Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/239

 9^ S.V.MABCH 24,i9oo.j NOTES AND QUERIES.

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" Jonson was not apt to hide his light under a bushel." That, at all events, cannot apply to his minor poetns, which he apparently produced with the greatest ease when he had flung off the load of pedantry that clogged his flight and had given free play to his fancy, which was one of the brightest in that most wonderful age. After these considerations, I am more convinced than ever that the epigram on Prince Henry is by our author, and I hope that MR. SIMPSON, who claims to be a " serious " student of Jonson, and is no doubt preparing a new edition of his works, will insert this little poem, and mention now and again been allowed to contribute to its pages.
 * N. & Q.' and the "frivolous" writer who has

I am surprised at the surprise that MR. SIMPSON exhibits when I say that Jonson's fame does not rest on his dramatic works. His * Sejanus ' and his ' Catiline ' are less interesting than Addison's ' Cato ' and Samuel Johnson's 'Irene.' I am therefore little affected by Milton's "graceful tribute to 'Jonson's learned sock,'" and really think that such language would be more properly applied to Mrs. Montagu's ' Blue Stocking.' I do not undervalue his comedies, which I have read with great pleasure, and parts of which are admirable, but they are "caviare to the general," and consequently no modern respon- sible manager has dared to bring even one of them before the public. " Of all Jonson's pieces there is hardly one," says A. W. Schlegel,

which, as it stands, would please on the stage in the present day, even as most of them failed to please in his own time " (' Dramatic Litera- ture,' p. 465). But as regards his minor poetry there is another story to tell. It was admired during his lifetime, and that admira- tion has grown greater every year since his death. " The minor poetry of Ben Jonson is extremely beautiful," says Hallam ('Litera- ture of Europe,' chap. xxii.).

" No sooner has he taken down his lyre, no sooner touched on his lighter pieces, than all is changed as if by magic, arid he seems a new person. His genius awakes at once ; his imagination becomes fertile, ardent, versatile, and excursive ; his taste pure and elegant ; and all his faculties attuned to sprightli- ness and pleasure." Gifford's 'Memoirs of Ben Jonson,' p. 67.

Relying on the judgment of such literary Gamaliels as these, and. in a modest way, on my own reading and observation, I do not recede from the opinion that Ben Jonson's reputation is founded, not on his tragedies and comedies, but on his shorter pieces, especially on those of an elegiac character, to which alone I applied the epithets MR. SIMP- SON considers too laudatory. It also depends,

in no small degree, on the position which his extraordinary ability and force of character won for him in an age abounding in rare and original genius. Ben Jonson was the proto- type of Samuel Johnson in the succeeding century ; and an interesting parallel might be written on the many points of resemblance between them. It is a pity that William Drummond, the Scotsman of the one century, has not left us as complete a record of the sayings and doings of the writer whom he grudgingly admired, as James Bos well in his book, immortal as long as the language in which it is written, does of the other whom he idolized.

One of the " five pieces in their kind ad- mirable " singled put by J. A. Symonds (' Ben Jonson,' p. 142) is " Underneath this sable hearse," which, on a former page, he says " is known by heart, and lives upon the lips of everybody." He was, by the way, only repeating what Hallam, a more competent critic, had said long before. Robert Bell, in his edition of ' The Poems of Ben Jonson,' has a long note (pp. 146-7) in which he gives the reasons why a doubt should be entertained as to its having been written by Ben Jonson. I can find nothing serious in them, but much that is vague and indefinite, and belonging to the category of those employed by Ignatius Donnelly in his attempt to rob another poet of his laurels. For my part, I shall still con- tinue to believe that the authorship of the famous lines is rightly attributed to Jonson, to whom Whalley says it has been "uni- versally assigned." If MR. SIMPSON resolves to exclude the poem from his forthcoming edition, I have much pleasure in supplying him with a substitute which, if not so excel- lent in quality, is possessed of considerable interest.

It is a mistake that Gifford and others have made when they assert that our author's 'Journey into Scotland' was wholly destroyed by fire. Even Jonson himself thought so, as we see from his ' Execration upon Vulcan.' One poem was saved which, so far as I am aware, has been overlooked by his various editors. In the ' Chorographia : or, a Survey of Newcastle upon Tine,' first printed in that town in 1649, and afterwards republished in the eleventh volume of the ' Harleian Miscel- lany,' London, 1810, are the following lines, written in praise of a noble building dear to all the inhabitants of the "canny toon." "The first[church] is Saint Nicholas," says the writer, p. 454,

"in the midst of the town ; a long, fair, arid high church, having a stately high stone steeple, with many pinnacles ; a stately stone lanthorn, standing