before us and we know that the vision represents a reality." In the light of Shakspere's soul are paled all false ideals. Behind that art which makes him the greatest of all dramatists lay a nature that was not only inspired by the beautiful, but penetrated with the grandeur of truth.

CHAPTER X.

BEN JONSON.

Born 1573; educated at Westminster School; probably went to St. John's College, Cambridge; for a short time connected with his stepfather's bricklaying business; then joined the army and went to the Low Countries; on his return settled in London not later than 1597; became an actor; married; and in 1619 became Poet Laureate; died August 1635.

TRAGEDIES.

Sejanus, acted by 1603; Catiline, acted by 1611.

COMEDIES.

Every Man in His Humour, acted by 1597 or 1598; Every Man out of His Humour, acted by 1599; The Case is Altered, acted by 1599; Cynthia's Revels, acted by 1600; The Poetaster, acted by 1601; Volpone, acted by 1605; Epicone, acted by 1609; The Alchemist, acted by 1610; Bartholomew Fair, acted by 1614; The Devil is an Ass, acted by 1616; The Staple of News, acted by 1625; The New Inn, acted by 1629; The Magnetic Lady, acted by 1632; The Tale of a Tub, acted by 1633.

FRAGMENTS: Found after his Death.

The Fall of Mortimer (a tragedy); The Sad Shepherd (a pastoral).

"HE is a great lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and scorner of others; given rather to lose a friend than a jest ; jealous of every word or action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth); a dissembler of ill-parts which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth; thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or done; he is passionately kind and angry; careless either to gain or keep; vindicative, but, if he be well answered, at himself.. For any religion, as being versed in both. Interpreteth best sayings and deeds often to the worst, oppressed with fantasie,

one;

which hath ever mastered his reason, a general disease in many poets. His inventions are smooth and easy: but above all he excelleth in a translation." Such was Drummond's summary of the personality and powers of Ben Jonson-written shortly after the poet had paid him a visit of two or three weeks during his stay in Scotland in 1618. But the grain of salt which one must take with the judgment of one poet on another is a very large full allowance must be made for the moods of genius: one must allow in this case for the mood of the sensitive melancholy Drummond, irritated perhaps by the egoistic and wine-excited Jonson, who evidently with superabundant energy, freed from the claims of work, had loudly vaunted himself and his talents, at the expense of his contemporaries. "He was better versed and he knew more in Greek and Latin," he said, "than all the poets in England." Ben Jonson's personality was likely to be misunderstood by his contemporaries, and especially by those in the same walk of life. He had all the faults of an eager creative nature, irritability, excitability intensified by drink, and that extreme belief in himself and his powers which was far more than the self-confidence of genius,-far more than that self-confidence which Michael Angelo said was necessary to every artist, so that, believing in himself, "he may produce something of worth and value." Had we to trust alone to Jonson's contemporaries for an estimate of his personality, we should form but an unpleasing idea of it. But to Jonson's discredit as a dramatist, be it said, no artist has left a greater impress of self on his works : to understand the individuality of this great Elizabethan, we have only to turn to his plays, for it stands there towering above all his creations, massive, egoistic, and self-conscious. He was the most self-conscious, as Shakspere was the most unself-conscious of Elizabethan artists; he had none of the impersonal philosophic interest in life which makes the ideal dramatist. Too egoistic to feel outward influences strongly, he had none of that power of assimilating and growing by experience so characteristic of Shakspere, so marked in his literary work; we are always aware of his personality as we read his dramas; he is always present behind his creations, conscious of a great ideal, pointing out the follies and the vices of a world, with whose inhabitants he seems to have no feeling of human fellowship. Yet his life was full and varied, and he acquired in the course of it a vast stock of knowledge, both practical and literary, which he turned to account in his dramatic work. Placed first at a school in Charing Cross, he was afterwards removed to West

minster School, where his intellectual welfare was carefully looked after by the antiquary Camden, one of the masters there, and from whom he acquired the habit, to which he always steadily adhered, of writing all his compositions first in prose, then afterwards turning them into verse. It was probably Camden's stimulus, added to his natural tastes and aptitude, that made him dive deep then and in after life into all sorts of branches of learning, searching for that knowledge

"The nectar that keeps sweet,

A perfect soul even in this grave of sin."

Shortly after the completion of his education here, following on a vain attempt to pursue his stepfather's trade and become a bricklayer, he served in a campaign in the Low Countries, where English troops were assisting Maurice of Nassau. Here it was that he gained the "rudiments of military science," and that respect for the profession which he shows in the epilogue to the Poetaster, the conception of the character of Captain Tucca in this play being in no way intended to detract from the honour of that "great profession which I once did prove." After his return, his marriage with "a shrew, yet honest," he began his career in connection with Henslowe's company, probably first as an actor, then as an author; Henslowe, as was his custom, furnishing the ready money, which was to support him till he completed the required plays. The facts of his life bear evidence to noble traits in his character, to that seriousness of thought and that interest in the deeper problems of life which gave him his strong moral tone, which made him unlike other Elizabethan artists, deeply interested in questions of religious faith, causing him to be converted once from the Protestant to the Catholic faith, then again, twelve years after, to the Protestant faith again; making him a diligent student of theology, writing

"Those humble gleanings of divinity,

After the fathers and those wiser guides,

Whom faction had not drawn to study sides,"

which were lost in the burning of his library. And his independence of patrons, which he himself loudly vaunted, "never esteeming a man for the name of a lord," was doubtless a fact. He had indeed friends among the nobility, but it was probably friendship not interest that made the attachment. Pembroke, whose discrimination made him worthy to be the friend of any genius, sent him always at the beginning of every new year £20

with which to buy books; but Sir Walter Raleigh, to one of whose sons Jonson was tutor in 1613, and who might thus have been used by him as a stepping-stone to worldly greatness, was lightly thought of by him. "Sir W. Raleigh," he said, "esteems more of fame than of conscience: the best wits of England were employed for making his historie." The social standing of an author evidently did not influence Jonson's criticism on his works; he hesitated not, when in Paris, to tell Cardinal du Perron that his translations of Virgil were naught. As for royal favour, there is no evidence of his having received any under Elizabeth, though she was present at a representation of Every Man in His Humour, and though he was called upon by a fellowpoet to write a lament on her death; and the patronage he received from James I. and Charles I., the name and honour of Laureate, the reversion of the office of the Master of the Rolls, the pension of 100 marks, first given by James I. and continued by Charles I., in deference to a hint given by the poet, in the New Inn, 1629, were all of the nature of rewards to the capable and versatile poet, who supplied the court with entertaining and varied masks. And that his devotion to the service of the court was not the result of a servile spirit, but of a belief in its power of being an influence for good, is abundantly shown in his address to it, "the special fountain of manners," prefixed to Cynthia's Revels. "Thou art a beautiful and brave spring and waterest all the noble plants of this island. In thee the whole kingdom dresseth itself, and is ambitious to use thee as her glass. Beware then thou render men's figures truly, and teach them no less to hate their deformities than to love their forms: for to grace these should come reverence, and no man call that lovely which is not also venerable. It is not powdering, perfuming, and every day smelling of the tailor, converteth to a beautiful object, but a mind shining through any suit which needs no false light either of riches or honor to help it." to a court, which to him was the representative of all the refinement and beauty and elevation in the United King dom, Ben Jonson was always the faithful "servant but not slave."

And

Even to the darker facts of his life, his quarrels with his literary associates, there is much that should justly be urged as palliation. Ben Jonson was a most careful and conscientious worker, with a high ideal of what the stage ought to be, and although it cannot be said of him, as of Ovid in the Poetaster, that his sharpness was most excusable