Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/117

Rh obstinacy, of purpose; and to undertake a journey on foot of several hundred miles, into a strange country, and at an unfavourable season of the year, to visit a brother poet, whose fame had reached his ears, was characteristic in every way of his constitutional resoluteness, and of that sort of practical sincerity which actuated his conduct indifferently either to friendship or enmity. We mean no disparagement by these last words, to the character of a man acknowledgedly great, as every one will allow Ben Jonson's to have been; but merely allude to a trait in that character, fully marked in the individual, and which he himself never attempted to disguise. His drinking out the full cup of wine at the communion table, in token of his reconciliation with the church of England, and sincere renunciation of popery, is an anecdote in point; and we need only hint at the animosities, one of them fatal, into which, in an opposite way, the same zealousness of spirit hurried him. There is much occasion to mark this humour throughout the whole substance of the conversations which passed between Drummond and his remarkable visitor.

The curious document which contains these, is in itself but a rough draught, written by Drummond when the matters contained in it were fresh in his recollection, and intended merely, it would seem, as a sort of memorandum for his own use. That its author never intended it should become public is evident, not only from the imperfect and desultory manner in which it is put together, but from the unsophisticated and unguarded freedom of its personal reflections. There is every proof that though it unhappily treats with much and almost unpalliated severity the character and foibles of the English poet, the truth is not, so far as it goes, violated. It is not kindly, nor can it be said to be hostilely written. Inhospitably, we cannot allow it to be, as it certainly never was intended to prove offensive to the feelings of the person whom it describes, or his admirers.

Several of the incidents of Ben Jonson's life, as they were communicated by him to Drummond have been given. These we have not occasion to notice; but we cannot pass over, as equally out of place, some of the opinions entertained by that remarkable man of his literary contemporaries. They are for the most part sweeping censures, containing some truth, but oftener much illiberality; pointed, and on one or two occasions coarse,—Jonson being at all times rather given to lose a friend than a jest. Spenser's stanzas we are told, "pleased him not, nor his matter." "Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children, and was no poet; that he had wrote the 'Civil Wars,' and yet hath not one battle in his whole book." Michael Drayton, "if he had performed what he promised in his Polyolbion, (to write the deeds of all the worthies,) had been excellent."—" Sir John Harrington's Ariosto, of all translations was the worst. That when Sir John desired him to tell the truth of his epigrams; he answered him, that he loved not the truth, for they were narrations, not epigrams."—"Donne, for not being understood, would perish. He esteemed him the first poet in the world for some things; his verses of Ohadine he had by heart, and that passage of the Calm, that dust and feathers did not stir, all was so quiet" He told Donne that his "Anniversary was profane and full of blasphemies; that if it had been written on the Virgin Mary it had been tolerable." To which Donne answered, "that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she was."—"Owen was a poor pedantic schoolmaster, sweeping his living from the posteriors of little children, and has nothing good in him, his epigrams being bare narrations."—" Sir Walter Raleigh esteemed more fame than conscience: the best wits in England were employed in making his history. He himself had written a piece to him of the Punic war, which he altered and set in his book."—"Francis Beaumont was a good poet, as were Fletcher and Chapman whom he loved."—"He fought several times with Mars-