Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/69

Rh and I have heard him say that he never heard any man read well but Ben Jonson." Whatever our poet's histrionic success may have been, his inventive faculties soon began to show themselves, for he was employed as an anonymous assistant to other dramatists, to help them in writing and altering plays.

His career, whether theatrical or literary, was soon interrupted by an unfortunate event. Our poet now stained himself with the blood, not of a public enemy, but of a brother actor. This man was Gabriel Spencer; but he has been absurdly stated to have been Marlow, who was killed two years before by another hand, and in a disreputable quarrel. A dispute arose, and a challenge was received by Jonson, which he was not loath to accept. They met: Spencer using a sword ten inches longer than Jonson's, nevertheless fell by his hand. It was a painful and melancholy triumph for the victor. He had been severely wounded, and was cast into prison on a charge of murder, and, as he himself tells us, "brought near to the gallows." How long the incarceration lasted, we cannot exactly ascertain. It was very little more or less than a year; but this must have seemed a long passage in his life, to a man immured in a dungeon (and we know what prisons then were), with the blood of a fellow-creature on his conscience, and in constant expectation of public trial, and perhaps summary punishment. He has told us nothing of this gloomy period, but it is connected with an incident not unimportant. We have reason to suspect that in his solitude and suffering he received no spiritual aid or consolation from the teachers of his own Church. But