to raise

      "A woful cry
To Sir Robert Pye,"

before some small instalment of long arrearages could be procured. And when, rarely, very rarely, his Majesty condescended to remember the necessities of "his and the Muses' servant," and send a present to the Laureate's lodgings, its proportions were always so small as to excite the ire of the insulted Ben, who would growl forth to the messenger, "He would not have sent me this, (scil. wretched pittance,) did I not live in an alley."

We now arrive at the true era of the Laureateship. Charles, in 1630, became ambitious to signalize his reign by some fitting tribute to literature. A petition from Ben Jonson pointed out the way. The Laureate office was made a patentable one, in the gift of the Lord Chamberlain, as purveyor of the royal amusements. Ben was confirmed in the office. The salary was raised from one hundred marks to one hundred pounds, an advance of fifty per cent, to which was added yearly a tierce of Canary wine,--an appendage appropriate to the poet's convivial habits, and doubtless suggested by the mistaken precedent of Chaucer's daily flagon of wine. Ben Jonson was certainly, of all men living in 1630, the right person to receive this honor, which then implied, what it afterward ceased to do, the primacy of the diocese of letters. His learning supplied ballast enough to keep the lighter bulk of the poet in good trim, while it won that measure of respect which mere poetical gifts and graces would not have secured. He was the dean of that group of "poets, poetaccios, poetasters, and poetillos,"[11] who beset the court. If a display of erudition were demanded, Ben was ready with the heavy artillery of the unities, and all the laws of Aristotle and Horace, Quintilian and Priscian, exemplified in tragedies of canonical structure, and comedies whose prim regularity could not extinguish the most delightful and original humor--Robert Burton's excepted--that illustrated that brilliant period. But if the graceful lyric or glittering masque were called for, the boundless wealth of Ben's genius was most strikingly displayed. It has been the fashion, set by such presumptuous blunderers as Warburton and such formal prigs as Gifford, to deny our Laureate the possession of those ethereal attributes of invention and fancy which play about the creations of Shakspeare, and constitute their exquisite charm. This arbitrary comparison of Jonson and Shakspeare has, in fact, been the bane of the former's reputation. Those who have never read the masques argue, that, as "very little Latin and less Greek," in truth no learning of any traceable description, went to the creation of Ariel and Caliban, Oberon and Puck, the possession of Latin, Greek, and learning generally, incapacitates the proprietor for the same happy exercise of the finer and more gracious faculties of wit and fancy. Of this nonsense Jonson's masques are the best refutation. Marvels of ingenuity in plot and construction, they abound in "dainty invention," animated dialogue, and some of the finest lyric passages to be found in dramatic literature. They are the Laureate's true laurels. Had he left nothing else, the "rare arch-poet" would have held, by virtue of these alone, the elevated rank which his contemporaries, and our own, freely assign him. Lamb, whose appreciation of the old dramatists was extremely acute, remarks,--"A thousand beautiful passages from his 'New Inn,' and from those numerous court masques and entertainments which he was in the daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to show the poetical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard."[12] And in excess of admiration at one of the Laureate's most successful pageants, Herrick breaks forth,--

"Thou hadst the wreath before, now take the tree,
That henceforth none be laurel-crowned but thee."[13]

An aspiration fortunately unrealized.

It was not long before the death of Ben, that John Suckling, one of his boon companions

    "At those lyric feasts,
Made at 'The Sun,'
'The Dog,' 'The Triple Tun,'
Where they such clusters had
As made them nobly wild, not mad,"[14]

handed about among the courtiers his "Session of the Poets," where an imaginary contest for the laurel presented an opportunity for characterizing the wits of the day in a series of capital strokes, as remarkable for justice as shrewd wit. Jonson is thus introduced:--

"The first that broke silence was good old Ben,
Prepared with Canary wine,
And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,
For his were called works, while others' were but plays;

"And bid them remember how he had purged the stage
Of errors that had lasted many an age;
And he hoped they did not think 'The Silent Woman,'
'The Fox,' and 'The Alchymist' outdone by no man.

"Apollo stopt him there, and bid him not go on;
'Twas merit, he said, and not presumption,
Must carry it; at which Ben turned about,
And in great choler offered to go out;

"But those who were there thought it not fit
To discontent so ancient a wit,
And therefore Apollo called him back again,
And made him mine host of his own 'New Inn.'"

This jeu d'esprit of Suckling, if of no value otherwise, would be respectable as an original which the Duke of Buckinghamshire,[15] Leigh Hunt,[16] and our own Lowell[17] have successfully and happily imitated.

In due course, Laureate Jonson shared the fate of all potentates, and was gathered to the laurelled of Elysium. The fatality occurred in 1637. When his remains were deposited in the Poet's Corner, with the eloquent laconism above them, "O Rare Ben Jonson!" all the wits of the day stood by the graveside, and cast in their tribute of bays. The rite over, all the wits of the day hurried from the aisles of Westminster to the galleries of Whitehall to urge their several claims to the successorship. There were, of the elder time, Massinger, drawing to the close of a successful career,--Ford, with his growing fame,--Marmion, Heywood, Carlell, Wither. There was Sandys, especially endeared to the king by his orthodox piety, so becoming the son of an archbishop, and by his versions of the "Divine Poems," which were next year given to the press, and which found a place among the half-dozen volumes which a decade later solaced the last hours of his royal master. There were the names, in the junior class, of Tom Carew, noted for his amatory songs and his one brilliant masque,--Tom Killigrew, of pleasant humor, and no mean writer of tragedy,--Suckling, the wittiest of courtiers, and the most courtly of wits,--Cartwright, Crashaw, Davenant, and May. But of all these, the contest soon narrowed down to the two latter. William Davenant was in all likelihood the son of an innkeeper at Oxford; he was certainly the son of the innkeeper's wife. A rumor, which Davenant always