Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/114

 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,