Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/777

Rh the earlier half of the reign of James I.; and by the year 1616 he had produced nearly all the plays which are worthy of his genius. They include the tragedy of Catiline (1611), which achieved only a doubtful success, and the comedies of Volpone or The Fox (acted 1605), Epiccene or The Silent Woman (1609), the Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614), and The Devil is an Ass (1616). During the same period he produced several masks, usually in connexion with Inigo Jones, with whom, however, he seems to have quarrelled already in this reign, though it is very doubtful whether the architect is really intended to be ridiculed in Bartholomew Fair under the character of Lanthorn Leatherhead. In 1616 a modest pension of 100 marks a year was conferred upon him; and possibly this mark of royal favour may have encouraged him to the publication of the first volume of the folio collected edition of his works (1616).

He had other patrons more bountiful than the crown, and for a brief space of time (in 1613) had travelled to France as governor to the eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh, then a state prisoner in the Tower, for whose society Jonson may have gained a liking at the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, but for whose moral character he, like so many of his contemporaries, seems to have had but small esteem. Thus by the year 1616 Jonson seems to have made up his mind to cease writing for the stage, where neither his success nor his profits had equalled his merits and expectations. He continued to produce masks and entertainments when called upon; but he was attracted by many other literary pursuits, and had already accomplished enough to furnish plentiful materials for retrospective discourse over pipe or cup. He was already entitled to lord it at the Mermaid, where his quick antagonist in earlier wit-combats no longer appeared even on a visit from his comfortable retreat at Stratford. That on the other hand Ben carried his wicked town habits into Warwickshire, and there, together with, made Shakespeare drink so hard with them as to bring upon himself the fatal fever which ended his days, is a bit of petty scandal with which we may fairly refuse to load his memory.

It was in the year 1618 that Ben Jonson, like his great namesake a century and a half afterwards, resolved to have a real holiday for once, and about midsummer started for his ancestral country, Scotland. He had (very heroically for a man of his habits) determined to make the journey on foot; and—imitation is the sincerest kind of flattery—was speedily followed by, the water-poet, who still further handicapped himself by the condition that he would accomplish the pilgrimage without a penny in his pocket. Jonson (who put money in his good friend's purse when he came up with him at Leith) spent more than a year and a half in the hospitable Lowlands, being solemnly elected a burgess of Edinburgh, and on another occasion entertained at a public banquet there. But the best remembered hospitality which he enjoyed was that of the learned and refined Scottish poet, to which we owe the so-called Conversations. In these famous jottings, the work of no extenuating hand, Jonson lives for us to this day, delivering his censures freely in praise and blame, but by no means generously described in the postscript added by his exhausted host as "a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others." A poetical account of this journey, "with all the adventures," was burnt with Jonson's library.

After his return to England Jonson appears to have resumed his former course of life. In 1619 his visits to the country seats of the nobility were varied by a sojourn at Oxford with Corbet at Christ Church, on which occasion a master's degree was conferred upon him by the university. He confessed about this time that he was or seemed growing "restive," i.e., lazy, though it was not long before he returned to the occasional composition of masks. The extremely spirited Gipsies Metamorphosed (1621) was thrice presented before the king, who was so pleased with it as to grant to the poet the reversion of the office of master of the revels, besides proposing to confer upon him the honour of knighthood. This honour Jonson (hardly in deference to the memory of Sir Petronel Flash) declined, but there was no reason why he should not gratefully accept the increase in his pension, which was in the same year (1621) raised to 200 marks. Yet the close of king James I.'s reign found the foremost of the poets of the time in an anything but prosperous condition. It would be unjust to hold "The Sun," "The Dog," "The Triple Tun," or the "Old Devil" with its Apollo club-room, where Ben's supremacy must by this time have become established, responsible for this result; taverns were the clubs of that day, and a man of letters is not considered lost in our own because he "haunts" a smoking-room in Pall Mall. Disease had weakened the poet's strength, and the burning of his library, as his Execration upon Vulcan sufficiently shows, must have been no mere transitory trouble to a poor man of letters. He thus thought it best to recur to writing for the stage, and in 1625 produced, with no faint heart, but with a very clear anticipation of the comments which would be made upon the reappearance of the "huge, overgrown play-maker," The Staple of News, a comedy excellent in some respects, but little calculated to become popular. In 1628, on the death of, some interest obtained for him the appointment of city chronologer, with a salary of 100 nobles a year—an office of which he appears to have considered the duties as purely ornamental, inasmuch as in 1631 his salary was suspended until he should have presented some fruits of his labours in his place, or—as he more succinctly phrased it "yesterday the barbarous court of aldermen have withdrawn their chandlerly pension for verjuice and mustard, £33, 6s. 8d." After being in 1628 arrested by mistake on the utterly false charge of having written certain verses in approval of the assassination of Buckingham, he was soon allowed to return to Westminster, where it would appear from a letter of his "son and contiguous neighbour," James Howell, he was living in 1629, and about this time narrowly escaped another conflagration. In the same year (1629) he once more essayed the stage with the comedy of The New Inn, which was actually, and on its own merits not unjustly, damned on the first performance. The epilogue dwelt not without dignity upon the neglect which the poet had experienced at the hands of "king and queen"; and it is honourable to King Charles I. that he should not only have immediately sent the unlucky author a gift of a hundred pounds, but on receiving another more cheerful versified appeal in response, should have increased his standing salary to the same sum, with the addition of an annual tierce of canary,—henceforth the poet-laureate's customary royal gift. But though he afterwards composed one or two little entertainments, and even a comedy or two, there seemed little power left in his palsy-stricken hand. The patronage of kind friends like the earl of Newcastle was never wholly wanting to him, nor could he have ended in neglect. He was the acknowledged chief of English literature, both at the festive meetings where he ruled the roost among the younger authors whose pride it was to be "sealed of the tribe of Ben," and by the avowal of grave writers, old or young, not one of whom would have ventured to dispute his pre-eminence. Nor was he to the last unconscious of the claims upon him which his position brought with it. When death came upon him on August 6, 1637, he left behind him an unfinished work of great beauty, the pastoral drama