (derived, pro- bably, from his parents), which assailed him with in- creasing virulence as his constitution gave way : to this must be added a tendency to dropsy, not the least of his evils." In all likelihood, driven back to the stage by want, he produced this year that very good comedy, " The Staple of News ; " and in the next, 1626, he had so far recovered from the first stroke of the palsy as to be able to compose for the court the antimasque of " The Fortunate Isles, and their Union." In January, 1629, the comedy of " The New Inn; or. The Light Heart" was brought out, and " completely damned," not being heard to the ​126 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES end. His infirmities had increased : he was no longer able to leave his room, or to move in it without assistance; and this play undoubtedly shows symp- toms of impaired powers. The tone of the epilogue is in pathetic contrast to his old confident self- assertion : — ' ' Plays in themselves have neither hopes nor fears ; Their fate is only in their hearers' ears ; If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad. But do him right ; He meant to please you : for he sent things fit, In all the members both of sense and wit, If they have not miscarried ! if they have, All that his faint and faltering tongue doth crave Is that you not impute it to his brain, That's yet unhurt, although set round with pain, It cannot long hold out. All strength must yield ; Yet judgment would the last be in the field With a true poet," This must have disarmed any generous enemy ; but the sickness of the lion is the sweet opportunity for "the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof." The envious and the stupid, wolves and asses, howled, brayed, tore, and kicked at him, till he, who, despite the common preference of a parent for a rickety child, had borne the popular condemnation without any open complaint, was galled into publishing the piece two years afterwards, with this angry title-page : "The New Inn; or. The Light Heart, a Comedy. As it was never Acted, but most negligently Played by some, the King's Servants ; and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the King's Subjects, 1629. Now at last set at Liberty to the Readers, his Majesty's Servants and Subjects, to be judged of, ​i I BEN JONSON 127 1 63 1." And, heated with the fire of battle, he recovered his old haughty self-confidence, and rang out vigorous defiance in an ode to himself. I must give three of its six stanzas : — "Come, leave the loathed stage. And the more loathsome age ; 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, less thou for them. Say that thou pour'st them wheat, And they will acorns eat ; 'Twere 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. Leave things so prostitute. And take the Alcaic lute ; Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre ; Warm thee by Pindar's fire : And though thy nerves be shrunk and blood be cold Ere years have made thee old. Strike that disdainful heat Throughout, to their defeat, As curious fools, and envious of thy strain. May, blushing, swear no palsy's in thy brain." The spirit of this ode is that which breathes through much of the latest book of Robert Browning, ​"Pacchiarotto, and other Poems." Thus the second stanza is remarkably re-echoed in the following:—
This scornful defiance brought several of the minor poets and critics into the field against him; while Randolph, Cleveland, and others who were proud to be called his sons, came to his defence, and some of the best scholars of the time took pleasure in translating the ode into Latin verse. Perhaps the most temperate and fair of the pieces called forth on this occasion was that by T. Carew, of which a specimen may be given:—
The court seems to have neglected Jonson soon after the death of James, as there is no masque by him for the three years between 1626 and 1630; and to this he alluded in the Epilogue to the "New Inn," ​BEN JONSON 129 from which I have already quoted : he is speaking of himself in the third person : — " And had he lived the care of king and queen, His art in something more yet had been seen." Charles was touched, and replied promptly and royally to the oblique remonstrance, as we learn from " Underwoods," Ixxx. : " An Epigram to King Charles, for an Hundred Pounds he sent me in my Sickness, MDCXXIX.," beginning— " Great Charles, among the holy gifts of grace, Annexed to thy person and thy place, 'Tis not enough (thy piety is such) To cure the called ' king's-evil ' with thy touch ; But thou wilt yet a kinglier mastery try, To cure the ' poet's-evil,' poverty." In March of the following year, in response to — " The humble petition of Poor Ben ; To the best of monarchs, masters, men, King Charles " ("Underwoods," xcv.), his annuity was raised from a hundred marks to a hundred pounds, with the voluntary addition by the king of a yearly tierce of Canary, Jonson's favourite wine, from the royal cellars at Whitehall. From "Underwoods," Ixxiv., "To Master John Burges," and Ixxxvi., "To the Household," 1630, we learn that both pension and wine were sometimes in arrear. ​130 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES The king's kindness did not stop here. In September, 1628, on the death of Middleton, the office of City's Chronologer had been conferred on Jonson, with a salary of one hundred nobles per annum. In November, 1631, this salary was sus- pended until he should have " presented some fruits of his labours in that his place." But in September, 1634, there is an entry in the City Records : "This day Mr. Recorder and Sir James Hamersley Knight and Alderman declared unto this Court His Majesty's pleasure signified unto them by the right honble. the Earle of Dorsett for and in the behalfe of Benjamine Johnson the Cittyes Chronologer, Wherupon it is ordered by this Court that his yearely pencion of one hundred nobles out of the Chamber of London shall be continued and that Mr. Chamberlen shall satisfie and pay unto him his arrerages thereof." He, no doubt, as is remarked by Mr. Dyce, to whom we owe the extracts from the Records, continued to hold the office till his death, when he was succeeded in it by Francis Quarles, of the " Emblems." This, with any other succours, must have been most welcome. Already, in 1631, he had addressed to the Lord High Treasurer an "Epistle Mendicant" ("Underwoods/' xc), wherein he says : — " Disease the enemy, and his ingineers, Want, with the rest of his concealed compeers, Have cast a trench about me now five years. The Muse not peeps out, one of hundred days : ​BEN JONSON 131 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 ; Unless some saving honour of the crown, Dare think it, to relieve, no less renown, A bed-rid wit, than a besieged town." This places the commencement of his disease and want in 1626. The want would have been much less had he not been not only liberal but lavish, with table ever free and purse ever open to his friends. And he was himself a generous liver : " Wine he always considered as necessary— and perhaps it was so — to counteract the occasional influence of that morbid tendency to melancholy generated by a constitutional affection of the scurvy, which also rendered society desirable and in some measure indis- pensable to him." This sad " Mendicant Epistle " appears to have brought him help from various quarters, and especially from the munificent Earl of Newcastle, one short letter to whom may be quoted : "My Noblest Lord and Best Patron, — I send no borrowing epistle to provoke your lordship, for I have neither fortune to repay, nor security to engage, that will be taken ; but I make a most humble petition to your lordship's bounty to succour my present necessities this good time [festival] of Easter, and it shall conclude all begging requests hereafter on the behalf of your truest beadsman and most thankful servant, " B. J." Though his maladies continually increased, he bravely struggled on, and in 1632 a contemporary records: ​132 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES "Ben Jonson, who I thought had been dead, has written a play against the next term, called the ' Magnetic Lady ; ' " which we learn was generally esteemed an excellent play. Howell wrote a char- acteristic letter to his " Father Ben " concerning it. Having quoted the ^^ Nullum fit magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementicB, " There's no great wit with out some mixture of madness," he goes on : " It is verified in you, for I find that you have been often- times mad : you were mad when you writ your 'Fox,' and madder when you writ your 'Alchemist;' you were mad when you writ 'Catiline,' and stark mad when you writ ' Sejanus ; ' but when you writ your ' Epigrams ' and the ' Magnetic Lady ' you were not so mad. . . . The madness I mean is that divine fury, that heating and heightening spirit which Ovid [Plato had been yet better] speaks of." Grant- ing the truth of this, filial piety should have kept him from blurting it out to " Father Ben," consider- ing his age and state and circumstances. In 1633 he produced his last comedy, " A Tale of a Tub : " a title which has been made his own by England's greatest satirist writing in his prime; who, turning over the leaves of the masterpiece in his far sadder decHne, justly exclaimed, "My God! what a genius I had when I wrote this ! " In the same year the king, going to Scotland to be crowned there, was magnificently entertained by the Earl of Newcastle at his seat at Welbeck, in Nottinghamshire ; and in the following year, during a Royal "progress" into the north of England, yet more magnificently at another of his seats, Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire ; and Jonson on both occasions furnished little anti​BEN JONSON 133 masques, each entitled, " Love's Welcome." The splendour of these entertainments may be estimated from what the Duchess records in the Life of her husband (he was afterwards Duke), that the first cost him between four and five thousand, and the second between fourteen and fifteen thousand pounds. Clarendon, in his " History of the Rebellion," recording this "stupendous entertainment," con- cludes : " which, God be thanked, though possibly it might too much whet the appetite of others to ex- cess, no man ever after imitated." About this period Jonson writes to the Earl, in reference to we know not what work : " The faith of a fast friend with the duties of an humble servant, and the hearty prayers of a religious beadsman, all kindled upon this altar to your honour, my honourable lady, your hopeful issue, and your right noble brother, be ever my sacrifice ! — It is the lewd printer's fault that I can send your lordship no more of my book, . . . My printer and I shall afford subject enough for a tragi-comedy ; for with his delays and vexation I am almost become blind ; and if heaven be so just, in the metamorphosis, to turn him into that creature which he most resembles, a dog, with a bell to lead me between Whitehall and my lodging, I may bid the world good night. And so I do." But one more play calls for notice, the "Sad Shepherd;" of which, unfortunately, only the first two acts and two scenes of the third have come down to us. Gifford says : " That it was completed I have little doubt : its mutilated state is easily accounted for by the confusion which followed the author's death. Into whose hands his papers fell, as he left apparently no will nor testamentary document ​134 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES of any kind, cannot now be told : perhaps into those of the woman who resided with him as his nurse, or some of her kin ; but they were evidently careless or ignorant, and put his manuscripts together in a very disorderly manner, losing some and misplacing others. Had they handed down to us * The Sad Shepherd ' in its complete state, we should have possessed a poem which might have been confidently opposed to the proudest effort of dramatic genius that time has yet bequeathed us." It is a pastoral drama; the scene in Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood and his band among the dratnatis personce. It is indeed very beau- tiful in parts, and one gladly welcomes such a sunset succeeding the overcast afternoon, as showing that the great light which had been clouded was by no means extinguished, that the genius of the brave old poet could still triumph ere it sank into the night of death; but I can hardly concur in the measureless praise of Gifford, who was perhaps less qualified to judge a purely poetical drama than one abounding in keen observation, satirical humour, and masculine eloquence. I think the Prologue clearly proves that it was completed, and seems to fix the date at 1635-6, the latter the year before Jonson's death. The theatres were shut up this year; otherwise the whole piece might have been preserved to us. That Jonson him- self was proud of it is evident from the opening lines of this Prologue : — " He that hath feasted you these forty years, And fitted fables for your finer ears, Although at first he scarce could hit the bore ; Yet you, with patience harkening more and more, At length have grown up to him, and made known The working of his pen is now your own : ​BEN JONSON 135 He prays you would vouchsafe, for your own sake, To hear him this once more, but sit awake. And though he now present you with such wool, As from mere English flocks his Muse can pull. He hopes when it is made up into cloth. Not the most curious head here will be loth To wear a hood of it, it being a fleece To match or those of Sicily or Greece. " These smooth-flowing Hnes are a further sample of the " jagged mis-shapen distiches " of my Lord Mac- aulay ! The last, it need scarcely be said, alludes to the pastoral poems of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion. It is pleasant to observe the friendly tone in which the poet addresses his audience, the grateful recogni- tion of his well-earned popularity; though his self- esteem asserts itself in the characteristic interjections, "for your own sake," and "but sit awake." It remains to speak of the Miscellaneous Poems and of the prose " Discoveries." The Epigrams, as will have been gathered from the quotations I have given, are seldom epigrams in our modern sense of the word : they are simply " short poems, chiefly re- stricted to one idea, and equally adapted to the delineation and expression of every passion incident to human life." They comprise eulogies, satires, epitaphs. I give two of the briefest, which are among the most epigrammatic as we now commonly under- stand the word : — "ON THE UNION " When was there contract better driven by Fate, Or celebrated with more truth of state ? The world the temple was, the priest a king. The spousM pair two realms, the sea the ring." ​136 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES "ON COURT-WORM " All men are worms, but this no man. In silk 'Twas brought to court first wrapt, and white as milk ; Where afterwards it grew a butterfly. Which was a caterpillar ; so 'twill die." One of the panegyrics is so exquisite that I cannot refrain from citing it, though rather long : it is No. Ixxvi., "On Lucy, Countess of Bedford" (to whom also Ixxxiv. and xciv. are addressed), a lady worthy of the high praise — the patroness not only of Ben, but of Donne, Drayton, and Daniel, one of the best pieces of this last, a stately and truly noble one, being written in her honour. Here is Ben's : — " 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 wished to see. My Muse bade Bedford write, and that was she ! " I wonder whether to my Lord Macaulay these were jagged mis-shapen quatrains ! The other collections are entitled " The Forest " and " Underwoods." They comprise many eulogiums, and specially many ​BEN JONSON 137 pieces in cordial praise of contemporary writers. There are also some beautiful songs too little known ; and it may be observed generally that Jonson's lyrics are strangely neglected, with the exception of three or four popular favourites, such as "Drink to me only with thine eyes," and that serene invocation of Hesperus in "Cynthia's Revels" (Act v. Sc. 3), " Queen and huntress, chaste and fair." But the most remarkable of the shorter poems are the epi- taphs and elegies, of which the finest are, I believe, the finest in the language. I will not speak here of the magnanimous and fervent tribute to the memory of Shakespeare ; and I merely mention the epitaphs on his own first daughter and first son, on Margaret Ratcliffe (the only acrostic I remember in his works), on Vincent Corbet, Philip Gray ; and the elegies on Lady Jane Pawlet, and on Lady Venetia Digby, whom he termed his Muse, and to whom the epigram, " Underwoods," xcvii., is addressed, being in praise of her husband, the celebrated Sir Kenelm Digby. But there are three which I am loth to omit, though two of them are generally known. The first is on Salathiel Pavy (Epigram 120), one of the boys of the Queen's Chapel, who performed in his " Cynthia's Revels " and " Poetaster," and of whom he was very fond : — " Weep with me, all you that read This little story : And know, for whom a tear you shed Death's self is sorry. 'Twas a child that so did thrive In grace and feature, As Heaven and Nature seemed to strive Which owned the creature. ​138 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Years he numbered scarce thirteen, When Fates turned cruel, Yet three filled zodiacs had he been The stage's jewel ; And did act, what now we moan, Old men so duly, As, sooth, the Parcse thought him one. He played so truly. So, by error, to his fate They all consented ; But, viewing him since, alas, too late ! They have repented ; And have sought, to give new birth, In baths to steep him But, being so much too good for earth, Heaven vows to keep him." The second (Epigram 124) is on Elizabeth L. H., a lady, I believe, still unidentified : — " Wouldst 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. One name was Elizabeth, The other let it sleep with death : Fitter, where it died, to tell, Than that it lived at all. Farewell ! " It will be remembered that Mrs. Barrett Brown- ing has a beautiful little poem, " A Portrait," bearing for motto the line, "One name was Elizabeth;" a line applicable to the poetess herself, to whose other ​BEN JONSON 139 names, both of maidenhood and marriage, it will be long ere the next can be applied. The third ("Underwoods," xv.), perfect and un- equalled, unless by the second section of the above, is on the Countess of Pembroke : — " Underneath this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; Death ! ere thou hast slain another, Learn'd and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee." "Timber; or, Discoveries made upon Men and Matter. As they have flowed out of his Daily Read- ings, or had their reflux to his peculiar Notion of the Times." Under this somewhat quaint title we have some of " the last drops of Jonson's quill," in a collec- tion of notes, moral and critical, showing how great must have been the loss when fire destroyed those accumulated during twice twelve years, when his powers were in full vigour. Gifford more than once expresses his opinion that Jonson's prose was the best of the time. This is a rather hazardous judg- ment, considering that among his contemporaries were Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Raleigh, together with such less ornate writers as Selden and Donne, not to speak of those who made the Authorised Version of the Bible. With- out exalting Ben's prose to this perilous elevation, we can recognise that it is truly admirable — terse, un- affected, perspicuous, sincere, weighty with knowledge and thought ; and so little out of date that it might have been written yesterday. In reading the moral reflections in these " Discoveries," one may often ​fancy himself occupied with Bacon's "Essays," until he misses the copiousness of illustration. Here are one or two of the shortest : " Consilia : " " No man is so foolish but may give another good counsel some- times ; and no man is so wise but may easily err if he will take no other's counsel than his own. But very few men are wise by their own counsel ; or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master." " Ap- plausus : " " We praise the things we hear with much more willingness than those we see, because we envy the present and reverence the past, thinking ourselves instructed by the one and overlaid by the other." " Comit. Suffragia:" "Suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed : nor can it be otherwise in those public councils, where nothing is so unequal as the equality ; for there, how odd soever men's brains or wisdoms are, their power is always even and the same." Under the head of Memoria, he tells us : " I myself could, in my youth, have repeated all that ever I had made, and so continued till I was past forty ; since, it is much decayed in me. Yet I can repeat whole books that I have read, and poems of some selected friends, which I have liked to charge my memory with." Of Shakespeare, De Shakespeare Nostrat : " I remember the players have often men- tioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been. Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted, and to justify mine own ​BEN JONSON 141 candour; for I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions ; wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. His wit was in his own power ; would the rule of it had been so too." On the birthday of Lord Bacon, 22 nd January, 1621, when newly made Lord Chan- cellor, and at the height of his prosperity, Jonson had written beautifully (" Underwoods," Ixx.) : — " England's high Chancellor : the destined heir, In his soft cradle, to his father's chair : Whose even threads the Fates spin round and full, Out of their choicest and their whitest wool." It was not long, as we are all aware, before wool any- thing but white came into that spinning ; but Jonson, in his own old age, and after Bacon's death (who died ten years before him), writes thus nobly to the honour of both : " My conceit of his Person was never increased towards him by his place or honours ; but I have and do reverence him for the greatness which was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many Ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength ; for Greatness he could not want. Neither could I condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest." And really, when one considers, it appears possible that Jonson knew Bacon quite as well as did Pope or even the omnis​142 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES cient Macaulay. Again, of his oratory : " Yet there happened in my time one noble Speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censo- rious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idle- ness in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end." And finally, after naming Lord Chancellor Egerton : " But his learned and able (though unfortunate) suc- cessor is he who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. In short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows backward : so that he may be named and stand as the mark and acme of our language." VI Jonson died in his sixty-fifth year, in August, 1637 ; according to Gifford, on the 6th, the funeral being on the 9th. But Col. Cunningham cites from "Notes and Queries" the following record, by Sir Edward Walker, Garter: "Thursday, 17 August. Died at Westminster, Mr. Benjamin Johnson, the most famous ​BEN JONSON 143 accurate, and learned poet of our age, especially in the English tongue, having left behind him many rare pieces, which have sufficiently demonstrated to the world his worth. He was buried the next day follow- ing, being accompanied to his grave with all or the greatest part of the nobilitye and gentry then in the towne." The different dates for the death tnay arise from the one being Old Style and the other New (although the New was not legally established in Eng- land until more than a century later, 1752), but those of the funeral cannot be thus reconciled. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, " in the north aisle, in the path of square stone opposite to the scutcheon of Robertus de Ros." His friends and admirers pro- jected a noble monument to his memory, to be raised by subscription, and in the meantime his remains were covered with the pavement stone which had been removed for the interment. Aubrey relates that Sir John Young, chancing to pass through the abbey, and not enduring that the remains of so great a man should lie at all without a memorial, gave one of the workmen eighteenpence to cut the famous inscription, "O rare Ben Jonson!" An ample sum was raised for the monument, but its erection was hindered by the political and religious agitations resulting in the great Civil War, and the money was returned to the subscribers. He left no family. His wife appears to have died some time before his journey into Scotland. If he married again, nothing is known, I believe, of the second wife and marriage save what is recorded in the following entry, which probably, but not quite certainly, relates to him, extracted by Mr. Collier from the register of St. Giles, Cripplegate : " Married ​144 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Ben Jonson and Hester Hopkins, 27th July, 1623." He would be then just past fifty. A monument of another kind was achieved to him in the '■'■Jonsonus Virbius ; or, the Memory of Ben Jonson. Revived by the Friends of the Muses ; " being a collection of elegies in English and latin, with one in Greek, published about six months after his death, under the care of Duppa, Bishop of Win- chester and tutor to the Prince of Wales, and reprinted by Gifford at the end of the " Works." In the list of contributors are some of the best known names of the period (we must bear in mind that most of the supremely great men whom we are wont to think of as Jonson's contemporaries, the " Elizabethans " and their juniors associated with his prime, died before him), including Lord Falkland, who is said to have given the title, Jonsonus Virbius ; Sir John Beau- mont, son of the author of "Bosworth Field," and nephew of the dramatist; the good Henry King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, a genuine, though a minor poet ; Thomas May, translator of I.ucan, and historian of the Parliament; William Habington, Edmund Waller, John Cleveland, Jasper Mayne, William Cartwright, Owen Feltham of the "Resolves," James Howell of the "Familiar Epistles," Shackerley Marmion, Ralph Brideoake (Bishop of Chichester after King), and John Ford the dramatist. I have already quoted some lines from Falkland's "Eglogue;" but a few more may here be given : — "Alas ! that bard, that glorious bard is dead, Who, when I wliilom cities visited, Hath made them seem but hours which were full days, Whilst he vouchsafed me his harmonious lays. ​BEN JONSON 145 JONSON you mean, unless I much do err, I know the person by the character. Her great instructor gone, I know the age No less laments than doth the widowed stage, And only vice and folly now are glad ; Our gods are troubled, and our prince is sad. How he, when he could know it, reaped his fame. And long outlived the envy of his name : To him how daily flocked, what reverence gave, All that had wit, or would be thought to have. Or hope to gain, and in so large a store, That to his ashes they can pay no more, Except those few who censuring, thought not so, But aimed at glory from so great a foe : How the wise too, did with mere wits agree, As Pembroke, Portland, and grave Aubigny ; Nor.thought the rigidest senator a shame, To contribute to so deserved a name." Lord Clarendon, in the " History of his own Life," says of Falkland, whose name always suffuses his style with a cordial glow : " He had naturally such a generosity and bounty in him that he seemed to have his estate in trust for all worthy persons who stood in want of supplies and encouragement, as Ben Jonson and others of that time, whose fortunes required, and whose spirits made them superior to ordinary obliga- tions." There is a letter from Ben to the Earl of Newcastle, dated 4th February, 1632: "I have here obeyed your commands, and sent you a packet of my own praises, which I should not have done if I had any stock of modesty in store; but 'obedience is better than sacrifice,' and you command it. I am now like an old bankrupt in wit that am driven to pay debts on my friends' credit ; and, for want of K ​146 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES satisfying letters, to subscribe bills of exchange." This letter enclosed several poems, among which were two from Falkland, then Sir Lucius Gary ; the first being, "An Anniversary Epistle on Sir Henry Morison, with an Apostrophe to my father Jonson," and the other, an " Epistle to his noble father Ben." Falkland, in the letter accompanying, speaks most modestly of his verses : " What is ill in them (which I fear is all) belongs only to myself; if there be any- thing tolerable, it is somewhat you dropt negligently one day at The Dog, and I took it up." Morison died young in 1629 or 1630, just before Gary, then twenty, married his sister Letitia, of whom Glarendon says : " She was a lady of a most extraordinary wit and judgment, and of the most signal virtue and exemplary life that the age produced, and who brought him many hopeful children in which he took great delight." "Underwoods," Ixxxviii., as termed, "A Pindaric Ode to the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Gary and Sir H. Morison," being written on the early death of the latter. Here is the second antistrophe : — "Alas ! but Morison fell young : He never fell, — thou fall'st, my tongue. He stood a soldier to the last right end, A perfect patriot, and a noble friend ; But most a virtuous son. All offices were done By him so ample, full, and round, In weight, in measure, number, sound, As, though his age imperfect miglit appear, His life was of humanity the sphere." The third strophe has been often quoted : — ​BEN JONSON 147 "It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be ; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear : A lily of a day, Is fairer far, in May, Although it fall and die that night ; It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauties see ; And in short measures life may perfect be." Whence the antistrophe swells triumphant over grief :— " Call, noble Lucius, then for wine, And let thy looks with gladness shine : Accept this Garland, place it on thy head, And think, nay know, thy Morison's not dead. He leaped the present age, Possest with holy rage, To see that bright eternal day ; Of which we priests and poets say Such truths as we expect for happy men." Many features of Ben's character have been inci- dentally illustrated in the course of these articles, but now some special attention must be given to it. Let us commence with Drummond's sketch in exceed- ingly black chalk, "the portrait composed almost entirely of shadows," already referred to (p. 112), and try whether we can work up from this something like an accurate likeness. " He is a great lover and praiser of himself; a con- temner and scorner of others ; given rather to lose a friend than a jest ; jealous of every word and action of those about him (especiallie after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth) ; a dissembler ​148 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES of ill parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth; thinketh nothing well hot what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or done; he is passionately kynde and angry; carelesse either to give or keep; vindicative, but, if he be well answered, at himself. " For any religion, as being versed in both. Inter- preteth best sayings and deeds often to the worst. Oppressed with fantasie, which hath over-mastered his reason, a generall disease in many Poets. His inventions are smooth and easie; but above all he excelleth in a Translation." This is indeed a bright testimonial from "your loving friend, W. D.," who had written two days before, " there is nothing I wish more than to be in the calendar of those who love you ! " " Save me from my friends ! " said the wise Italian ; "against my enemies I can guard myself." Let us consider this magnanimous eulogium somewhat in detail : " He is a great lover and praiser of himself." That Jonson, like every other man, loved and praised himself (such as make show of most humility praising themselves most intolerably), I do not deny ; but that he was a great lover and praiser of himself, exceeding common men in these respects, I find no proof. True, he had a full share of self-esteem, to which he frankly gave voice when occasion demanded; but this self- esteem was firmly based on solid merits. High- minded, brave, sincere, never writing from unworthy motives, or with intentions other than honourable, planning with patient care, and working out with con- scientious thoroughness ; aware, as he could not but be aware, that in classical learning, and in the sober ​I BEN JONSON 149 taste and judgment which such learning nourishes, he was almost if not quite unequalled. He would neither bow nor pretend to bow to vulgar censures of what he knew to be above the vulgar compre- hension ; neither consent nor affect to consent to be mixed up with the lower class of playwrights, unlearned and unskilful, producing in hottest haste, pandering to the mob, often scurrilous, profane, and obscene. "A contemner and scorner of others ; given rather to lose a friend than a jest ; jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth)." Every- thing we know of Jonson, bearing upon these charges, tends to falsify them. Gifford says, and says well : "It cannot be too often repeated that this writer, who has been described as a mere mass of spleen and ill-nature, was, in fact, the frankest and most liberal of mankind. I am fully warranted in saying that more valuable books given to individuals by Jonson are yet to be met with than by any [other] person of that age. Scores of them have fallen under my own inspection, and I have heard of abundance of others." And in a note he cites confirmation from the elder Disraeli (" Quarrels of Authors ") : " No [other] has left behind him in MS. so many testi- monies of personal fondness as Ben Jonson, by in- scriptions and addresses, in the copies of his works, which he presented to his friends. Of these I have seen more than one fervent and impressive." And William Godwin (in "Appendix to the Lives of E. and J. Philips ; " where, by the way, he points out in some detail how largely Milton was indebted to ​Jonson) : " That he was envious, and sparing in com- mendation to his contemporaries, may as well im- mediately be denied. His commendatory verses on Shakespeare, Drayton, Donne, Fletcher, Sir John Beaumont, and others [many others] may easily be consulted ; and he that finds in them any penury of praise, any malicious ambiguity or concealed detrac- tion, may safely be affirmed to have brought a mind already poisoned to their perusal." Indeed, it is scarcely too much to assert that in his poems we find generous and hearty while discriminating eulogy of all the most justly eminent persons of his time, and especially of those eminent in literature and in his own department of literature, as well as most kindly and encouraging praise of many writers of a lower degree. And how cordial were his relations with the worthiest of his literary brethren may be seen, not only from his commendations of them, but from their commendations of him. Besides those named as contributing to the Jonsonus Virbius we have commendatory verses, either on particular dramas or on his works in general, from George Chapman, Donne, Francis Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden (in Latin), and Selden's "most beloved Friend and Chamberfellow " Edward Heyward, to whom the "Titles of Honour" was dedicated, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Oldham, Herrick, Shirley, and others. Shirley having, as Gifford notes, been singled out with exquisite propriety, by Steevens and others, as the most scurrilous of Jonson's enemies, it may be well to give some lines from his prologue to the "Alchemist," written for a performance of it after Jonson's death : — ​BEN JONSON 151 " ' The Alchemist,' a play for strength of wit, And true art, made to shame what hath been writ In former ages ; I except no worth Of what or Greeks or Latins have brought forth ; Is now to be presented to your ear, For which I would each man were a Muse here To know, and in his soul be fit to be Judge of this master-piece of comedy ; Which, though some men that never reached him may Decry, that love all folly in a play ; The wiser few shall this distinction have, To kneel, not tread, upon his honoured grave." Strange scurrile enmity this ! — as strange, in its kind, as the loving friendliness of "your loving friend, W. D." VII Two striking proofs of Ben's magnanimous gene- rosity must be noted : he fostered all possible rivals in the young and promising talents, who were proud to call him father, and whom he adopted as his literary sons ; he praised all actual rivals in direct proportion to their merits, the most fervid praise to the most formidable rivals, the very men whom, had he really been jealous and envious, he would have most striven to depreciate. One capital and crucial instance suffices on this point, the instance of Him who easily outrivalled all competitors, but who in his own and the next two or three ages was scarcely, in popular estimation, ranked above Jonson or Beau- mont and Fletcher. How did Jonson speak of Shakespeare? His verdict in prose I gave in a previous number ; his verdict in poetry we have in ​152 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES the two pieces, "Underwoods," xi. and xii., "On the Portrait of Shakespeare," prefixed to the first foUo edition, 1623, and, "To the Memory of my beloved Master WilUam Shakespeare, and What He hath Left Us." Would that we had space here to give this latter at full length, for it is so honourable to both that it can hardly be too often reprinted. I ask where, even now, when the supremacy has long been unchallenged, which was then challenged freely, and by many as wise in their great generation as the wisest in ours, which is so much smaller — where even now shall we find a tribute to that supremacy more ample, more magnificent, or rendered with more loyal free will ? — " To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ; While I confess thy writings to be such, As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much. 'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. Soul of the age 1 The applause 1 delight ! the wonder of our st^e I My Shakespeare rise ! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further to make thee a room : *
W. Basse, which opens thus : — " Renowned Spenser, Ilea thought more nigh To learned Chaucer; and, rare Beaumont, lie A little nearer Spenser, to make room For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb. To lodge all four in one bed make a shift. For until doomsday hardly will a fifth, Betwixt this day and that, by fates be slain. For whom your curtains need be drawn again. ​BEN JONSON 153 Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give. — to hear thy buskin tread And shake a stage ; or when thy socks were on, Leave thee alone for the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Briton, thou hast one to show, To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time ! And all the Muses still were in their prime, When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm ! Nature herself was proud of his designs, And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines ! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit. Yet must I not give Nature all ; thy Art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. For a good poet's made, as well as born. And such wert thou ! Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well torned and true filed lines : In each of which he seems to shake a lance, As brandisht at the eyes of ignorance.* Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear. And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Eliza and our James 1 But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere Advanced, and made a constellation there ! Shine forth, thou Star of Poets."
one. So Wordsworth, in his Elegy on Lamb, dwelt with unusual tenderness on the aptness of his name. ​154 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES It has been justly remarked by Gifford that the two most endearing appellations of our greatest poet, "Gentle Shakespeare" and "Sweet Swan of Avon," are due to that very rival whom the Shakespearian commentators of the last century persistently accused of envying and maligning him. It may also be observed, as a proof of Jonson's sound judgment, that the two men whom he, with all his profound classical knowledge and sympathies, put forward as our champions, in prose and verse respectively, against the mightiest of " insolent Greece or haughty Rome " (he uses the identical terms in both cases) were Bacon and Shakespeare. We now come to the parenthetical charge, that "drink is one of the elements in which he liveth." That Ben in his forty-seventh year, robust in body and mind, and in full enjoyment of a long holiday, drank enough to astound and terrify Drummond, may be freely admitted ; but was the jolly guest a sot because the host was a prim valetudinarian ? They were an ill-assorted couple, and the strong man, as usual, was not aware how he overbore the weak ; and the weak man, also as usual, pretended to enjoy it, and took a covert revenge. If, in place of the laird of Hawthornden, the recording host had been such an one as the Ettrick Shepherd celebrates, we should have had something like a true, because sympathetic, character of Westminster's first Big Ben : — " Canty war ye o'er your kale, Toddy jugs, an' caups o' ale ; Heart aye kind, an' leal, an' hale, — Honest Laird o' Lamington ! ​I BEN JONSON 155 I like a man to tak' his glass, Toast a friend or bonnie lass ; He that winna is an ass — Deil send him ane to gallop on ! I like a man that's frank an' kind, Meets me when I have a mind, Sings his sang an' drinks me blind, Like the Laird o' Lamington." He would just have suited our poet, who "of all styles loved most to be named Honest, and hath of that one hundreth letters so naming him." Did Drummond, think you, have many so naming him ? In our days the question of stimulants is commonly discussed with so much canting intemperance on the one side (that called, in irony, the Temperance) and so much timid hypocrisy on the other, that we rarely hear or read a straightforward sensible word on it. About the best I have ever seen, in a short space, is that of Dr. Garth Wilkinson, in his magistral but little known work, "The Human Body and its Connexion with Man," chap, iii., " Assimilation and its Organs;" much of the argument being as good for the sedative tobacco as for the stimulant wine. The wise liberal rule in this matter is precisely the contrary of that in politics : it is men not measures, instead of measures not men. The pertinent question is not, How much does So-and-So drink? but. How does he live and work on his drink, and into what society does it lead him ? It is scarcely needful to state that Jonson emerges triumphant from such a test As Gifford says on this point : " The immensity of his literary acquisitions, and the number and extent of his productions, refute the slander, no less ​156 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES than the gravity, dignity, wisdom, and piety of those with whom he passed his life from manhood to extreme old age." Clarendon, in his Life, speaking of himself in the third person, says : " He owed all the little he knew, and the little good that was in him, to the friendships and conversation he had still been used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age ; by whose learn- ing and information and instruction he formed his studies, and mended his understanding, and by whose gentleness and sweetness of behaviour, and justice and virtue and example, he formed his manners. . . . Whilst he was only a student of the law, and stood at gaze, and irresolute what corner of life to take, his chief acquaintances were Ben Jonson, John Selden, Charles Cotton, John Vaughan, Sir Kenelm Digby, Thomas May, and Thomas Carew, and some others of eminent faculties in their several ways. Ben Jonson's name can never be forgotten, having by his very good learning, and the severity of his nature and manners, very much reformed the stage, and indeed the English poetry itself. . . . His [Jon- son's] conversation was very good, and with the men of most note." One of the first scholars and most laborious writers of the age, conspicuous in the second rank of our poets and the front rank of our drama- tists, he was on terms of familiar friendship with the noblest of his contemporaries ; the boon-companions of his prime were the men of the Mermaid, and of his age his sons at the Apollo. He was convivial, and, as his burly namesake put it, " a clubbable man ; " and in his days, taverns were the regular social resorts of the most illustrious men, as coffee-houses in the ​BEN JONSON 157 next century, and as no places at all in ours — for our clubs have expanded far beyond the bounds of sociability. Frank and fearless, he rather exaggerated than sought to hide his jovial tastes ; and the younger men, who exulted in being of his society, did so too. But we know that there was a serious side to his character which he could assert on occasion, as in the apologetical Dialogue to the " Poetaster," already quoted from : — " 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 or the bays, And in this age can hope no other grace." Garth Wilkinson says : " It is at banquets like Plato's that wine is vindicated. Their guests show the scope of human assimilation. . . . The spirit of playmates with the spirit of wine; the pleasant emotions and the brilliant saws and dreams of society, like wine- lilies naturally rock upon the cup, and dip their spirity roots into the beakers. The imaginative skies are vinous then ; Valhalla has its mead, and great Odin never eats, but all sustenance is liquor to All- father, who drinks only wine. Elysium, too, would be a poor Elysium without nectar and ambrosia." Try to Fancy an Elysium full of Anti-Tobacco Tee- totalers ! Who that is sane would not prefer Tar- tarus ? Now, the banquets at which rare Ben revelled were like Plato's, and their wine was fully vindicated by the genial genius and wit that flowed more freely than its freest flowing. Hackneyed as they are, I could not but give Beaumont's verses on the Mer- maid, and, though they are equally hackneyed, I must give those of Herrick on other taverns : — ​158 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES "Ah Ben! Say how, or when, Shall we thy guests Meet at those lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun ? Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad ; And yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine. My Ben 1 Or come agen ; Or send to us Thy wit's great over-plus : But teach us yet Wisely to husband it ; Lest we that talent spend : And having once brought to an end That precious stock ; the store Of such a wit : the world should have no more." In Epigram 120, "Inviting a Friend to Supper," Jonson enumerates with rich relish the good things this " grave sir " may look for, but interjects — " Howsoe'er, my man,* Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus, Livy, or of some better book, to us, Of which we'll speak our minds, amidst our meat. And I'll profess no verses to repeat." In " Underwoods," Ixvi., "An Epistle, answering to one that asked to be sealed of the Tribe of Ben," he specifies among those with whom he will have no fellowship : —
is addressed " To my faithful servant and (by his continued virtue) my loving friend," Richard Brome, on his comedy of the " Northern Lass," which, Jonson says, has justly gained good applause from the stage. ​BEN JONSON 159 " those that merely talk, and never think, That live in the wild Anarchy of Drink, Subject to quarrel only." And in his Leges Convivales for the famous Apollo Club, founded by him, we see what sound ideas he had of good fellowship. This club met in the Apollo Room of the Old Devil Tavern, close to the east of Temple Bar, bought by Messrs. Child, the bankers, in 1787, and soon afterwards pulled down by them for the erection of a new building for their business. The Laws, it is said, were engraved on black marble. Over the door of the room was a bust of our poet, beneath which, in gold letters, on a black ground, were the following lines from his pen : — " ' Welcome all who lead or follow, To the Oracle of Apollo — Here he speaks out of his pottle, Or the tripos, his tower bottle : All his answers are divine. Truth itself doth flow in wine. Hang up all the poor hop-drinkers, Cries old Sim, the king of skinkers ; He the half of life abuses. That sits watering with the Muses. Those dull girls no good can mean us ; Wine it is the milk of Venus, And the poet's horse accounted ; Ply it, and you all are mounted. 'Tis the pure Phoebian liquor, Cheers the brains, makes wit the quicker, Pays all debts, cures all diseases. And at once three senses pleases. Welcome all who lead or follow, To the Oracle of Apollo.' O Rare Ben Jonson ! " These verses, with all their humorous exaggeration ​of the Rabelaisian revelry, testify to a certain vigour of constitution (conspicuous in the bill of fare of Epigram loi, already mentioned), and make us envy the generations who scarcely knew that they had nerves. As Wilkinson says again : "The hospitalities of other times enabled the guests to digest hard things, for which their successors have no stomachs : courage and clanship and bold ambition haunted the boars' heads and smoking beeves, and horns of mead and of wine. The revellers were firmer in friendship, brighter in honour, softer in love, and stronger in battle, for the spirits which descended upon the hall." The other charges need not be discussed at length, being partly disposed of in what has been said already. We admit that Ben was passionately kind and angry ; but know that such a character is rarely, if ever, vindictive, and find no trace of vindictiveness in his life or works. Although by no means strait- laced, he seems to have been sincerely religious, and warmly attached to the Church of England, to which he was re-converted by patient study and reflection. His few devotional pieces are very earnest and solemn, and darkened with hypochondria such as lowered on his namesake of the next century. I know nothing to make us doubt that right through his life he was governed by the principles announced in the passage cited from the dedication to "Volpone" (p. loo): " For my particular, I can, and from a most clear conscience, affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness ; have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed bawdry as is now made the food of the scene." Abhorrence of the ​'* ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy," then too common on the stage, could not be more forcibly expressed than in his indignant denial "that all are embarked in this bold adventure for hell." Drummond's literary verdict appears as untrust- worthy as his moral. "Oppressed with fantasie, which hath ever mastered his reason, a generall disease in many Poets ! " A general disease in poets, perhaps, but Jonson was precisely the last poet to be infected with it. As Clarendon justly remarks, in the passage quoted from already, " his natural ad- vantages were judgment to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy; his productions being slow and upon deliberation, yet then abounding with great wit and fancy, and will live accordingly." He went to the other extreme, his reason or judgment was generally too predominant over his fantasy or imagination ; whence that intellectual coldness and hardness, detracting from his popularity in our soft- headed, sentimental age. VIII Having sketched the life of Rare Ben and spoken generally of his works, it remains to speak of them particularly in connection with the subject wherein the Tobacco Plant is most profoundly interested. Books have been regarded, studied, and judged in many relations, as, taking a few instances at random, to history, or the art of making fiction appear solid fact ; metaphysics, or the art of " erring with method ; " morality, or the art of expanding local habits into I. ​universal rules ; logic, or the art of transforming words into things ; theology, or the art of dogma- tising on matters whereof nobody can know anything whatever; rhetoric, or the art of saying nothings gracefully ; politics, or the art of embroiling embroil- ment; science, or the art of rendering a grain of knowledge more conspicuous than a desert of ne- science. But if to these and the like trivial matters, why not to the most important and transcendent of all ? Wherefore I proceed to consider the works of our poet in relation to sublime and divine tobacco — a thrilling theme ! It has been often remarked that the introduction of the weed (so we lovingly vilipend the sweetest and dearest of flowers) was synchronous with the wonderful outburst of genius irradiating the close of the sixteenth and opening of the seventeenth century ; whence it has been plausibly urged that the latter was in large measure due to the former, that those fires of unequalled fervour and splendour were kindled at the altar of Diva Nicotina. Against this theory it has been contended by the profane, that if tobacco at the very beginning wrought such mar- vellous effects, we ought to be by this time, through continual and ever-increasing inspiration of pipe and cigar (for truly to in-spiration these are ever devoted), a people half-composed of Raleighs, and Bacons, and Shakespeares ; but the objection shows a lack of historical insight, due, it may be, to a lack of his- torical knowledge. The world is a perpetual flux ; the centuries are differently dominated ; the heavenly dynasties change even as the dynasties of earth ; the god must have successive avatars, nor can he continue in one form, even though it be the most beautiful​BEN JONSON 163 Was not the Golden Age the best ? — yet it had to give way to the Silver, and this again to the Iron (if the poets will graciously permit) ; and are we not now in the age of Brass ? Even so the Elizabethans repre- sent an age of Tobacco, the Queen Anne's men an age of Coffee, the late George III.'s men an age of Revolutions, the Victorians an age of Cant. And as among the brazen multitudes we have still a few men of iron, of silver, and even of gold; so among the canting multitudes we have still some men of revolu- tion, of coffee, and even a few men of genius inspired by tobacco. It has, too, been often remarked that Shakespeare never mentions or alludes to tobacco, though he may have smoked many a good pipe with Raleigh himself at the " Mermaid." It is to be feared that the remark is deplorably well founded. I myself have carefully scrutinised his works, in the hope of dis- covering some indication of his knowledge of its existence and use, but have not been able to find a single one that I can consider certain. Of course there are passages which a fumous special pleader might press into the service, but I scorn the wresting and racking of texts. Neither in Othello^ nor Mac- beth, nor Lear ; neither in Anthony and Cleopatra, Julius CcBsar, nor even in Coriolanus, can the candid investigator light upon traces of the common custom of smoking. It is not recorded that Hamlet ever took a pipe to soothe his melancholy, or that Ttmon of Athens offered cigars of a superior brand at his else sumptuous entertainments. In Troilus and Cressida we have Achilles and Ajax always fuming without the aid of even a cigarette. Many of the ​164 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES characters are continually taking snuff, but this does not appear to have been supplied by the tobacconist. The pipes are simply pastoral, and none of the weeds is The Weed. Let the antis ^ exult and triumph over us : neither in Shakespeare nor in the Bible is there sanction for such burning of incense as ours. It may be pleaded that Shakespeare places all his dramas in times anterior to his own ; that he scarcely ever touches on contemporary matters, save to flatter, courtier-like, his queen and king, or kick at a puppet- show stealing away his audiences (as if people had not a perfect right to go to see marionettes rather than Hamlet^ if so their tastes led them !) : we accept these apologies in palliation, we cannot in full vindi- cation. Let us frankly admit that the greatest and most universal writers have their faults— of com- mission, and yet more of omission. Has not Swift pointed out, among other defects ("Tale of a Tub," sect, v.), that Homer himself "seems to have read but very superficially either Sendivogius, Behmen, or Anthroposophia Theomagica?" And the weeping critic continues : " Having read his writings with the utmost application usual among modern wits, I could never yet discover the least direction about the struc- ture of that useful instrument, a save-all; for want of which, if the moderns had not lent their assistance, we might yet have wandered in the dark." And then, saddest of all : " But I have still behind a fault far more notorious to tax this author with ; I mean his gross ignorance in the common laws of this realm, and in the doctrine as well as discipline of the Church of England." And these heavy charges equally apply
to Plato and Aristotle and the other wise men of antiquity. Homer nods, and forgets the save-all; Shakespeare also nods, say over a pipe, and forgets the very pipe over which he is nodding. And here I may observe, with profound regret, that it is not only in literature that the greatest men are thus fallible. To take but one capital instance, it has been argued that Socrates himself was but a lazy old loafer who went bumming around at Athens, gossiping about anything and everything with any- body he could get to gossip with him, and pretending that this desultory chit-chat was philosophy ; picking up loose young swells like Alcibiades, and sponging on them for dinners, after which he was quite ready to stay drinking all night, as we read in the " Banquet." As to his guardian genius, about whom or which so much grandiose nonsense has been scribbled, these avvocati del diavolo allege his own description of the influence in that last dying speech and confession, the " Apology " : " This began with me from child- hood, being a kind of voice which, when present, always diverts me from what I am about to do, but never urges me on." Whence they argue, with cruel exultation, that it must be self-evident to every im- partial reader (whose intellects have not been be- wildered by the obscure intricacies of the catacombs, wherein the mummies of dead languages have lain mouldering for millenniums) that this renowned Agathodaemon was neither more nor less than su- preme vagrant indolence ! It has been further argued (I shudder in writing it) that in our days he would have been prosecuted for neglecting his poor wife and children (as he also confesses in the ​"Apology"), instead of trying to maintain them in comfort by working honestly at his stone-cutting business ; and that he richly deserved all that he ever got from Xanthippe (who, as appears by the Fhcedo, was really a good, warm-hearted creature, devotedly attached to this idle and incorrigible old vagabond), whether it were a deluge of reproaches or a deluge of anything else. And finally, as to his much vaunted death, it has been argued that nineteen out of twenty of the men ever hanged at Tyburn or Newgate have died just as "game," without wasting time in talk about matters of which they knew nothing. So urge the dreadful depredators : for me, who am quite ignorant with regard to all these things, I refrain from expressing or even forming any opinion until Prof. Jowett and his college (who are said to be the only men in England who have learnt any Greek) shall have delivered judgment on the whole case ; and, in order to obtain such judgment, I hope the editor will send them a few copies of this formidable indictment. But all this may be considered rather digressive, and I therefore make a sharp turn from Socrates and his somewhat unwholesome hemlock to our Ben and his good tobacco. He has indeed strangely omitted all mention of it from "Sejanus," "Catihne," "The Poetaster " {temp. Augustus), and most of the masques, which are mythological or romantic. Several of his comedies, however, wherein he depicts the fashions and humours of his time, do exceedingly abound in references to that newest and most extraordinary fashion and humour of smoking. All of these I cannot notice, but select the more prominent. ​BEN JONSON 167 Beginning with the first published play, "Every Man in his Humour," who is the great smoker therein ? Who but Captain Bobadill ? — the renowned, the valiant, the modest, the veracious, the irresistible swordsman, who with nineteen other blades as good, or nearly as good as his own, will settle for you an army of forty thousand. We first discover this great captain in his room in the house of Cob the water- bearer, to which mean lodging we might fancy him reduced by that evil fortune which so frequently attends surpassing merit, were he not careful to let us know that he merely hides there because he would not be too popular, and generally visited as some are. Of course Cob is fascinated by his lodger : "Oh, my guest is a fine man ! . . . Oh, I have a guest — he teaches me — he does swear the legiblest of any man christened : By Saint George ! the foot of Pharaoh I the body of me ! as I am a gentleman and a soldier I — such dainty oaths ! and withal he does take this same filthy roguish tobacco, the finest and cleanliest : it would do a man good to see the fume come forth at's tonnel's." As tonnels is doubtless classic Cobbian for nostrils, or, as Spenser writes it, nosethrills, we learn what was then one fashionable point in smok- ing. Our veteran goes forth with his visitor, Master Mathew, the Town Gull, to a breakfast whose fine frugaUty may be partly due to the fact that Mathew has not past a two shillings or so about him. Here is a bill of fare to shame gluttons : " Come ; we will have a bunch of radish and salt to taste our wine, and a pipe of tobacco to close the orifice of the stomach," Only this, and nothing more! as Poe sings, not without tautology. Was it on such a diet ​that our hero built up what the angry Downright terms, "that huge tumbrel-slop," and "Gargantua breech?"
We now come to Scene 2, Act iii., of which the last part is specially devoted to the glorification of tobacco. The great Bobadill asks for a light, and exclaims: "Body o' me! here's the remainder of seven pound since yesterday was seven-night. 'Tis your right, Trinidado: Did you never take any, Master Stephen?"
"Stephen (a country gull).—No, truly, sir; but I'll learn to take it now, since you commend it so.
Bobadill.—Sir, believe me, upon my relation, for what I tell you the world shall not reprove. I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only; therefore, it cannot be, but 'tis most divine. Further, take it in the nature, in the true kind: so, it makes an antidote, that had you taken the most deadly poisonous plant in all Italy, it should expel it, and clarify you, with as much ease as I speak. And for your green wound, your Balsamum, and your St. John's wort are all mere gulleries and trash to it, especially your Trinidado. Your Nicotian is good too. I could say what I know of the virtue of it, for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours, crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this kind; but I profess myself no quacksalver. Only this much, by Hercules I do hold it, and will affirm it before any prince in Europe, to be the most sovereign and precious weed that ever the earth tendered to the use of man."
There is a panegyric for you, and coming from such a reticent warrior! and one, moreover, who could declare with not less assurance than that Divine rogue Mercury in the glorious Greek hymn Shelley so gloriously translated:—
​BEN JONSON 169 " you know clearly beforehand That all which I shall say to you is sooth ; I am a most veracious person, and Totally unacquainted with untruth." Gifford notes that Bobadill had good authority for the epithet Divine ; and, indeed, for the whole of his panegyric. He quotes the famous passage in the " Faerie Queene " : — "There, whether it divine tobacco were, Or panacea, or polygony " — referring to the "sovereign weed" with which Bel- phoebe cured the sore wound of Prince Arthur's gentle Squire Timias (Book iii., canto v., st. 32, 33) : — "The soveraine weede betwixt two marbles plaine Shee pownded small, and did in peeces bruze ; And then atweene her lilly handes twaine Into his wound the juice thereof did scruze ; And round about, as she could well it uze, The flesh therewith she suppled and did steepe, T' abate all spasme, and soke the swelling bruze ; And, after having searcht the intuse deepe, She with her scarf did bind the wound from cold to keep." Surely a very pretty piece of feminine doctoring in the heart of the wild wood green. Gifford further notes that in his "Cosmography," Heylin, " no incompetent judge, perhaps, of this matter," says that the island of Trinidad abounds with the best kind of tobacco, much celebrated formerly by the name of a Pipe of I'rinidado. He knows not what species of tobacco was meant by nicotian, this having been originally, as now, a generic term. It might mean that grown in the ​particular district (Florida) from which it was brought to Jean Nicot. He remarks upon the strangeness of the fortune by which the insignificant settlement of Tobago has come to give the name by which the weed is generally known, and he says : " Many grave treatises were now extant (particularly on the Continent), which celebrated the virtues of this plant in the most extravagant terms. To listen to them, the grand elixir was scarcely more restorative and in- fallible." In a quaint book containing much curious information, " Opium and the Opium Appetite," by Alonzo Calkins, M.D. (Philadelphia: J. B, Lippin- cott & Co., 187 1), I find such a passage quoted, and worth requoting, from the " Message to Humanity " of one Dr. CorneUus Bontek^, who was not indeed of Jonson's time, but of that of the Restoration : "A remarkable fact it is that three things of the greatest moment to mankind were discovered at about the same era — the circumnavigation of the globe, the circulation of the blood, and the smoking of tobacco. [I answer not for the good doctor's statements.] This is the very best remedy to be found in the world against that root of all the diseases afflicting mankind, the scurvy. Is one amorous at heart and joyless in his loneliness ; is he sick and weak in body, or torpid and stiff in the joints ; is there pain in the head, eyes, or teeth ; doth colic, or gout, or stone exist ; or, is there a proneness to cra- pulency ? Here in this glorious weed is provided an all-sufficient remedy for his manifold ills." What does your contributor, Dr. Gordon Stables, say to that? Returning to our comedy, we soon find Master ​BEN JONSON 171 Mathew exclaiming : " By this air, the most divine tobacco that ever I drunk" — drinking tobacco being then a common phrase for smoking it. One of Gilford's examples, from the " Scourge of Folly " by Davies, may be worth citing here : — " Fumosus cannot eat a bit, but he Must drink tobacco, so to drive it down." Just SO Lane tells us of the modern Egyptians, that the terms they use for " smoking tobacco " mean " drinking smoke," or " drinking tobacco." Poor Cob is beaten by Bobadill for vilifying the divine tobacco, and in a soliloquy of pathetic in- dignation, declares that it would not have grieved him had it not been his guest; one for whom, among other things, his wife Tib had "sold almost all my platters to buy him tobacco : " — your right Trini- dado, O sumptuous Bobadill ! Cob applies for a warrant to the merry old magistrate, Justice Clement, who at first pretends that instead of granting it he will send poor Cob to prison. ' ' What ! a threadbare rascal, a beggar, a slave . . . and he to deprave and abuse the virtue of an herb so generally received in the courts of princes, the chambers of nobles, the bowers of sweet ladies, the cabins of soldiers I " Wherewith we may close the subject so far as concerns "Every Man in his Humour." It is noted that " much of what occurs in Jonson on the subject of tobacco, was written before the death of Elizabeth, who had no objection, good lady, to this or anything else which promoted the commerce, and assisted the revenues of her kingdom." ​IX Though we cannot expect to meet such another magnificent panegyrist of our sovereign herb as the renowned and vaHant Bobadill, we shall meet many who may be looked upon as subordinates in the company commanded by that great captain. The next play, "Every Man out of His Humour," is introduced by what is called The Character of the Persons^ and in this we find smoking marked as a principal trait in three of them. First we have Fastidious Brisk, the neat, spruce, affecting courtier, who has been regarded as a Bobadill at Whitehall ; and who, among other courtly accomplishments, "speaks good remnants, notwithstanding the base viol and tobacco ; swears tersely, and with variety." One can understand how the base viol might hinder his speaking, though even its twanging or droning should sometimes leave gaps for "remnants," but surely the interwhiffs of' tobacco afford the very best opportunities for venting such ; and as to the terse swearing, there can be little doubt that its terseness was in large measure due to the pipe. Then we have Sogliardo, another edition of Stephen the country gull, who "comes up every term to learn to take tobacco, and see new motions (puppet shows)." Whereon Giffbrd finely glosses : " It may seem strange to enumerate taking tobacco among the accomplishments to be acquired in town ; but it was then a matter of serious study, and had its professors, like the rest of the liberal arts." That this great liberal art hath no longer special professors ​BEN JONSON 173 is doubtless owing to the fact that nearly every one now is both professor and practiser, being able easily to master the art himself. Finally, we have that admirable scamp Shift, the Cavalier Shift, one of whose chief exercises is taking tobacco, this being his sole innocent and laudable employment. Coming to the play itself, we find almost every act odorous with those rich fumes that cheer but not inebriate. But first let me quote the beginning of the fine passage in which the poet, under the name of Asper, announces and vindicates the purpose of his comedy : — " Who is so patient of this impious world, That he can check his spirit, or rein his tongue ? Or who hath such a dead unfeeling sense. That heaven's horrid thunders cannot wake ? To see the earth cracked with the weight of sin, Hell gaping under us, and o'er our heads Black, ravenous ruin, with her sail-stretched wings, Ready to sink us down, and cover us. Who can behold such prodigies as these, And have his lips sealed up ? Not I : my soul Was never ground into such oily colours, To flatter vice, and daub iniquity : But, with an armed and resolved hand, I'll strip the ragged follies of the time Naked as at their birth." A strain too fierce and indignant for our light and pleasant theme ! This same Asper rough-handles certain types of pre- tentious critics common in his day among theatrical audiences, just as Sterne dealt right sternly with the varieties of the cant of criticism common in his. (We have no dramatic criticism, or drama, in these days, but mere insipid tolerance or eulogy of stage ​174 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES pieces without intellect or characters.) Among the rest, he singles out — " How monstrous and detested is't to see A fellow, that hath neither art nor brain, Sit like an Aristarchus, or stai-k ass. Taking men's lines, with a tobacco face, In snuff, still spitting, using his wry'd looks. In nature of a vice, to wrest and turn The good aspect [regard] of those that shall sit near him From what they do behold ! " This passage may best be illustrated by another from the Induction to " Cynthia's Revels," performed, it will be remembered, at the Blackfriars, by the children (boys) of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel. " Third Child. — Now, sir, suppose I am one of your genteel auditors, that am come in, having paid my money at the door, with much ado, and here I take my place and sit down : I have my three sorts of tobacco in my pocket, my light by me, and thusjl begin. At the break he takes his tobacco.'] By this light, I wonder that any man is so mad, to come to see these rascally tits play here. They do act like so many wrens or pismires — not the fifth part of a good face amongst them all. And then their music is abominable — able to stretch a man's ears worse than ten — pillories, and their ditties — [these dashes doubtless represent whiffs] most lamentable things, like the pitiful fellows that make them — poets. By this vapour, an 'twere not for tobacco — I think — the very stench of 'em would poison me, I should not dare to come in at their gates. A man were better to visit fifteen jails — or a dozen or two of hospitals — than once adventure to come near them. How is't ? well ? First Child. Excellent ; give me my cloak.* Third Child. Stay ; you shall see me do another now, but a more sober, or better-gathered gallant ; that is, as it may be thought, some friend, or well-wisher to the house : and here I enter.
the prologue was a long black velvet cloak. ​BEN JONSON - 175 First Child. What, upon the stage too ? Second Child. Yes ; and I step forth like one of the children, and ask you. Would you have a stool, sir ? Third Child. A stool, boy ! Second Child. Ay, sir, if you'll give me sixpence I'll fetch you one. Third Child. For what, I pray thee ? what shall I do with it ? Second Child. O Lord, sir ! will you betray your ignorance so much? Why, throne yourself in state upon the stage, as other gentlemen use, sir." On which we may quote the comment of Gifford : "At the theatres in Jonson's time, spectators were admitted on the stage. Here they sat on stools, the price of which, as the situation was more or less com- modious, was sixpence or a shilling : here, too, their own pages, or the boys of the house, supplied them with pipes and tobacco. Amidst such confusion and indecency were the dramatic works of Shake- speare and his contemporaries produced." Much as we admire and love the pipe, we must admit that it was quite out of place on the stage of a theatre while a genuine drama was proceeding; especially as abundant and abominable spitting appears to have been the ordinary custom of the age in smoking. How the actors got through their parts at all is a miracle ; the case was even worse than in that para- dise of cads, the modern music-hall, where at least the stage is free from intrusion. Returning to " Every man out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone, the "public, scurrilous, and prophane jester, that more swift than Circe, with absurd similies will transform any person into deformity; the good feast-hound or banquet-beagle, that will scent you out a supper some three miles off; whose religion is ​176 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES railing, and his discourse ribaldry ; " this amiable and honourable personage, ridiculing Fastidious Brisk's affectation of intimacy with lords, says : — " There's ne'er a one of these but might lie a week on the rack, ere they could bring forth his name ; and yet he pours them out as familiarly as if he had seen them stand by the fire in the presence, or ta'en tobacco with them over the stage, in the lords' room." Whereon Gifford, who has left any one else very little to do in the way of annotation : " The lords' rooms answered to the present stage-boxes. The price of admission to them appears to have been originally a shilling. Thus Decker : ' At a new play you take up the twelve-penny room, next the stage, because the lords and you may seem to be hail-fellow, well met.'— ' Gull's Hornbook, 1609.'" With Act iii. we enter the middle aisle of St. Paul's, the Mediterraneo, as Brisk terms it, then, as is well known, the common resort of persons of all professions, reputable and disreputable, and the scene of all kinds of business transactions. Here Carlo Buffone reads a bill, being one of the various baits for gulls set up by our noble friend the Cavalier Shift, otherwise Apple-John, otherwise Signor Whiffe, who justifies this last name by saying : " I have been taking an ounce of tobacco hard by here, with a gentleman, and I am come to spit private in St Paul's ; " and who modestly avows afterwards : " It pleases the world, as I am her excellent tobacconist, to give me the style of Signor Whiffe." Thus runs the delectable advertisement : — " If this city, or the suburbs of the same, do afford any young gentleman of the first, second, or third head, more or less, whose ​BEN JONSON 177 friends arc but lately deceased, and whose lands are but new come into his hands, that, to be as exactly qualified as the best of our ordinary gallants are, is affected to entertain the most gentlemanlike use of tobacco ; as first, to give it the most exquisite perfume ; then, to know all the delicate sweet forms for the assumption of it ; as also the rare corollary and practice of the Cuban ebolition, euripus, and whiff, which he shall receive, or take in here at London, and evaporate at Uxbridge, or farther, if it please him. If there be any such generous spirit, that is truly enamoured of these good faculties ; may it please him, but by a note of his hand to specify the place or ordinary where he uses to eat and lie ; and most sweet attend- ance, with tobacco and pipes of the best sort, shall be ministered. Stet, qucESO, candide Lector," Candid reader, in sooth ! Did I not well in calling our Shift admirable? Who in our degenerate days can compose such a tobacco advertisement as that ? It is not surpassed even by that stupendous feat of genius of Madame Rachel, of the wonder-working water from the Fountain of Youth, the Well of Life, brought, lest its celestial virtues should evaporate, by relays of swift dromedaries from the heart of the Libyan Desert ! It would appear by the text that the whiff was a long retention of the smoke low down somewhere, such as is practised in Spain, maybe a drawing it down into the lungs, as is cus- tomary in the East : Gifford quotes from Daniel : — " This herb in powder made, and fired, he sucks, Out of a little hollow instrument Of calcinated clay, the smoke thereof : Which either he conveys out of his nose. Or down into his stomach with a whiff. " And again from the " Gull's Hornbook " : — " Then let him shew his several tricks in taking the whiffe, the ring, &c., for these are compliments (accomplishments) that M ​178 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES gain gentlemen no mean respect ; and for which indeed they are more worthily noticed than for any skill they have in learning." As for the Cuban ebolition, or ebullition, we can but guess at its nature from its name ; and as for the euri- pus^ we can but conjecture with probability that as the Euripus was the ancient name of the strait be- tween Euboea and the continent, proverbial for its frequent flux and reflux, the term signified inhaling and exhaling smoke in swift succession. The bait of this keen and bright prospectus soon attracts its fish : — ^^ Sogliardo. Nay, good sir, house your head: do you profess these sleights in tobacco ? Shift, I do more than profess, sir, and, if you please to be a practitioner, I will undertake in one fortnight to bring you that you shall take it plausibly in any ordinary, theatre, or the Tilt- yard, if need be, in the most popular assembly that is. Puntarvolo [' a vain-glorious knight, over-englishing his travels ']. But you cannot bring him to the whiffe so soon ? Shift. Yes, as soon, sir ; he shall receive the first, second, and third whiffe, if it please him, and, upon the receipt, take his horse, drink his three cups of Canary, and, expose [exhale] one at Hounslow, a second at Stains, and a third at Bagshot." Fascinated by the which modest and veracious assurances, Sogliardo persuades him, nothing loth, to stay and dine, and even presses upon him, nothing loth, a poor French crown for the ordinary, saying : " If we can agree, we'll not part in haste." Doubt not that they agree, when Shift is above all determined not to disagree : will the angler willingly part in haste from his hooked fish ? The result is reported in Act iv., Sc. 4 : — ​BEN JONSON 179 ' ' Punt, [to Carlo. Was your new-created gallant with you there, Sogliardo? Carlo. O porpoise ! hang him, no ; he's a leiger [permanent resident] at Horn's ordinary yonder ; his villainous Ganymede and he have been droning a tobacco-pipe there ever since yester- day noon. Punt. Who ? Signior Tripartite [meaning Shift of the three appellations], that would give my dog the whiffe ? Carlo. Ay, he. They have hired a chamber and all, private, to practise in, for the making of the patoun, the receipt recipro- cal, and a number of other mysteries not yet extant [revealed]. I brought some dozen or twenty gallants this morning to view them, as you'd do a piece of perspective, in at a key -hole ; and there we might see Sogliardo sit in a chair, holding his snout up like a sow under an apple-tree, while the other opened his nostrils with a poking-stick, to give the smoke a more free de- livery. They had spit some three or four score ounces between 'em afore we came away. Ptmt. How ! spit three or four score ounces ? Carlo. Ay, and preserved it in porrengers, as a barber does his blood when he opens a vein. Punt. Out, pagan ! how dost thou open the vein of thy friend ? Carlo. Friend ! is there any such foolish thing in the world, ha ? 'slid, I never relished [tasted] it yet. Punt. Thy humour is the more dangerous." Truly it is hideous, with the poking-stick for the nostrils and the spittle in porrengers; but we may hope that the scurrilous and profane jester, whose religion is railing and his discourse ribaldry, is exaggerating, if he is not wholly inventing. Droning a tobacco-pipe occurs again in the " Silent Woman, ' Act iv., Sc. I : "As he lies on his back droning a tobacco pipe." The phrase seems suggestive of a happy monotony of indolence; the slow, sleepy breathing, as of an insect drone in summer, breathed through a tube like the drone of a bagpipe : it also ​appears to be a coinage of Ben's. As to ihepatoun and the receipt reciprocal, they remain esoteric, and we are left to mere conjecture. Gifford remarks that as patons, in French, are those small pellets of paste with which poultry are crammed, making of the patoun may mean moulding the tobacco, which was then always cut small, into some fantastic or fashionable shape for the pipe. Petun, we know, was one of the Indian names of tobacco, and was adopted in France, being commonly used by St. Amant and other jovial French writers about contemporary with Jonson, though 1 believe it is now obsolete ; and paioim may have some connection with petun. With regard to the receipt reciprocal, Gifford suggests that it not im- probably meant the passing of the pipe from one to the other; but there would be no mystery in this. He alleges the riiig, in the passage already cited from Decker's "Gull's Hornbook," as meaning the same; but I think it more probably meant puffing out the smoke so as to form rings of which the one should pass through the other, &c., a not uncommon practice in our own day. In conclusion, on these occult matters, I quote the memorandum by Steevens which Whalley transcribed on the margin of his copy : " Mr. Reed, who may be considered as the high-priest of black letter, declares no book to have been written containing instructions how to take tobacco [a woeful want !]. You have, therefore, not a single auxiliary on the present subject, except your own sagacity; and must of course be content to rank the patoun, &c., among the 'mysteries not yet extant.' — Aug. 29, 1781." Leaving these abstruse and obscure mysteries, we ​go back to Act iii., Sc. 3 — An apartment at court : Enter Macilente (who does not concern us), Fasti- dious, and Cinedo (his page) with tobacco. For what has our gay Brisk come? He has come to lay his homage at the feet of Saviolina, " a court-lady, whose weightiest praise is a light wit, admired by herself, and one more, her servant Brisk." Now we learn what the author meant when he said of this gallant, he "speaks good remnants notwithstanding the base viol and tobacco ; " for with those two sweet instruments, the pipe and the viol de gambo, our enamoured courtier courts his mistress — alas ! in vain, for poetical wooings are rarely successful in this gross world. At first euphuism is intermitted for puff, puff ; then for hum, hum ; then again for puff, puff. Here is a fragment from the close : she has taken the viol to tune it : — ' ' Fast. You see the subject of her sweet fingers there — Oh, she tickles it so, that — She makes it laugh most divinely ; I'll tell you a good jest now, and yourself shall say it's a good one : I have wished myself to be that instrument, I think, a thousand times, and not so few, by heaven . . . Sav. Here, servant, if you will play, come. FasL Instantly, sweet lady. — In good faith, here's most divine tobacco ! Sav. Nay, I cannot stay to dance after your pipe. Fas/. Good ! nay, dear lady, stay ; by this sweet smoke, I think your wit be all fire . . . Sav. Is your tobacco perfumed, servant, that you swear by the sweet smoke ? FasL Still more excellent ! Before heaven, and these bright lights, I think — you are made of ingenuity, I — Will your lady- ship take any ? .S'av. O, peace, I pray you ; I love not the breath of a wood- cock's head. Fast. Meaning my head, lady ? ​Sav. Not altogether so, sir ; but, as it were fatal to their follies that think to grace themselves with taking tobacco, when they want better entertainment, you see your pipe bears the true form of a woodcock's head. Fast. O admirable simile I Sav, 'Tis best leaving of you in admiration, sir. [Exit.] " Thus are idols insensible to the sweetest incense burnt to them ! Woodcock was a cant term for a fool. Gifford gives a drawing of an ancient pipe, in which he discerns pretty nearly the true form of a woodcock's head. Tobacco is mentioned on other occasions in " Every Man out of His Humour," but the allusions are scarcely of sufficient importance to be noted here. One remark must be made in closing. The objects of ridicule in this play are not things or customs themselves, but the affectations or exaggerations of them. Courtliness or courtesy, wit, learning, swords- manship, and tobacco are all good, though the mere pretension to them, or the fantastic abuse of them, is comically contemptible. X " Cynthia's Revels ; or, the Fountain of Self- Love " (1600) has but two or three allusions to tobacco in addition to those cited from the Induction in the preceding section. The first scene opens with a dialogue between Cupid and Mercury. To the un- equalled virtues and endowments of the precocious son of Maia and Zeus, the most frank and liberal tribute is paid in the Homeric Hymn translated by Shelley, from which I have already quoted : — ​BEN JONSON 183 " Now, when the joy of Jove had its fulfilling, And Heaven's tenth moon chronicled her relief, She gave to light a babe all babes excelling, A schemer subtle beyond all belief, A shepherd of thin dreams, a cow-stealing, A night-watchingi and door-waylaying thief, Who 'mongst the Gods was soon about to thieve. And other glorious actions to achieve. " The babe was born at the first peep of day ; He began playing on the lyre at noon ; And the same evening did he steal away Apollo's herds." It will, I think, be some considerable time before our new system of national education and the law of heredity can develop another such infant pheno- menon ! His lyre this half-day old made himself with the shell of a tortoise, having "bored the life and soul out of the beast ; " and when he had made it he sang to its accompaniment, and truly remark- able were the earliest themes of his unpremeditated song : — " He sung how Jove and May of the bright sandal Dallied in love not quite legitimate ; And his own birth, still scoffing at the scandal, And naming his own name, did celebrate ; His mother's cave and servant-maids he planned all In plastic verse, her household stuff and state, Perennial pot, trippet, and brazen pan ; — But singing he conceived another plan." "Seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat," the enfant terrible went forth and stole fifty of Apollo's kine; yet, when this little affair had been settled (Hermes getting a half-share in what he finely called ​184 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES "the herds in litigation"), Apollo himself thus praised him : — " This glory and power thou dost from Jove inherit, To teach all craft upon the earth below ; Thieves love and worship thee — it is thy merit To make all mortal business ebb and flow By roguery." In this last matter we are, perhaps, entitled to felicitate ourselves on being somewhat ahead of even the old Greeks ! In our dramatic " Comical Satire," Cupid, addressing Mercury, is no less candid than the hymn. Thus : — "... my mother Venus . . . but stoop'd to embrace you, and (to speak by metaphor) you borrow'd a girdle of hers, as you did Jove's sceptre (while he was laughing) and would have done his thunder too, but that 'twas too hot for your itching fingers. ... I heard, you but looked in at Vulcan's forge the other day, and entreated a pair of his new tongs along with you for company : 'tis joy on you i' faith, that you will keep your hooked talons in practice with anything. 'Slight, now you are on earth, we shall have you filch spoons and candlesticks rather than fail : pray Jove the perfumed courtiers keep their casting-bottles, pick-tooths and shittlc-cocks from you, or our more ordinary gallants their tobacco-boxes ; for I am strangely jealous of your nails." From which it appears that the use of tobacco was already almost universal among gentlemen of the court; the abstainers being principally such per- fumed, finical, effeminate, queasy dandies as had been probably turned inside out by their first and last attempt at a pipe. In Act ii., Sc. 2, we have the character of Anaides, who is the caricature of Eutolmos or good Audacity. ​BEN JONSON 185 Cupid asks : "Is that a courtier too ? " and Mercury replies (I perforce condense) : — "Troth no; he has two essential parts of the courtier, pride and ignorance ; marry, the rest come somewhat after the ordinary gallant. 'Tis impudence itself, Anaides ; one that speaks all that comes in his cheeks, and will blush no more than a sackbut. . . . He will censure or discourse of any thing, but as absurdly as you would wish. His fashion is not to take knowledge of him that is beneath him in clothes. He never drinks [/o atiy] below the salt. He does naturally admire his wit that wears gold lace or tissue. Stabs any man that speaks more contemptibly [contemptuously] of the scholar than he. He is a great proficient in all the illiberal sciences, as cheating, drinking, swaggering, whoring, and such like : never kneels but to pledge healths, nor prays but for a pipe of pudding- tobacco. The oaths which he vomits at one supper would main- tain a town of garrison in good swearing a twelve-month. " On the pipe of pudding-tobacco Gifford notes : " It appears from the Induction that there were 'three sorts of tobacco' then in vogue; which, from the names scattered over our old plays, seem to be the leaf, pudding, and cane-tobacco. I can give the reader no other information respecting them, than that cane-tobacco appears to have been the most expensive of the whole : —
With smoak more chargeable than cane tobacco.' — Merry Devil of Edmonton." At the end of the piece the nymphs and gallants who have drunk at the Fountain of Self-Love, and been but apes and counterfeits of truly noble and gentle courtiers, are adjudged to perform penance at Niobe's stone or Weeping-cross, and then to purge themselves at "the Well of Knowledge, Helicon" ​(not Hippocrene ; and so elsewhere in Jonson, though my Lord Winchelsea, with immense self- sufficiency, denounced a certain Miltonic poem as spurious because it thus made the mount a spring), and leave the stage in pairs singing a palinode, in the form of a litany, whereof one verse is — " From stabbing of arms, flap-dragons, healths, whiffs, and all such swaggering humours, Chorus. Good Mercury defend us." Of whiffs we have had enough in "Every Man out of his Humour"; for the stabbing of arms Gifford brings two apposite quotations : — " How many gallants have drank healths to me Out of their daggered arms ! " — Decker's ^^ Honest Whore." "By the faith of a soldier, lady, I do reverence the ground that you walk upon. I will fight with him that dares say you are not fair, stab him that will not pledge your health, and with a dagger open a vein to drink a full health to you." — Green's " Tu Quoque." In the Apologetical Dialogue added to the " Poet- aster" (1601) — see Section 2 — the author, referring to his assailants, Decker, Marston, and the rest, says : — " or I could do worse, Armed with Archilochus' fury, write Iambics. Should make the desperate lashers hang themselves, Rhime them to death, as they do Irish rats*
an Irish rat." — As You Like It, Act ill., Sc. 2. ​BEN JONSON 187 In drumming tunes. Or, living, I could stamp Their foreheads with those deep and public brands. That the whole company of barber-surgeons Should not take off, with all their art and plasters. And these my prints should last, still to be read In their pale fronts ; when what they write 'gainst me Shall, like a figure drawn in water, fleet, And the poor wretched papers be employed To clothe tobacco, or some cheaper drug : This I could do, and make them infamous. But to what end ? when their own deeds have mark'd 'em ; And that I know, within his guilty breast Each slanderer bears a whip that shall torment him Worse than a million of these temporal plagues : Which to pursue were but a feminine humour, And far beneath the dignity of man." So Ben in pure scorn refrains from branding them, the while his red-hot irons are hissing in their blood ! In "Volpone; or, The Fox" (1605), whose scene is Venice, tobacco, I think, is mentioned but once, Act ii., So. I. In order to obtain sight of the beauti- ful Celia, the chaste spouse of the jealous and in- famous Corvino, that crafty old Fox, Volpone, whose monstrous avarice ministers to more monstrous lusts, disguises himself as a mountebank doctor, and has his stage erected in front of her house in a retired corner of the Piazza of St. Mark. Here he dis- courses in first-rate quack or cheap-jack style, with that voluble and impressive eloquence which leaves the pulpit, the bar, and the senate quite out of the race, on his unique panacea, " this blessed unguento, this rare extraction," surnamed Oglio del Scoto (he appears in the character of Scoto Mantuano), and on his also unique powder — ​" Here is a powder, concealed in this paper, of which, if I should speak to the worth, nine thousand volumes were but as one page, that page as a line, that line as a word ; so short is this pilgrimage of man (which some call life) to the expressing of it. Would I reflect on the price ? why, the whole world is but as an empire, that empire as a province, that province as a bank, that bank as a private purse, to the purchase of it. I will only tell you ; it is the powder that made Venus a goddess (given her by Apollo), that kept her perpetually young, cleared her wrinkles, firmed her gums, filled her skin, coloured her hair ; from her derived to Helen, and at the sack of Troy unfortunately lost : till now, in this our age, it was as happily recovered, by a studious antiquary, out of some ruins of Asia, who sent a moiety of it to the court of France (but much sophisticated), wherewith the ladies now colour their hair. The rest, at this present, remains with me ; extracted to a quintessence : so that whatever it but touches, in youth it perpetually preserves, in age restores the complexion." When he pauses to take breath in this prodigious flux of oratory, the interval is filled by "a verse extempore" in honour of the medicaments by his dwarf Nano, who acts as the buffoon always ac- companying such a mountebank. Thus sings Nano to the glory of the oil : —
That to their books put med'cines all in, But known this secret, they had never (Of which they will be guilty ever) Been murderers of so much paper. Or wasted many a hurtless taper ; No Indian drug had e'er been famed. Tobacco, sassafras not named ; Ne yet of guacum one small stick, sir, Nor Raymond Lully's great elixir. Ne had been known the Danish Gonswart, Or Paracelsus with his long sword." Another proof, if proof were needed, of the then high pharmaceutic reputation of tobacco ; a reputation, be ​BEN JONSON 189 it observed, which it long kept, and still maintains to a considerable degree in many lands, and to which (bating the old uncritical extravagances) it has far more serious and solid claims than are generally admitted in our time and country. In "Epiccene; or, The Silent Woman" (1609), I have already referred to Act iv., Sc. i : "As he lies on his back droning a tobacco-pipe." There is another phrase worth mention ; not in itself, for it is very trivial and common in the writers of the time, but on account of Gifford's note : — '■'■He went away in snuff {hcX iv., Sc. 2), i.e., in anger: alluding, I presume, to the offensive manner in which a candle goes out. The word is frequent in our old writers, and furnishes Shakespeare with many playful opportunities of confounding it with the dust of tobacco." Now, in Section viii., I wrote : " It has, too, been often remarked that Shakespeare never mentions or alludes to tobacco, though he may have smoked many a good pipe with Raleigh himself at the ' Mer- maid.' It is to be feared that the remark is deplorably well founded. . . . Many of the per- sonages are continually taking snuff, but this does not appear to have been supplied by the tobacconist." Gifford was so well-read, painstaking, and accurate, that I withdraw the above and suspend my judgment on this important matter until I am able to investi- gate it again. In the meanwhile, as affording some presumption in my favour and against Gifford, it may be remarked, on the authority of " the once celebrated Charles Lillie," perfumer, London, 1740, as stated in a little book called " Nicotiana ; or the Smoker's ​and Snuff-Taker's Companion" (London : Effingham Wilson, 1832), by Henry James Meller, Esq., that snuff-taking was very rare, and indeed very little known in England, being chiefly a luxurious habit among foreigners residing here, and a few English gentry who had travelled abroad, until 1702, when the expedition sent out under Sir George Rooke and the Duke of Ormond, to make a descent on Cadiz, captured among other rich booty several thousand barrels and casks of the finest snuffs of Spanish manufacture, and immense quantities of gross snuff from Havana, in bales, bags, and scrows (untanned hides of buffaloes sown with thongs of the same). The whole quantity taken was estimated at fifty tons' weight ; and much of this being sold by the captors at a very low price, snuff-taking soon became a popu- lar custom and fashion. XI We are now at the culmination of Jonson's genius, "The Alchemist" (16 10; ceL 37, about which age so many of the illustrious culminate or perish) ; and here we meet Abel Drugger, a tobacco man, one of the favourite parts of Garrick. This masterpiece of comedy, admirable in all respects, is not least admir- able for its construction, a department in which nearly all our really great dramatists and novelists have been so poor (Fielding, particularly in " Tom Jones," is a shining exception) that they have been driven to beg, borrow, or steal, or fail. In "The Alchemist" we have a thoroughly original plot, full of vigorous and ​BEN JONSON 191 complicated action, involving the most diversified characters, so closely and deftly knit that, without sacrifice of probability, the scene is concentrated in one house and the lane in front of it, and the time is no more than is occupied in the representation. The acrostic Argument indicates the mainspring of the piece very succinctly : — "The sickness hot, a master quit, for fear. His house in town, and left one servant there ; Ease him corrupted, and gave means to know A Cheater and his punk ; who now brought low. Leaving their narrow practice were become Cozeners at large ; and only wanting some House to set up, with him they here contract. Each for a share, and all begin to act." The cheater is Subtle, alchemist, fortune-teller, astrologer, dealer in familiar spirits (not of alcohol), passed master gamester, &c. &c. His worthy com- panion is Dol Common, who plays whatever parts occasion may call for. The servant is Jeremy, the butler, who, as Captain Face, touts for the firm, and also acts as Ulen Spiegel, the Lungs, Puffe, or Assis- tant of Subtle. "Much company they draw," con- tinues the Argument; and finely, in sooth, do they draw all the hooked and netted fish and fowl. Dapper, the lawyer's clerk, comes for a fly or familiar, "to rifle with at horses, and win cups ; " and then, as his greed grows, for one that shall enable him to win at all games. Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias, a pastor and deacon at Amsterdam, come for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of immortality; for which also comes Sir Epicure Mammon, "a ​grave sir, a rich, that has no need, a wise sir, too, at other times," whose exuberance of voluptuous anticipation is as inexhaustible as the wealth and health at the command of the lord of the stone and the elixir, though a harvest of such foison has been reaped before in the same fields by the sensual raptures of "Volpone;" Dame Pliant, the rich and buxom young widow, comes to have her fortune told, and her brother Kastril to learn all the niceties of the quarrel and the duello, which, as we know by Touchstone's exposition, were then subtle exceedingly. Our modest and innocent friend Abel comes likewise ; and he, for tobacco's sake, must be put in scene as he makes his first appearance (Act. i., Sc. i) : —
"Subtle. What is your name, say you, Abel Drugger?
Drugger. Yes, sir.
Sub. A seller of tobacco ?
Drug. Yes, sir.
Sub. Umph! Free of the grocers [the Grocers' Company] ?
Drug. Ay, an't please you.
Sub. Well—your business, Abel?
Drug. This, an't please your worship:
I am a young beginner, and am building
Of a new shop, an't like your worship, just
At corner of a street : — Here is the plot on't —
And I would know by art, sir, of your worship,
Which way I should make my door, by necromancy.
And where my shelves ; and which should be for boxes,
And which for pots. I would be glad to thrive, sir :
I was wished to your worship by a gentleman.
One Captain Face, that says you know men's planets,
And their good angels, and their bad.
Sub. I do,
If I do see them. [An angel was also a coin.]
Re-enter Face.
Face. What I my honest Abel ?
Thou art well met here.
Drug. Troth, sir, I was speaking, Just as your worship came here, of your worship : I pray you speak for me to master doctor. Face. He shall do anything. Doctor, do you hear ? This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow ; He lets me have good tobacco, and he does not Sophisticate it with sack-lees or oil, Nor washes it in muscadel and grains. Nor buries it in gravel, under ground, Wrapped up in greasy leather, or pissed clouts : But keeps it in fine lily pots, that, opened, Smell like conserve of roses, or French beans, He has his maple block, his silver tongs, Winchester pipes, and fire of juniper : A neat, spruce, honest fellow, and no goldsmith. [In the sense of money-lender, usurer.] Sub. He is a fortunate fellow, that I am sure on. Face. Already, sir, have you found it ? Lo thee, Abel ! Sub. And in right way toward riches Face. Sir ! Sub. This summer He will be of the clothing of his company. And next spring called to the scarlet ; spend what he can. Face. What, and so little beard ? Sub. Sir, you must think, He may have a receipt to make hair come : But he'll be wise, preserve his youth, and fine for't. His fortune looks for him another way. Face. 'Slid, doctor, how canst thou know this so soon ? I am amused [amazed] at that. Sub. By a rule, captain. In metoposcopy, which I do work by ; A certain star in the forehead, which you see not. Your chesnut or your olive-coloured face Does never fail : and your long ear doth promise. I knew't by certain spots, too, in his teeth, And on the nail of his Mercurial finger. Face. Which finger's that ? Sub. His little finger. Look. You were born upon a Wednesday ? Drug. Yes, indeed, sir, N ​194 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Sub. The thumb, in chiromancy, we give Venus ; The forefinger to Jove ; the midst to Saturn ; The ring to Sol ; the least to Mercury, Who was the lord, sir, of his horoscope, His house of life being Libra ; which foreshewed He should be a merchant, and should trade with balance. Face. Why, this is strange ! Is it not, honest Nab ? Sub. There is a ship now coming from Ormus, That shall yield him such a commodity Of drugs — This is the west, and this the south? [^Pointing to the plan. Drug. Yes, sir. Sub. And those are your two sides. Drug. Ay, sir. Sub. Make me your door, then, south ; your broad side west : And on the east side of your shop, aloft. Write, Mathlai, Tarmiel, and Baraborat ; Upon the north part, Rael, Velel, Thiel. They are the names of those Mercurial spirits That do fright flies from boxes. Drug. Yes, sir. Sub. And Beneath your threshold, bury me a loadstone To draw in gallants that wear spurs : the rest, They'll seem to follow. Faee. That's a secret, Nab ! Sub. And on your stall, a puppet, with a vice And a court-fucus,* to call city-dames : You shall deal much with minerals. Drug. Sir, I have At home, already Sub. Ay, I know you have arsenic. Vitriol, sal-tartar, argaile, alkali, Cinoper : I know all. — This fellow, captain. Will come in time to be a great distiller [chemist], And give a say+ — I will not say directly, But very fair — at the philosopher's stone. • A doll moved by wires, with face painted or rouged, t Assay, essay ; attempt or trial. ​BEN JONSON 195 Face. Why, how now, Abel 1 is this true ? Drug. Good captain, What must I give ? Aside to Face. Face. Nay, I'll not counsel thee. Thou hear'st what wealth (he says, spend what thou canst) Thou'rt like to come to. Drug. I would gi' him a crown. Face. A crown ! and toward such a fortune ? heart, Thou shalt rather gi' him thy shop. No gold about thee .? Drug. Yes, I have a portague * I have kept this half-year. Face. Out on thee, Nab ! 'Slight, there was such an offer— Shalt keep't no longer, I'll give't him for thee. Doctor, Nab prays your worship to drink this, and swears He will appear more grateful, as your skill Does raise him in the world. Drug. I would entreat Another favour of his worship. Face. What is't. Nab? Drug, But to look over, sir, my almanack, And cross out my ill days, that I may neither Bargain, nor trust upon them. Face. That he shall. Nab ; Leave it ; it shall be done 'gainst afternoon. Stib. And a direction for his shelves. Face. Now, Nab, Art thou well pleased, Nab ? Drug. 'Thank, sir, both your worships. Face. Away. Exit Drugger." The above quotation is very long, but the scene is too good to be mangled ; and, moreover, only by giving it in full could the exquisite simpHcity of Abel and the exquisite roguery of the accomplices be adequately developed for such as do not know the play. It will be observed that Drugger says very Uttle, telling his business and answering questions
portague as a piece very solemnly kept of divers." ​196 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES as briefly as possible, and being only profuse in interjections of humble thanks to the sharpers who are plucking him. The attraction of the part for Garrick doubtless consisted in its Uberal scope for the eloquent pantomine of gait, attitude, gesture, facial expression, of which he was so consummate a master, alike in tragedy and comedy. Eyes intent on him only must have read the speeches of Subtle and Face with scarcely less precision and far deeper impression than the ears heard them. As a great composer will maintain the identity of a simple air or fugal theme through countless intricate variations, combinations, and transformations, so we can imagine the great mimic preserving the original simple Drugger through a manifold diversity of humorous phases; and the good Partridge would have found him no more an actor in this than in Hainlet, remarking to his patron, Tom Jones, that any one in the circum- stances would have looked and done just as Mr. Garrick did. Referring to Face's recommendation of Abel, Gifford notes : — 'It should be observed that the houses of drug- gists (tobacconists) were not merely furnished with tobacco, but with conveniences for smoking it. Every well-frequented shop was an academy of this 'noble art,' where professors regularly attended to initiate the country aspirant. Abel's shop is very graphically described, and seems to be one of the most fashionable kind. The maple block was for shredding the tobacco leaf, the silver tongs for holding the coal, and the Jire of Juniper for the customers to light their pipes. Juniper is not lightly ​BEN JONSON 197 mentioned ; ' when once kindled,' Fuller says, ' it is hardly quenched ; ' and Upton observes, from Cardan, that * a coal of juniper, if covered with its own ashes, will retain its fire a whole year.' " Juniper was, more- over, burnt in Jonson's time to sweeten the air of chambers. Thus, in the character of the persons prefixed to *' Every Man out of his Humour," Deliro is described as " a good doting citizen, ... a fellow sincerely besotted on his own wife, and so rapt with a conceit of her perfections, that he simply holds him- self unworthy of her. . . . He doth sacrifice twopence in juniper to her every morning before she rises, and wakes her with villainous out-of-tune music, which she, out of her contempt (though not out of her judg- ment), is sure to dislike." See also " Cynthia's Revels," Act ii., Sc. I. We are horrified to learn from this same speech of Face into what loathsome depths of iniquity the black art of sophisticating pure tobacco had plunged so soon after its blessed introduction into common use here. But this was chiefly the fault of that sapient fool or fatuous sage, James I., who, by one of the earliest Acts of his reign, in 1604, increased the importation duty from twopence to six shillings and tenpence per lb. (probably equal to 30s. now), an advance at one wild leap of exactly four thousand per cent. ! A pretty premium upon adulteration and smuggling. " In consequence of this, nearly a stagna- tion of the trade took place ; and Stitii informs us that so low was it reduced in 161 1 [the year after the pro- duction of the "Alchemist"], that only 142,085 lbs. weight were imported from Virginia, not amounting to one-sixth of the previous annual supply " (" Nico. ​198 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES tiana," pp. 38, 39), Culture at home was then tried, but another Act was passed in 1620 prohibiting this. It was also discovered that " the wisest fool in Chris- tendom " had only imposed the monstrous duty on tobacco from Virginia ; and recourse was had to the Spanish and Portuguese possessions, whose tobacco thus came in at the old twopence, to the heavy injury of our own colonists ! These naturally complained, and so in 1624 yet another Act lessened the duty on their produce, and prohibited importation of any other. As the trade began to revive under this, James finished his reign as he had begun it, by an attempt to cut down the inveterate weed he could not uproot ; he had a law made imposing heavy penalties on any one dealing in tobacco without royal letters patent. " A blow so sudden and unexpected occasioned the ruin, we are told, of many thousands, and the trade went rapidly to decay." (*' Nicotiana," pp. 39, 40.) It was by this consistent and enlightened course of conduct that the Most High and Mighty Prince James justified the free and independent gratulations of those who accomplished our Authorised Version of the Bible : " For whereas it was the expectation of many, who wished not well to our Ston, that upon the setting of that bright Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth, of most happy memory, some thick and palpable clouds of darkness [breathed from myriads of tobacco-pipes] would so have overshadowed this land, . . . the appearance of your Majesty, as of the Sun in his strength, instantly dispelled those sup- posed and surmised mists [by the before-mentioned Acts and the " Counterblast : " but how dispel mists which were not in existence, being only supposed ​BEN JONSON 199 and surmised?]" &c. &c. This is how the modern Solomon dealt with a precious and wholesome luxury, rapidly growing into an almost universal necessary of really civilised life, and the duty on which in 1875, just 250 years after his death, con- tributed ;^7,72o,558 to the national revenue, being 38f per cent, of all the Customs, 5 per cent, more than spirits, and over twice as much as tea ! And, even in his own time, he was so far foiled in his demented war a outrance against the "weed of glorious feature " (Wordsworth !) that, as I read in Dr. Carrick Murray's little work on Smoking (p. 70) : " From ' The Honesty of the Age,' by Barnaby Rych, published in 16 14, two years before the celebrated 'Counterblast,' we learn there were 'upwards of 7000 houses that doeth live by that trade in London, and near about London.' " And now we must postpone to another section the further consideration of honest Abel Drugger, who, unsophisticated himself, supplied unsophisti- cated tobacco. XII The second Act introduces Sir Epicure Mammon, who has been promised by Subtle that the magisterium, the great work, both philosopher's stone and elixir, will be perfected for him this day. Mammon is ac- companied by his unbelieving friend, Pertinax Surly, a gamester, whose incredulity he overwhelms, if he cannot drown it, with torrents of eloquence, swelling into boundless floods of dithyrambic rapture when he catalogues to Face, disguised as Lungs, some of the ​200 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Stupendous luxuries in which he means to revel. It is not within my purpose to quote from these wonder- ful rhapsodies, nor would fragmentary quotation do them any justice, their effect being strictly cumulative; but I cannot help citing the note on them, of him whom we all love as dearly as he himself loved old plays and tobacco — the subtle, sympathising critic, whose appreciation of our Elizabethan poetry, and especially dramatic poetry, is all but infallible ; and who has the gift of such exquisite and unique expression. Of course I mean Charles Lamb. " The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torrent of images, words, and book-knowledge with which Mammon con- founds and stuns his incredulous hearer ; they come pouring out like the successive strokes of Nilus. They ' doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.' Description outstrides proof. We are made to believe effects before we have testimony for their causes : as a lively description of the joys of heaven sometimes passes for an argument to prove the existence of such a place. If there be no one image which rises to the height of the sublime, yet the con- fluence and assemblage of them all produces an effect equal to the grandest poetry. Xerxes' army, that drank up whole rivers from their numbers, may stand for single Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the most determined offspring of the author. . . . What a ' tow'ring bravery ' there is in his sensuality ! He affects no pleasure under a Sultan. It is as if ' Egypt with Assyria strove in luxury.' " — Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, who lived about the iitne of Shakespeare. Well may Mr. H. H. Furness, in the preface to his invaluable Variorum Edition of Hamlet, lament the fine genius wasted in the South Sea House, and say that if England had known what a precious gift she had in Elia, she would have endowed him with un- vexed leisure for the study and interpretation of our grand old writers. ​When Mammon has departed, not without leaving more gold to make sure and perfect the final projection, Ananias, the deacon of Amsterdam, comes in, and is soon packed off, with threats that the work shall be ruined if additional money is not brought within the hour; then re-enter Face in his uniform, followed by Drugger. Subtle affects anger at the interruption, and Face gets another piece of gold out of poor Nab to appease him. Abel wants a lucky and thriving sign for his shop:—
"Face. What say you to his constellation, doctor,
The Balance?
Sub. No, that way is stale and common.
A townsman born in Taurus gives the bull,
Or the bull's head: in Aries the ram,
A poor device! No, I will have his name
Formed in some mystic character; whose radii,
Striking the senses of the passers-by;
Shall, by a virtual influence, breed affections,
That may result upon the party owns it:
As thus——
Face. Nab!
Sub. He shall have a bel that's Abel;
And by it standing one whose name is Dee,
In a rug gown, there's D; and rug, that's drug;
And right anenst him a dog snarling er;
There's Drug-er: Abel Drugger. That's his sign.
And here now's mystery and hieroglyphic!
Face. Abel, thou art made.
Drug. Sir, I do thank his worship.
Face. Six o' thy legs more will not do it, Nab.
He has brought you a pipe of tobacco, doctor.
Drug. Yes, sir——"
The Dee in a rug gown, as Gifford, of course, notes, is levelled at the then notorious Dr. Dee, a ​202 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES great pretender to astrology, alchemy, and magic. Beginning as dupe, he soon developed into cheat ; for in this department of natural history the shrewder pigeons, when plucked, are apt to turn hawks ; and with the equally notorious Kelly rambled over Europe, ostensibly as conjurer, really as spy. On his return, he settled at Mortlake, where, notwithstanding his possession of the philosopher's stone, he died in ex- treme poverty, being, as Lilly says, " enforced many times to sell some book or other to buy a dinner." In the print before one of his books he appears wrapped in a rough, shaggy gown ; to this Jonson alludes. Kelly is mentioned, Act iv., Sc. i, and Gifford has an interesting note on his career. Abel has another thing he would impart. Hard by him is lodged a rich young widow. Dame Pliant, but nineteen at the most, to whom he now and then gives a fucus, and sometimes physic, in return for which she trusts him with all her mind. She has come up to town to learn the fashion^ and she strangely longs to know her fortune. His worship the doctor is, of course, the very one wise man who can tell it ; and Face hints that Nab may win her. " Drug. No, sir, she'll never marry Under a knight : her brother has made avow. Face. What I and dost thou despair, my little Nab, Knowing what the doctor has set down for thee, And seeing so many of the city dubbed ? . . . what's her brother, a knight ? Drug. No, sir, a gentleman newly warm in his land, sir, Scarce cold in his one-and-twenty, that does govern His sister here ; and is a man himself Of some three thousand a year, and is come up To learn to quarrel, and to live by his wits, And will go down again, and die in the country. ​I I BEN JONSON 203 Face. How ! to quarrel ? Drug. Yes, sir, to carry quarrels, As gallants do ; to manage them by line. Face. 'Slid, Nab, the doctor is the only man In Christendom for him. He has made a table, With mathematical demonstrations. Touching the art of quarrels : he will give him An instrument to quarrel by. Go, bring them both, Him and his sister. And, for thee, with her The doctor happ'ly may persuade. Go to : 'Shalt give his worship a new damask suit Upon the premises. Sub. O, good captain ! Face. He shall ; He is the honestest fellow, doctor. Stay not. No offers ; bring the damask, and the parties. Drug. I'll try my power, sir. Face. And thy will, too. Nab. Sub. 'Tis good tobacco, this ! What is't an ounce ? Face. He'll send you a pound, doctor. Sub, O, no. Face. He will do't. It is the goodest soul ! Abel, about it ! Thou shalt know more anon. Away, be gone. Exit Abel. A miserable rogue, and lives with cheese, And has the worms. That was the cause, indeed, Why he came now : he dealt with me in private, To get a med'cine for them. Sub. And shall, sir. This works. Face. A wife, a wife for one of us, my dear Subtle ! We'll e'en draw lots. . . . Sub. Faith, best let's see her first, and then determine. Face. Content ; but Dol must have no breath on't. Sub. Mum." Two things in this admirable part-scene puzzle my ignorance : first, Why does Kastril {Kestrel, a worth- less, degenerate hawk; hence, a mean, dastardly fellow), the angry boy, Dame Pliant's brother, want to learn to live by his wits, having some three ​204 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES thousand a year (equal to quite twelve thousand in our days), and meaning to go back to the country ? Second, Why does Abel, who is druggist as well as tobacconist and grocer, and who supplies physic, need to consult Face about a medicine for the worms ? In Act iii., Sc. 2, enter Abel, followed by Kastril : — '^^ Face. What, honest Nab! Hast brought the damask ? Drug. No, sir ; here's tobacco. Face. 'Tis well done, Nab : thou'lt bring the damask too ? Drug. Yes ; here's the gentleman, captain, Master Kastril, I have brought to see the doctor. Face. Where's the widow ? Drug. Sir, as he likes, his sister, he says, shall come. Face. O, is it so ? Good time. Is your name Kastril, sir ? Kas. Ay, and the best of the Kastrils, I'd be sorry else, By fifteen hundred a year. Where is the doctor ? My mad tobacco-boy here tells me of one That can do things : has he any skill ? Face. Wherein, sir? Kas. To carry a business, manage a quarrel fairly, Upon fit terms. Face. It seems, sir, you are but young About the town, that can make that a question. Kas. Sir, not so young but I have heard some speech Of the angry boys, and seen them take tobacco ; And in his shop ; and I can take it too. And I would fain be one of 'em, and go down And practise in the country." What on earth, or under the earth, makes Kastril term poor, quiet, simple Abel "my mad tobacco- boy?" Where is aught wild in him, except the superstitious credulity common to his age? Mad Abel Drugger! mouton enrage, peaceablest of living ​BEN JONSON 205 creatures gone rabid, as Carlyle glosses with his immense chuckle ! The angry boys are called the terrible boys in the "Silent Woman," Act i., Sc. i. Upton quotes from Wilson's " Life of King James " : "The king minding his sports, many riotous de- meanours crept into the kingdom; divers sects of vicious persons, going under the title of roaring-boys, bravadoes, roysters, &c., commit many insolencies; the streets swarm, night and day, with bloody quar- rels, private duels fomented," &c. Gifford adds : " These pestilent miscreants continued under various names to disturb the peace of the capital down to the accession of the present royal family;" but methinks we have read of beating the watchmen or Charlies, and other such gentlemanlike rowdyisms, as occurring long after the royal Germans, with their kin and followers, kindly came for our goot and our goots. All quiet smokers, who have the leisure and take the trouble to read beyond their Bible and the precious leaves of their Tobacco Plant, must remem- ber how fiercely Milton denounced those sons of Belial, and how Swift tomahawked the Mohawks. How bumptious is Kastril, because he, too, can take tobacco ! In our age he would have smoked when ten years younger. Gifford says : " It has been already mentioned [see preceding Section] that Abel's shop was frequented by the adept as well as the tyro in the mystery of 'taking tobacco.' Here the latter was duly qualified for his appearance at ordinaries, taverns, and other places of fashionable resort. Here he practised the 'Cuban ebolitio, the euripus, the whiffe,' and many other modes of sup- pressing or emitting smoke with the requisite grace, ​206 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES under Cavalier Shift and other eminent masters, whose names have not reached the present times — carent quia vate sacro." The dialogue proceeds ; Face, as the eminently disinterested friend of truth, extolling the little less than omniscience and omni- potence of the doctor with such effect that we read : — " Kas. Pray thee, tobacco-boy, go fetch my suster ; I'll see this learned boy before I go ; And so shall she. Face, Sir, he is busy now ; But if you have a sister to fetch hither, Perhaps your own pains may command her sooner ; And he by that time may be free. Kas. I go. [Exit. Face. Drugger, she's thine : the damask ! {Exit Abel.] Subtle and I Must wrestle for her. [Aside.l " Surly, disguised as a wealthy Spanish Don ignorant of English, penetrates into the house to expose the cheaters, and has the opportunity of telling Dame Pliant, whom he hopes to win for himself, into what hands she has fallen, 'mongst what a nest of villains. Discovering himself when Subtle enters, he jeers and strikes down that venerable doctor ; and when Subtle cries, " Help ! Murder ! " retorts balefuUy ; — " There's no such thing intended : a good cart And a clean whip shall ease you of that fear." Face comes at the cry ; sees how matters stand, slips out, and returns with Kastril : — ^' Face. Why, now's the time, if ever you will quarrel Well, as they say, and be a true-born child : The doctor and your sister both are abused. ​BEN JONSON 207 Kas. Where is he ? Which is he ? He is a slave, Whate'er he is, and the son of a whore. Are you The man, sir, I would know ? Sur. I should be loth, sir. To confess so much. Kas. Then you lie in your throat. Sur. How ! Face. [To Kastril.] A very errant rogue, sir, and a cheater. Employed here by another conjuror That does not love the doctor, and would cross him If he knew how. Sur. Sir, you are abused. Kas. You lie : And 'tis no matter. Enter Drugger with a piece of damask. Fcue. Nay, here's an honest fellow, too, that knows him, And all his tricks. Make good what I say, Abel, This cheater would have cozened thee o' the widow. [Aside to Drugger. He owes this honest Drugger here seven pound. He has had on him in twopenny'orths of tobacco. Drug. Yes, sir. And he has dammed himself three terms to pay me. Face. And what does he owe for lotium ? Drug. Thirty shillings, sir ; And for six syringes. Sur. Hydra of villainy ! Face. [To Kastril.] Nay sir, you must quarrel him out o' the house. Kas. I will : Sir, if you get not out o' doors, you lie ; And you are a pimp. Sur. Why, this is madness, sir, Not valour in you ; I must laugh at this. Kas. It is my humour : you are a pimp and a trig, And an Aniadis de Gaul, or a Don Quixote. Drug. Or a knight o' the curious coxcomb, do you see ? " Dragger himself, we see, grows witty at the expense of his rival ; as for his fibbing against him, all is fair ​208 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES in love and war. It will be remarked that Kastril has not yet mastered the nice gradations of the gentle- manly quarrel, and can but blurt out grossly at the very beginning, " Vou //V," which should be the climax. It will also be remarked that his munition of invec- tive is neither abundant nor formidable. For the sake of his sister, Surly does not want to quarrel with him, but sees clearly through his vapouring, and tells him that he is valiant in company ; for all present — save Dame Pliant, always passively neutral — are dead against the gamester, who for once is playing an honest game. Even Ananias, entering, has his zeal mightily kindled against Surly's Spanish slops : — "Ana. They are profane, Lewd, superstitious, and idolatrous breeches. Sur. New rascals ! A'as. Will you be gone, sir ? Afia. Avoid, Sathan ! Thou art not of the light ! That ruff of pride About thy neck, betrays thee ; and is the same With that which the unclean birds, in seventy-seven. Were seen to prank it with on divers coasts : Thou look'st like antichrist in that lewd hat. Sur, I must give way " The " unclean birds of seventy-seven " may refer to the number of Spanish troops poured about that year, 1577, into the Netherlands under Alva. During the early part of James's reign Spanish influence and fashions were paramount at court; but the people remembered the Armada, and loved not Pope or Inquisition, and always welcomed any stage ridicule of their old enemies. The huge Spanish ruffs, with their deep sets or plaits, often came in for mockery ; ​BEN JONSON 209 and in the present piece, Act iv., Sc. i, Subtle ex- claims, when Surly first enters disguised — " He looks in that deep ruff like a head in a platter Served in by a short cloak upon two trestles." Surly being at length got rid of for the time, Face and Drugger are left on one side, Subtle and Ananias on the other : — " Face. Drugger, this rogue prevented us, for thee : We had determined that thou should'st have come In a Spanish suit, and have carried her so ; and he, A brokerly slave ! goes, puts it on himself. Hast brought the damask ? Drug. Yes, sir. Face. Thou must borrow A Spanish suit : hast thou no credit with the players ? Drug. Yes, sir ; did you never see me play the Fool ? Face. I know not, Nab ; thou shalt, if I can help it. ^{Aside. Hieronimo's old cloak, ruff, and hat will serve ; I'll tell thee more when thou bringest 'em. _Exit Drugger." Old Hieronimo, or Jeronymo, was the title-hero of a popular play by Kyd, and of its sequel, the " Spanish Tragedy," frequently burlesqued by our poet and his contemporaries, though Jonson himself in his early hack days earned a small sum by writing additions to it. We are now at the close of the Fourth Act, and the beginning of the denouement. Lovewit, the master of the house, suddenly returns, and is descried by Dol, with forty of the neighbours about him talking. Face, the man of action, immediately assumes command in the confederacy : — '■'■ Face. Be silent : not a word, if he call or knock. I'll into mine old shape again and meet him, O ​210 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Of Jeremy, the butler. In the meantime, Do you two pack up all the goods and purchase,* That we can carry in two trunks. I'll keep him Off for to-day, if I cannot longer : and then At night I'll ship you both away to RatclifiF, Where we will meet to-morrow, and there we'll share. Let Mammon's brass and pewter keep the cellar ; We'll have another time for that. But, Dol, Prithee go heat a little water quickly ; Subtle must shave me : all my captain's beard Must off, to make me appear smooth Jeremy." The neighbours tell Lovewit of the strange persons who have been flocking to his house, day and night, for weeks past, during which Jeremy has not been seen. Jeremy appears, and maintains that the house has been shut up and the keys in his pocket for the last three weeks, and that the neighbours must have had visions or been demented. These worthies waver before his assurance. Then the dupes come up, undeceived and raging; Mammon and Surly, Kastril for his sister (who is awaiting the genuine Spanish Don she has been promised for husband), Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome; Dapper cries out from within, and Subtle shouts to quieten him ; Lovewit overhears Face rebuking the latter for his noise; and finally Face, seeing that he is caught, and feehng that "nothing's more wretched than a guilty conscience" (when the guilt's found out), offers to confess in private : — • Whalley notes : "A cant term for goods stolen or dishonestly come by: thus Shakespeare, Henry V. — ' They will steal anything, and call it purchase. ' And this sense seems to be derived from Chaucer, who thus uses it in his ' Prophecy ' : — 'And robbery is holde purchase.' " ​BEN JONSON 211 "Give me but leave to make the best of my fortune, And only pardon me the abuse of your house : It's all I beg. I'll help you to a widow, In recompense, that you shall give me thanks for, Will make you seven years younger, and a rich one. 'Tis but your putting on a Spanish cloak : I have her within." Drugger returns with Hieronimo's cloak, hat, and ruflf; Face tells Subtle to take the suit, and bid him fetch a parson presently : " Say he shall marry the widow." Face goes off with the things to his master ; but Subtle thinks that he means to don the Don himself and marry Dame Pliant, and so informs Dol, who exclaims, " 'Tis direct against our articles." Subtle plans with her to get off with the plunder to Brentford instead of Ratcliff, and leave Face in the lurch, Dol beforehand getting what she can from the widow. Nab returns with the parson, and is sent back again to wash himself. Face re-enters, and finds that all the purchase is safely packed up, money and goods, including poor Abel's damask and tobacco : — '■^ Face. Give me the keys. Dol. Why you the keys ? Sub. No matter; Dol ; because We shall not open them before he comes. Face. 'Tis true, you shall not open them, indeed ; Nor have them forth, do you see ? not forth, Dol. Dol. No! Face. No, my smock-rampant. The right is, my master Knows all, has pardoned me, and he will keep them ; Doctor, 'tis true — you look [astonished] — for all your figures : I sent for him, indeed.* Wherefore, good partners, • A falsehood, to frighten them. ​212 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Both he and she be satisfied ; for here Determines the indenture tripartite 'Twixt Subtle, Dol, and Face. All I can do Is to help you over the wall, o' the back-side. Or lend you a sheet to save your velvet gown, Dol. Here will be officers presently, bethink you Of some course sudden to 'scape the dock : For thither you will come else. [Loud knocking.] Hark you, thunder." They curse him, he mocks ; and they have to decamp without bag or baggage. Lovewit in the Spanish dress has been married off-hand to Dame Pliant. Mammon, Surly, Kastril, Ananias, Tribulation return with ofificers, and are admitted when Lovewit has cast off his disguise. He lets them know who he is, and explains that his servant, taking advantage of his absence, had let the house to a doctor and a captain, of whom he knows nothing. He had found only a gentlewoman within, whom he had married, because her Spanish count had neglected her. They search the house in vain. Mammon, who says that he has been cheated of eight score and ten pounds within these five weeks,* besides his first materials, demands at least his brass and pewter vessels, which he had sent to be turned into gold. Lovewit will not give these up unless Mammon can bring certificate that he was gulled of them. Mammon will rather lose them than so expose his folly, and retires with Surly, who bitterly regrets that, in not securing the widow when she was in his power, he must needs cheat • Yet at the opening of Act ii. he says that they had been at the work ten months. But if so, how could Subtle and Dol have been brought so low (Act i., Sc. i), when Face took them into the house but some weeks before (Act v., Sc. i)? ​BEN JONSON 213 himself, "with that same foolish vice of honesty." Ananias and Tribulation come to rescue the same things, which they have bought of Subtle for a hundred marks, as orphans' goods, and left with him for transmutation : Lovewit threatens to cudgel them out of the house, and they depart with anathema maranatha. Our Drugger comes, and is beaten out again. Kastril enters, dragging in his sister, and rating her in that refined style which was conserved by those staunchest of Conservatives, the country gentlemen, even till the time of Fielding and Squire Western. Lovewit confronts the puerile bully : — '■^ Love. Come, will you quarrel? I will feize [chastise] you, sirrah ; Why do you not buckle to your tools ? Kas. Od's light, This is a fine old boy as e'er I saw ! Love. What, do you change your copy now ? proceed, Here stands my dove : stoop at her if you dare. Kas. 'Slight, I must love him 1 I cannot choose, i' faith, An' I should be hanged for't ! Suster, I protest, I honour thee for this match. Love, O, do you so, sir ? Kas. Yes, an' thou canst take tobacco and drink, old boy, I'll give her five hundred pound more to her marriage. Than her own state. Love. Fill a pipe full, Jeremy. Face. Yes ; but go in and take it, sir. Love. We will ; I will be ruled by thee in everything, Jeremy. Kas. 'Slight, thou art not hide-bound, thou art a jovy boy I Come, let us in, I pray thee, and take our whiffs." Thus tobacco is vindicated at the close of the comedy, as, like your If, a great peace-maker. Oh that rich region of comedy ! Oh our poor work-a-day ​214 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES world ! How many of us love wit, and can take tobacco and drink ; but who will therefore give us two thousand pounds ? Echo answers, 'Ounds ! F.S. — Shakespeare and Snuff. — At the close of Section x., I promised to return to this subject, anent a note of Gifford. Consulting the " Complete Concordance to Shakespeare," New and Revised Edition, by Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke (London : W. Kent and Co., 1874), I find only the following references to snuff and snuffing : — Midsummer Night's Dream, v. i, 254. — " It is already in snuff." Love's Labour's Lost, v. 2, 22. — "The light, by taking it in snuff." All's Well that Ends Well, i. 2, 59.—" To be the snuff of younger spirits." I Henry LV,, i. 3, 41. — "Took it in snuff; and still he smiled." Liejiry VILL., iii. 2, 96. — " 'Tis I must snuff it ; then out it goes." Cymbeline, i. 6, 87. — " And solace i' the dungeon by a snuff?" King Lear, iii. i, 26. — " In snuffs and packings of the dukes." King Lear, iv. 6, 39. — " My snuff, and loathed part of nature." Hamlet, iv. 7, 116. — "A kind of wick, or snuff, that will." Love's Labour's Lost, iii. I, 16, — "Snuffed up love by smelling love." The numbers of the lines I have added from the Globe edition. Now, if the reader interested in this great question will look up the passages referred to, I think he will agree with me that in only a couple of them — the fourth, from i Henry IV., and the last, from Love's Labour's Lost, is there any possi- bility of allusion to the dust of tobacco. And even in these, I am afeared that a very little pondering ​BEN JONSON 215 will snuff out or puff away this poor possibility. The former is in Hotspur's account of the dainty lord who pestered him after Holmedon fight : — " He was perfumed like a milliner ; And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held A pouncet-box, which ever and anon He gave his nose and took't away again ; Who therewith angry when it next came there, Took it in snuff; " A pouncet-box is a box for holding perfume, such as was in use long before the blessed powder of tobacco was know^n in our hemisphere. " Took it in snuff," is, indeed, a pun : to take in snuff, meaning to take offence, as well as to take by snuffing up. In brief, snuff and snuffing [German, schnupfen, " to draw into the nose," in die nase ziehen were familiar in our language of old, and tobacco-dust and the inhaling thereof were named from them, not vice versa; the general being made specific in honour of the most aromatic, stimulating, brain-clearing, and popular of all the triturated titillants of the olfactory nerves : snuff is the snuff, as tobacco the weed, and, as in the East, the same word means smoke and tobacco. In French, German, Spanish, and Italian alike, our snuff par excellence is distinguished as powder of tobacco, the great word " tobacco " being, with various spellings, common to all. These remarks dispose of the other passage. I am thus compelled to decide against Gif- ford, and in favour of myself, when I wrote, " Many of the characters (Shakespeare's) are continually taking snuff, but this does not appear to have been supplied by the tobacconist." ​XIII In "Bartholomew Fair" (1614) we have a good deal of tobacco in decidedly queer company. Tom Quarlous, the gamester, declares that, rather than marry a rich old Puritanical widow for the sake of her fortune, he would submit to the most terrible tortures and privations ; among others : "I would e'en desire of fate, I might dwell in a drum and take in my sustenance with an old broken tobacco-pipe and a straw." Humphrey Waspe, telling of the trouble he has had with his young, rattle-brained master, Bartholomew Cokes, an esquire of Harrow, who has been but a day and a half in town, and is fascinated by every novelty he comes across, gives as the climax : " I thought he would have run mad o' the black boy in Bucklersbury, that takes the scurvy, roguy tobacco there." Entering the Fair, we soon meet, among other estimable characters, Ursla the pig-woman. Mooncalf the tapster, and Nightingale the ballad-monger : — '* Urs. Fie upon't : who would wear out their youth and prime thus, in roasting of pigs, that had any cooler vocation? hell's a kind of cold cellar to't, a very fine vault o' my con- science ! — What, Mooncalf I Moon. [ Within the booth,"] Here, mistress. Urs. My chair, you false faucet you ; and my morning's draught, quickly, a bottle of ale, to quench me, rascal. I am all fire and fat, Nightingale, I shall e'en melt away to the first woman, a rib again, I am afraid. . . . Fill again, you unlucky vermin ! . . . a poor vexed thing I am, I feel myself dropping already as fast as I can ; two stone of suet a day is my propor- tion. I can but hold life and soul together with this (here's to you, Nightingale), and a whiff of tobacco at most. Where's my pipe now ? not filled I thou arrant incubee. ​BEN JONSON 217 Night. Nay, Ursia, thou'lt gall between the tongue and the teeth, with fretting now. Urs. How can I hope that ever he'll discharge his place of trust, tapster, a man of reckoning under me, that remembers nothing I say to him? [A>?V Night] but look to't, sirrah, you were best. Threepence a pipe-full, I will have made, of all my whole half-pound of tobacco, and a quarter of a pound of colts- foot mixt with it too, to eke it out ? * I that have dealt so long in the fire, will not be to seek in smoke now. Then six and twenty shillings a barrel I will advance on my beer, and fifty shillings a hundred on my bottle-ale ; I have told you the ways how to raise it. Froth your cans well in the filling, at length, rogue, and jog your bottles o' the buttock, sirrah, then skink out the first glass ever, and drink with all companies, though you be sure to be drunk ; you'll misreckon the better, and be less ashamed on't. But your true trick, rascal, must be, to be ever busy, and mistake away the bottles and cans, in haste, before they be half drunk off, and never hear anybody call (if they should chance to mark you), till you have brought fresh, and be able to forswear them. Give me a drink of ale." Another drink of ale she surely deserved, after this pregnant exposition of the esoteric principles of (Bartholomew) fair dealing. Now enters Dan Jordan Knockem, a horse-courser and ranger of TurnbuU Street, between whom and Ursla some delicate banter is exchanged : — "Knock. What! my little lean Ursla! my she-bear! art thou alive yet, with thy litter of pigs to grunt out another Bartholomew Fair ? ha !
then was equal to at least a shilling now, and that the ordinary pipe-bowls were very small. See "Tobacco: Its History and Associations," by F. W. Fairholt, F.S.A., for records and illus- trative diagrams. Tobacco, indeed, was three shillings an ounce to the father of Sir Philip Sidney (p. 70, ed. 1859) ; but there were twenty-five pipefuls in the ounce temp. James I. (p. 161). ​Urs. Yes, and to amble a foot, when the Fair is done, to hear you groan out of a cart up the heavy hill. . . . Well, I shall be meet with your mumbling mouth one day. Knock. What ! thou'lt poison me with a newt in a bottle of ale, wilt thou? or a spider in a tobacco-pipe, Urse? Come, there's no malice in these fat folks, I never fear thee, an I can scape thy lean Mooncalf here. Let's drink it out, good Urse, and no vapours 1 . . . Thou art such another mad, merry Urse, still 1 troth I do make conscience of vexing thee, now in the dog-days, this hot weather, for fear of foundering thee in the body, and melting down a pillar of the Fair. Pray thee take thy chair again, and keep state ; and let's have a fresh bottle of ale, and a pipe of tobacco ; and no vapours. . . . Look, here's Ezekiel Edgworth a pickpockef] ; a fine boy of his inches as any in the Fair I has still money in his purse, and will pay all, with a kind heart, and good vapours. Edg. That I will indeed, willingly, Master Knockem ; fetch some ale and tobacco." Nightingale returns, and arranges with Ezekiel, whose confederate he is, and Ursla the tactics for this great field-day. Nightingale will take his stand in the fullest passages, shifting often, and while singing will use his hawk's eye nimbly, and make signs to Ezekiel where the full purses are ; after each assemblage Ezekiel will hand the booty over to Nightingale, who will quickly deposit it with Ursla; and at night they will meet and share the lot. " Urs. Enough, talk no more on't : your friendship, masters, is not now to begin. Drink your draught of indenture, your sup of covenant, and away : the Fair fills apace, company begins to come in, and I have ne'er a pig ready yet. Knock. Well said I fill the cups, and light the tobacco ; let's give fire in the works, and noble vapours." Knockem's vapour, like the noble Nym's humour, or the blooming and awfully of our own days, can be ​BEN JONSON 219 applied in the most various senses or nonsenses ; for the rest, the horse-courser chiefly indulges in stable- slang. Winwife, a gentleman, and Quarlous come on the scene : — " Knock. Master Winwife ! Master Quarlous ! will you take a pipe of tobacco with us ? Do not discredit me now, Zekiel. [Edgworth gives him a purse : Zekiel being used to pay for Dan, and Dan to roar or bully for Zekiel. fVinw. Do not see him ; he is the roaring horse-courser, pray thee let's avoid him : turn down this way. Quar. 'Slud, I'll see him, and roar with him too, an' he roared as loud as Neptune ; pray thee go with me. . . • Knock. Welcome, Master Quarlous, and Master Winwife ; will you take any froth and smoke with us ? Quar. Yes, sir ; but you'll pardon us if we knew not of so much familiarity between us afore. Knock. As what, sir? Quar. To be so lightly invited to smoke and froth." The new-comers and Ursla have a sharp set-to with the tongue; Knockem takes her part, and falls to fist-fighting with Quarlous ; Ursla, who has hurried off for the hot dripping-pan to baste away her anta- gonists, stumbles with it and scalds her leg, her leg, her leg, her leg ! Adam Overdo, the foolish Justice of the Peace, who has come to the Fair disguised as "mad Arthur of Bradley, that makes the orations," in order to take note of all the rogueries there abound- ing, and has been sipping a bottle of ale to cover his watching, and is bamboozled into taking deep interest in the pickpocket, as a clerkly and innocent young man fallen among debauched company, and worthy of rescue — this sapient magistrate moralises : — " Over. These are the fruits of bottle-ale and tobacco ! the foam of the one, and the fumes of the other I Stay, young man, ​220 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES and despise not the wisdom of these few hairs that are grown grey in care of thee. Edg. Nightingale, stay a little. Indeed, I'll hear some of this ! " Enter now Dame Overdo his wife, with Grace Wellborn his ward, young Cokes his brother-in-law, who has this day taken out his license to marry Grace, and Coke's masterful man Waspe ; our blind justice proceeds with his moral exhortation : — " Over. Thirst not after that frothy liquor, ale ; for who knows when he openeth the stopple, what may be in the bottle ? Hath not a snail, a spider, yea, a newt been found there ? [Manifest plagiarism from his excellency Dan Jordan Knockem !] thirst not after it, youth ; thirst not after it. Cokes. This is a brave fellow, Numps [Waspe], let's hear him. . . . Over. Neither do thou lust after that tawney weed tobacco. Cokes. Brave words I Over. Whose complexion is like the Indian's that vents it. Cokes. Are they not brave words, sister ? Over. And who can tell, if before the gathering and making up thereof, the Alligarta hath not pissed thereon ? — The creeping venom of which subtle serpent, as some late writers affirm, neither the cutting of the perilous plant, nor the drying of it, nor the lighting or burning, can anyway persway [mitigate] or assuage. Cokes. Good, i' faith I is it not, sister ? Over. Hence it is that the lungs of the tobacconist [smoker] are rotted, the liver spotted, the brain smoked like the backside of the pig-woman's booth here, and the whole body within, black as her pan you saw e'en now without. Cokes. A fine similitude that, sir ! did you see the pan ? Edg. Yes, sir. Over, Nay, the hole in the nose here of some tobacco-takers, or the third nostril, if I may so call it, which makes that they can vent the tobacco out, like the ace of clubs, or rather the flower-de-lis, is caused from the tobacco, the mere tobacco ! Cokes. Who would have missed this, sister ? ​BEN JONSON 221 Mrs. O. Not anybody but Numps. Cokes. He does not understand. Edg. {Picks Cokes' pocket of his ptirse."] Nor' you feel. {Aside. Gives the purse aside to NiGHT.] In, to Ursia, Nightingale, and carry her comfort : see it told. This fellow [the reverend Justice ! ] was sent to us by Fortune, for our first fairing. {Exit Night. Over. But what speak I of the diseases of the body, children of the Fair ? Cokes. That's to us, sister. Brave, i' faith I Over. Hark, O you sons and daughters of Smithfield I and hear what malady it doth the mind : it causeth swearing, it causeth swaggering, it causeth snuffling and snarling, and now and then a hurt [appalling climax ! ]. Mrs. 0. He hath something of Master Overdo, methinks, brother. Cokes. So methought, sister, very much of my brother Overdo : and 'tis when he speaks. Over. Look into any angle of the town, the Streights or the Bermudas,* where the quarrelling lesson is read, and how do they entertain the time, but with bottle-ale and tobacco ? The lecturer is o' one side, and his pupils o' the other ; but the seconds are still bottle-ale and tobacco, for which the lecturer reads, and the novices pay. Thirty pound a week in bottle-ale ! forty in tobacco 1 and ten more in ale again ! Then for a suit to drink in, so much, and, that being slavered, so much for another suit, and then a third suit, and a fourth suit ! and still the bottle-ale slavereth, and the tobacco stinketh ! Waspe. Heart of a madman ! are you rooted here ? will you never away? what can any man find out in this bawling fellow, to grow here for ? . . .
and avenues, running between the bottom of St. Martin's Lane, Half-moon (now Bedford Street), and Chandos Street. In Justice Overdo' s time they were the receptacle of fraudulent debtors, thieves, and prostitutes. ... At a subsequent period this clus- ter of avenues exchanged the old name of the Bermudas for that of the Caribee Islands, which the learned professors of the district corrupted, by a happy allusion to the arts cultivated there, into the Cribbee Islands, their present appellation." — Gifford, in i8i6. ​222 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Over. I will conclude briefly Wsape. Hold your peace, you roaring rascal, I'll run my head in your chaps else." Thus the enraptured auditor of poor Overdo's oration had his pocket picked of one purse; and before he got out of the Fair the other (for gold, the former being for silver) went too : divine punishment from Diva Nicotina ! As for Overdo himself, "the wise justice is in a maze of dupery from the first scene to the last ; " naturally enough, with intellects uncleared by tobacco. As Quarlous says when next he sees our magistrate : " Look, here's the poor fool again, that was stung by the Waspe erewhile." Passing over two or three casual notices of pipes, which merely show that they were among the estab- lished favourites of the fair, we come in this same remarkable and busy scene (being the whole of Act iii.), to that most popular character, on the old stage, the " Banbury man," that is to say Puritan, Zeal-of- the-land Busy. This worthy is suitor to Dame Pure- craft, a widow, and what may be termed her Stiggins or spiritual director. Her son-in-law, John Littlewit, a proctor, thus speaks of him : — "... an old elder come from Banbury, a suitor that puts in here at meal tide, to praise the painful brethren, or pray that the sweet singers may be restored ; says a grace as long as his breath lasts him ! Sometime the spirit is so strong with him, it gets quite out of him, and then my mother, or Win [his wife] are fain to fetch it again with malmsey or aqua coelestis." Master Littlewit wanted to go to the Fair because it was the fashion, and yet more because there was to be performed a puppet-play of his own making. ​BEN JONSON 223 Mistress Win, or Win-the- fight, Littlewit was equally anxious to go, but feared that her mother would never consent to " such a profane motion." Then did this unscrupulous husband suggest unto his wife, who was in an interesting condition, that she should suddenly fall into a violent longing for roast pig, one of the standard delicacies of the Fair ; and he even went to the enormity of saying : " Win, long to eat of a pig, sweet Win, in the Fair, do you see, in the heart of the Fair, not at Pyecorner ! " With admirable wifely submission, all unconscious of evil, this sweet Griselda, this long-suffering Win-the-fight, did then and there commence to long so terribly for roast pig, and for pig, too, in the very heart of the fair ; that her pious mother was constrained to consult her confessor, whether in such a critical case it would not be lawful to sanction a venture even among the tents of the wicked in the Fair. Littlewit found Zeal-of the-land Busy zealously and busily and profitably employed : " fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cup- board, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right." The saint, after arguing with fine subtlety the subtle point of casuistry, graciously sanctioned the expedition, and agreed to take part in it himself. And this is the way in which he came to commune for a time with that sinner Knockem : — " Knock. Sir, I will take your counsel, and cut my hair, and leave vapours ; I see that tobacco, and bottle-ale, and pig, and Whit a Captain, with a finely forcible appellative in the ' Dramatis Personce ' ], and very Ursla herself is all vanity. Busy. Only pig was not comprehended in my admonition, the rest were : for long hair, it is an ensign of pride, a banner ; and the world is full of these banners, very foil of banners. And ​224 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES bottle-ale is a drink of Satan's, a diet-drink of Satan's, devised to puff us up and make us swell in this latter age of vanity ; as the smoke of tobacco to keep us in mist and error : but the fleshly woman, which you call Ursla, is above all to be avoided, having the marks upon her of the three enemies of man : the world, as being in the Fair ; the devil, as being in the fire ; and the flesh, as being herself. . . . [Goes forward. Knock. An excellent right hypocrite ! Now his belly is full, he falls a railing and kicking, the jade. A very good vapour ! I'll in, and joy Ursla, with telling her how her pig works ; two and a half he eat to his share [Let tts mercifully hope, portions, not pigs I ] ; and he has drunk a pail-full. He eats with his eyes, as well as his teeth." No comment is needed on this ; and certainly none on Busy, of whom it may be simply further reported that when Lan thorn Leatherhead, the hobby-horse seller or toyman, seeks to tempt the party with a drum, among other things, his pious zeal flameth out full fiercely : — " It is the broken belly of the beast, and thy bellows there are his lungs, and these pipes are his throat, those feathers are of his tail, and thy rattles the gnashing of his teeth." Pipes must have been pretty popular with the low as with the high, when a Bartholomew Fair toyman, as a matter of course, kept them in stock. There is one more passage worth quoting anent the customs of the stage, already dwelt on in Section ix. Cokes the volatile of course visits the puppet- show, whereof Master Littlewit is the dramatist, and asks : — " Have you none of your pretty impudent boys now, to bring stools, fill tobacco, fetch ale, and beg money, as they have at other houses?" ​BEN JONSON 225 And now we must bid farewell to this vigorous and multifarious comedy, abounding in the keenest observation and humour, leaving the ultimate destinies of the principal characters in the day's proceedings at the fair to be learnt from the play itself, which ranks only just below " The 'Fox,' the 'Alchemist,' and 'Silent Woman,' Done by Ben Jonson, and outdone by no man." Yet one word more, in the interest of our friend Zeal-of-the-land. In the epilogue to "Tartuffe," by Lord Buckhurst, may be read : — " Many have been the vain attempts of wit Against the still-prevailing hypocrit : Once, and but once, a poet got the day, And vanquished Busy in a puppet-play ! But Busy rallying, filled with holy rage, Possessed the pulpit, and pulled down the stage. " XIV In the renowned Bobadill, the noble Cavalier Shift, Brisk the Fastidious, honest Abel Drugger, and the worthies we have just left in Bartholomew Fair, we have Jonson's chief tobacco heroes; and in con- nection with them is the bulk of what he has to say concerning the " sovereign herb," so that it now remains for me but to gather up the fragments that are left, omitting the very small crumbs. In "The Devil is an Ass" (i6i6), Satan, warning the poor imp Pug, who burns to try his mischief on earth, that he will now find men further advanced p ​226 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES in vice than himself, instances among many other things : — "Carmen Are got into the yellow starch, and chimney-sweepers To their tobacco, and strong waters. Hum, Meath, and Obarni." The former instance is merely absurd, not vicious; as for the latter, if a fact, the poor chimney-sweepers were to be sincerely felicitated. So Barnaby Rich, in his "Honestie of this Age," published two years earlier (1614), as cited by Fairholt (p. 75, ed. 1859) : 'There is not so base a groome that comes into an ale-house to call for his pott, but he must have his pipe of tobacco ; for it is a commodity that is nowe as vendible in every taverne, wine, and ale-house, as eyther wine, ale, or beare ; and for apothecaries' shops, grocers' shops, chandlers' shops, they are (almost) never without company, that from morning till night are still taking of tobacco. What a number are there besides, that doe keepe houses, set open shoppes, that have no other trade to live by, but by the selling of tobacco." The only other mention in this play goes to confirm the first. Fitzdottrel is pretending to be bewitched, gnashing, foaming (with soap), and raving. Sir Paul Eitherside, a lawyer and justice, with others, watching him. One asks, " What does he now, sir?"— " Sir P. E. Shew The taking of tobacco, with which the devil Is so delighted. Fitz. Hum ! Sir P. E. And calls for hum. You takers of strong waters and tobacco, Mark this." ​BEN JONSON 227 This is the second foohsh justice we have had con- demning tobacco. The censure of some people is the best praise they can give, and the weed is truly honoured when denounced by the devil himself, who is the Father of Lies, and by a lawyer whose name is Eitherside, and who is so poor at that, as our cousins have it, that he is solemnly taken in by a very gull counterfeiting demoniac possession. The Induction to the "Staple of News" (1625, set 52) introduces us to the poet in person, "rolling him- self up and down like a tun." There is no allusion to tobacco worth remarking in this comedy, but one of Gifford's notes has both a nicotian and a Jonsonian interest. Several of the characters, including ladies, dine together in the renowned Apollo of the Devil Tavern, "at brave Dick Wadloe's," the convivial throne-room or royal banqueting-hall of rare old Ben and his courtly club, he being perpetual Chairman or President. Gifford observes : " From the manner in which Marmion (an enthusiastic admirer of Jonson) speaks of his entertainment there, it may be safely concluded that an admission to it was a favour of no ordinary kind." He then quotes the following brave passage from Marmion's "Fine Companion," re- marking that " the boon Delphic god " was our poet himself : — " Careless. I am full Of oracles, I am come from Apollo Emilia. From Apollo ! Careless. From the heaven Of my delight, where the boon Delphic god Drinks sack and keeps his Bacchanalia, And has his incense, and his altars smoking, And speaks in sparkling prophecies ; thence I come, ​228 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES My brains perfumed ■with the rich Indian vapour ^ And heightened with conceits. From tempting beauties, From dainty music, and poetic strains, From bowls of nectar, and ambrosiac dishes. From witty varlets, fine companions. And from a mighty continent of pleasure, Sails thy brave Careless." Among the extravagant intelligence furnished to the " Staple of News " there is actually an anticipation of the fish-torpedo ! "They write here, one Cornelius- Son, Hath made the Hollanders an invisible eel To swim the haven at Dunkirk, and sink all The shipping there." It has been more or less facetiously remarked that Shakespeare's first gravedigger must have had queer notions of economy when he assured Hamlet, "A tanner will last you nine year." In Act v., Sc. 2 of this play there is an exquisite dissertation, overlong to quote now, by a miserly usurer, on the enormity of wasting sixpence but once a year. In the *' New Inn," whose absurd plot is redeemed for the reader by some excellent writing, the lady who for long years incredibly counterfeits a drunken Irish nurse, says of one of the guests : — " He tauk so desperate and so debausht. So baudy like a courtier and a lord, God bless him, one that tak'th tobacco." And in the rude revelry of the " militia below stairs," Jordan the chamberlain is dubbed, " Lieutenant of the ordnance, tobacco and pipes." The " Magnetic Lady ; or, Humours Reconciled " ​BEN JONSON 229 (1632), has, I believe, but a single mention of tobacco. At the close of Act iii., Damplay, one of the critical chorus, which Ben was fond of introducing, replies to his companion and contrast, Probee : — " I care not for marking the play ; I'll damn it, talk, and do that I come for. I will not have gentlemen lose their privilege, nor I myself my prerogative, for never an overgrown or super- annuated poet of them all. He shall not give me the law : I will censure and be witty, and take my tobacco, and enjoy my Magna Charta of reprehension, as my predecessors have done before me." There are several interesting allusions in this play to the poet himself and his earlier works. Being then in his sixtieth year, he indulged in the retrospection and expansiveness of age. In the Induction, the Boy of the House (Black Friars), who is the third member of the chorus, says — " The author beginning his studies of this kind with ' Every Man in his Humour ; ' and after, ' Every Man out of his Humour ; ' and since continuing in all his plays, especially those of the comic thread, whereof the ' New Inn ' was the last, some recent humours still, or manners of men, that went along with the times ; finding himself now near the close, or shutting up, of his circle, hath fancied to himself in idea this ' Magnetic Mistress ' ... to draw thither a diversity of guests, all persons of different humours, to make up his perimeter. And this he hath called 'Humours Reconciled.'" No better definition of the leading idea of the greater part of his comedies could be given than is thus furnished by old Ben himself, who always knew as thoroughly what he meant to do as how to do it, composing not by impulse, but with settled purpose and plan. ​230 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES When the nature of Parson Palate has been ex- pounded by Master Compass in rhyme (as Tennyson, in one of his later poems, expounds that of the unctuous hypocrite and swindler who ever slimed his victims ere he gorged), his brother, Captain Ironside, asks, "Who made this Epigram, you?" and Compass replies, " No, a great clerk As any of his bulk, Ben Jonson made it" (Act i., Sc. i). In the interlude of the chorus between Acts i. and ii., Probee asks the Boy, who has spoken of "any velvet lethargy in the house," a phrase whose import actors will keenly appreciate : —
good clothes, boy ? we have seen him in indifferent good clothes ere now." Boy. Ay, and may do in better, if it please the king his master to say Amen to it, and allow it, to whom he acknowledgeth all. But his clothes shall never be the best part about him though ; he will have somewhat beside either of human letters, or severe honesty, shall speak him a man, though he went naked." We remark likewise his old self-assertion, and his disdain for the mob, whether rich or poor, high or low. Thus in the Induction he says of himself, through the mouth of the Boy : •' He will not woo the gentile ignorance so much. But careless of all vulgar censure, as not depending on common approba- tion, he is confident it shall super-please judicious spectators, and to them he leaves it to work with the rest, by example or otherwise." But Jonson was never quite so haughty and contemptu- ous as his friend and fellow " gnomic poet " and drama- tist, about fifteen years before him in life, only three in ​BEN JONSON 231 deatli, George Chapman. Our fiery and dauntless translator of Homer thus ends the dedication of the first of his poems, "The Shadow of Night " (1594, set. 35-6) : " So preferring thy allowance in this poor and strange trifle, to the passport of a whole City of others, I rest as resolute as Seneca, satisfying myself if but a few, if one, or if none like it." And as a postscript to the "Gloss" on the first of his two hymns, he writes : " For the rest of his own invention, figures and similes, touching their aptness and novelty, he hath not laboured to justify them, because he hopes they will be proved enough to justify themselves, and prove sufficiently authentical to such as understand them; for the rest, God help them [for the poet evidently will not, interjects Mr. Swinburne in citing this passage], I cannot do as others, make day seem a lighter woman than she is, by painting her." Again, in his dedication of " Ovid's Banquet of Sense " (1595) to the same " truly learned and very worthy Friend " Master Matthew Roydon, he declares : " The profane multitude I hate, and only consecrate my strange poems to those searching spirits, whom learning hath made noble, and nobility sacred." See also the dedi- cations of the tragedies, "The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois," and "Caesar and Pompey." *
loses his head and foams at the mouth when the monarchy or Church is in question. Jonson's Puritans in the "Alchemist" and ' ' Bartholomew Fair " made fine targets for virulent invective ; but a note to this drama is about as good a brief specimen of his ravings in one of these paroxysms as I remember. Bias, a vi-politic, or sub- secretary, says (Act iii., Sc. 4) " Sir, the corruption of one thing in nature Is held the generation of another " ​232 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES "A Tale of a Tub" (1633) should be especially interesting to all North Londoners, the scene being Finsbury Hundred, and the dramatis personce belong- ing to Pancras, Totten-Court, Maribone, Kentish-town, Kilborn, Islington, Hamstead, Chalcot; the which places, together with Canonbury, Tyburn (already a scene of dire suspense), Highgate, Paddington, are spoken of as "all the towns about here." One of the characters says, "to Kentish Town we are got at length" — riding from Totten(ham) Court ! St. John's Wood was so truly a wood that daylight brigandage could be plausibly located in its corner, a mile west through the fields from the town of Pancras ; and so with the This theory of equivocal generation had passed out of fashion be- fore Gifford's time (see one of his notes on "Alchemist," ii. i, vol. ii. p. 27), but he could not contain himself. Thus he burst out : " There is nothing new under the sun ! This is precisely the prin- ciple on which that great philosopher Dr. Darwin [really scientific versifier of the " Loves of the Plants/'grandfather of our great author of the ' ' Origin of Species"], and those humane admirers of the French Revolution t(p to a certain point, Price, Priestley, &c., justified their exultation at the wholesale murder of princes and peers by a re- generative cry of hell-hounds. The corruption of one dead king would produce a thousand worms, whose happiness, taken in the aggregate, would surpass that of the individual, and consequently prove a clear gain on the score of humanity ; while the summary ex- termination of a perverse generation of priests and nobles, though not quite agreeable to the victims themselves, would be more than compensated to the universe in a few centuries by prodigious advances towards perfectibility, in a more tractable and philosophic race of atheists and murderers." How long are the pages of Jonson to be defiled by such rabid and venomous slaver? Gifford, the editor and scholiast, commands our admiration and gratitude ; but the sooner Gifford the High Church and State man (" high as venison is high") is ejected from the society of our brave old poet the better : there is surely quite enough of him and his fellows in this kind in his own Quarterly for even the most determined followers of Mithridates, who " fed on poisons till they were become a sort of nutriment." ​BEN JONSON 233 cross-ways over the country between Kentish Town and Hamstead Heath. The nominal time seems to be early in the reign of Elizabeth, as one says he beheld " King Edward, our late liege and sovereign lord," ride forth in state ; but the author probably wrote in accordance with his own time and experience. Most of the personages are uneducated ; and, strangely enough, these all speak in a sort of West Country dialect, thus : — "Why, 'tis thirty years, e'en as this day now, Zin Valentine's Day, of all clays kursined, look you ; And the zame day o' the month as this Zin Valentine, Or I am vowly deceived." The woman of my Lady Tub, of Totten Hall, speaks of the city ladies and court ladies as if the capital were far remote. Strangely enough, moreover, we read of the new year in January, though for a con- siderable period after Jonson's time the old year did not end until Lady-day. Further, Hilts says to the intended bride, referring to the intended bridegroom, poor Clay, the tile-maker, who is sorely diddled : — " it's true, you are a proper woman ; But to be cast away on such a clown-pipe As Clay I " which, if an anachronism, appears to imply that in Jonson's days (the earlier, if not the latter) clay pipes were left to the lower classes. The comedy, or comedy-farce, is full of genial fun, and I should think would prove popular even now on the stage, if fairly acted. The author himself says of it in the Prologue : — ​234 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES " But acts of clowns and constables to-day Stuff out the scenes of our ridiculous play. We bring you now, to show what different things The cotes of clowns are from the courts of kings." It gladdens us to find our big Ben, at threescore, laughing such kindly and jolly laughter. Lastly, for the comedies, we come to "The Case is Altered," which, however, ought probably to have been placed second or third, as it appears to have been written in 1599. The style has a freedom and ease which are somewhat deficient in his later dramas; both form and substance come nearer to those of his best contemporaries; romance and passion are not slain outright by the keen, cold, intellectual analysis of humours and affectations and charlatanisms. On the whole, I am inclined to regret with Gifford that Jonson "did not rather labour to perfect his early style than to exchange it altogether for that more severe and masculine mode of composition which he subsequently adopted." The miser, Jaques de Prie, rich with stolen wealth, who acts the beggar for its greater security, is drawn with much power and humour : his doting ecstasies over his hidden hoard of golden crowns, his anxious suspicions that every one coming to his house must have discovered his secret, his transport of agony when he finds that his treasure has been stolen from him in turn are true to the life in an ante-banknote miser. (But surely Peter Onion and Juniper, the cobbler, must have had some difficulty in walking off impromptu with the bulk and weight of thirty thousand golden crowns !) In Charles I,amb's note ​BEN JONSON 235 anent this play, in the " Specimens," he says, with his usual rich appreciation : — "The old poets, when they introduce a miser, make him address his gold as his mistress ; as something to be seen, felt, and hugged ; as capable of satisfying two of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying medium in the place of the good old tangible metal has made avarice quite a Platonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching, and hand- ling pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A banknote can no more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion than Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the shades. See the ' Cave of Mammon,' in Spenser ; Barabas's contemplation of his wealth, in the ' Rich Jew of Malta ' [Marlowe] ; Luke's raptures in the ' City Madam ' [Massinger] ; the idolatry and absolute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in this early comic production of Ben Jonson's. Above all, hear Guzman, in that excellent old translation of the ' Spanish Rogue,' expatiate on the ' ruddy cheeks of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish pis- tolets, your plump and full-faced Portuguese, and your clear- skinned pieces of eight of Castile,' which he and his fellows the beggars kept secret to themselves, and did privately enjoy in a plentiful manner. ' For to have them to pay them away is not to enjoy them ; to enjoy them is to have them lying by us, having no other need of them than to use them for the clearing of the eyesight and the comforting of our senses. These we did carry about with us, sewing them in some patches of our doublets near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as we could hand- somely quilt them in, holding them to be restorative.' " But our most exquisite and genial of critics has nearly made me disremember his "Plant divine, of rarest virtue," for whose sake he was ready to do anything but die. It is only once mentioned (Act ii., Sc. 3). Aurelia the sprightly rallies her melancholy sister, Phcenixella — " Sister, i' faith you take too much tobacco. It makes you black within as you are without. What, true-stitch, sister ! both your sides alike 1 " ​236 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Jonson was then but green in judgment, and, perhaps, had not yet mastered the great art of smoking, so we will excuse him for fancying that the great plant tends to mournfulness instead of serenity. We find a certain artlessness of youth — the youth both of the dramatist and the drama at the close of the sixteenth century — in the way in which the catas- trophe is hurried and huddled. Paulo Firenze, after a short burst of indignation, pardons off-hand his false friend Angelo, who had abducted Paulo's true love, confided to his care. The tablet which iden- tifies Caspar as Camillo is ready at a moment's notice, Chamont having carried it about him for years, conserving it secret from his bosom friend Caspar himself. Tobacco is mentioned but two or three times in the masques, most significantly in that of the " Metamorphosed Gipsies," thrice presented to King James, 162 1, of which the MS. in the author's own writing is preserved, a good fortune shared by no other of his compositions. It is very clever, graceful, and courtier-like; but we are sorry to say that, to please the counterblasting king, our poet descends to vilify tobacco. The first mention occurs in the long famous and popular song, "Cocklorel would needs have the devil his guest." The tobacco stanzas are the last three, and are not in the MS., so they must have been tacked on specially for "Solomon, the son of David." Afterwards the Patrico jingles about it in the same strain, using the same metaphor, and giving it the same accompaniments, being those of the well-known story: "Three things to which James had a dislike, and with which, he said, he would ​BEN JONSON 237 treat the devil were he to invite him to a dinner, were a pig, a poll of ling with mustard, and a pipe of tobacco for digesture." I wonder with what the devil has treated him since inviting him to dinner ! Well, the indignation of Diva Nicotina confounded Jonson in these acts of servile hypocrisy, so alien from his stout, honest character — the first lines are doggrel, and the others mere patter, both destitute alike of wit and humour; and the metaphor with which the herb of herbs and its censer are associ- ated, is so coarse that I dare not reproduce the verses in these our dainty days. A righteous retribution, O Ben! In the rich Epigram loi, "Inviting a Friend to Supper," from which I have already quoted in Section vii., we have the following lines : — " But that which most doth take my Muse and me, Is a pure cup of rich Canary wine. Which is the Mermaid's now, but shall be mine : Of which had Horace or Anacreon tasted, Their lives, as do their lines, till now had lasted. Tobacco, nectar, or the Thespian spring. Are all but Luther's beer, to this I sing." Brave old Ben ! we know you here again ! Every man has the right to have his own particular idol, and to exalt it in hyperbole by depreciating the most precious things or most noble natures in comparison therewith. Wherefore, we quarrel not with this extreme devotion to Canary, nor with the supremacy claimed for it. Rather we welcome our glorious convivialist of the Mermaid Tavern, our boon Delphic god of the Apollo room, seeing how rightly he ranks our rich Indian vapour with nectar and the Thespian ​238 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES spring. Aught more precious he could not find to name with the very darhng of his heart. Brave old big Ben ! With these generous lines we must close our excerpts, although we could glean a few others of minor importance. I can scarcely better conclude this long series of papers than with some sentences from Mr. Swinburne's very fine Introduction to the works of George Chapman (London : Chatto and Windus, 1875), which has also been reprinted separately : — " Even the Atlantean shoulders of Jonson, fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies, have been hardly tasked to support and transmit to our own day the fame of his great genius, overburdened as it was with the twofold load of his theories on art and his pedantries of practice.* And Chapman, though also a brother of the giant brood, had not the Herculean sinews of his younger friend and fellow-student. The weight that could but bend the back that carried the vast world of invention whose twin hemispheres are ' Volpone ' and the * Al- chemist,' was wellnigh enough to crush the staggering strength of the lesser Titan. . . . The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortuous jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit and style. . . . But when on a fresh reading we skip over these blocks [the savour- less interludes of buffoonery, too common in even our best old plays, whether comedies or tragedies : gross baits for the gross
has a most righteous admiration, says of the " Poetaster" : "This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies of I3en, in his own day and ours, who have said that he made a pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole court of Augustus by a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, TibuUus converse in our own tongue more finely and poetically than they were used to express them- selves in their native Latin," &c. ​groundlings] laid as if on purpose in our way through so magnificent a gallery of comic and poetic inventions, the monument of a mind so mighty, the palace of so gigantic a genius as Ben Jonson's, we are more than content to forget such passing and perishable impediments to our admiration of that sovereign intellect which has transported us across them into the royal presence of its ruling and informing power. . . . Here, again, we find that Jonson and Chapman stand far apart from their fellow-men of genius. The most ambitious and the most laborious poets of their day, conscious of high aims and large capacities, they would be content with no crown that might be shared by others; they had each his own severe and haughty scheme of study and invention, and sought for no excellence which lay beyond or outside it; that any could lie above, past the reach of their strong arms and skilful hands, past the scope of their keen and studious eyes, they would probably have been unable to believe or to conceive. And yet there were whole regions of high poetic air, whole worlds of human passion and divine imagination, which might be seen by humbler eyes than theirs and trodden by feebler feet, where their robust lungs were powerless to breathe, and their strenuous song fell silent,"
The reader will do well to study the whole of this Introduction, which is not unworthy in its sphere of the author of "Atalanta in Calydon," being the fit reverse of the golden medallion of which that is the noble obverse.
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