Cle. King.

Enter Philaster and Pharamond.

My lord is come.

My son! Blest be the time that I have leave to call Such virtue mine! Now thou art in mine arms,

Methinks I have a salve unto my breast For all the stings that dwell there. Streams of grief

That I have wrong'd thee, and as much of joy

That I repent it, issue from mine eyes; Let them appease thee. Take thy right; take her;

She is thy right too; and forget to urge My vexed soul with that I did before. Phi. Sir, it is blotted from my memory, Past and forgotten.-For you, prince of Spain,

Whom I have thus redeem'd, you have

Others took me, and I took her and him

33 i. e. sword.

At that all women may be ta'en sometime.

Ship us all four, my lord; we can endure Weather and wind alike.

King. Clear thou thyself, or know not me for father.

Are. This earth, how false it is! What means is left for me

To clear myself? It lies in your belief. My lords, believe me; and let all things else

Struggle together to dishonor me.

Bel. Oh, stop your ears, great King, that I may speak

As freedom would! Then I will call this lady 34

As base as are her actions. Hear me, sir;

Believe your heated blood when it rebels Against your reason, sooner than this

lady.

Meg. By this good light, he bears it handsomely.

Phi. This lady! I will sooner trust the wind

With feathers, or the troubled sea with pearl,

Than her with any thing. Believe her not.

Why, think you, if I did believe her words,

I would outlive 'em? Honor cannot take Revenge on you; then what were to be known

But death? King. Forget her, sir, since all is knit Between us. But I must request of you One favor, and will sadly 35 be denied. Phi. Command, whate'er it be.

King.
Walk aside with him.
(Dion and Bellario walk apart.)
Dion. Why speak'st thou not?
Bel.
Dion. No.
Bel. Have you not seen it, nor the like?
Dion. Yes, I have seen the like, but readily
I know not where.

Bel.

Bear away that boy

To torture; I will have her clear'd or

buried.

I have been often told In court of one Euphrasia, a lady, And daughter to you; betwixt whom and

me

They that would flatter my bad face would swear

There was such strange resemblance, that

we two

Could not be known asunder, drest alike. Dion. By Heaven, and so there is!

Bel.
For her fair sake,
Who now doth spend the spring-time of
her life

In holy pilgrimage, move to the King,

35 shall be sorry to be denied.

Far above singing. After you were gone, I grew acquainted with my heart, and search'd

What stirr'd it so: alas, I found it love! Yet far from lust; for, could I but have liv'd

In presence of you, I had had my end. For this I did delude my noble father With a feign'd pilgrimage, and drest myself

In habit of a boy; and, for I knew My birth no match for you, I was past hope

Of having you; and, understanding well That when I made discovery of my sex

I could not stay with you, I made a vow, By all the most religious things a maid Could call together, never to be known, Whilst there was hope to hide me from men's eyes,

For other than I seem'd, that I might

Benjamin or Ben Jonson, as he has always been called (1573-1637), the stepson of a bricklayer, gained the beginnings of his solid classical learning in Westminster School under the celebrated Camden, but went to no university. After working as a bricklayer, fighting in Flanders, and being imprisoned for killing a man in a duel, he produced his first extant play, Every Man in His Humor, in 1598. In 1598-1602 he was concerned in a vigorous literary quarrel, especially with Dekker and Marston, during which they were fertile in dramas satirical of each other. His tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, were produced in 1603 and 1611, and his greatest comedies, those of his middle period, Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, from 1605 to 1614. Though his later plays were less meritorious, and though his lack of popular success often left him poor, toward the end of his life he held a station of commanding literary influence.

Jonson is the most vivid literary personality of the whole Elizabethan epoch; indeed, he is the first English writer whom we know intimately as a man. We know him through the self-expression in his candid, pugnacious prologues and epilogues, and in certain prose works; and we know him through one of the most delightful of seventeenth-century books, the Conversations with him recorded by William Drummond, whom he fascinated but repelled. With Jonson's classical sympathies and literary good-taste, his gifts as a talker, his trenchant humor and biting tongue, his influence over younger men, his solidity, his downright good-sense, he reminds us to an extraordinary degree of his namesake Samuel, a century and a half later, to whose biography by Boswell the Conversations by Drummond are like a sort of unflattering first sketch. Jonson, however, was no less inferior to Johnson as a Christian soul than he was superior in both the importance and variety of his literary work, which shows most remarkable versatility. The most vigorous and penetrating of early literary critics, author of an English grammar, yet also of some of the most limpid of songs, of strict and learned classical tragedy, of mordant realistic comedy, of highly poetic masques, he was the most weighty and versatile man of letters, though of course not the greatest poet or dramatist, in the entire Elizabethan period. While the other dramatists differ among

themselves in degree, he stands apart in kind.

The foundation of Jonson's literary ideals was an admiration for the classics, their conscientious finish, their temperance and firmness, their reality. In the prologue to his first known comedy he cut loose from the extravagances of romantic drama in favor of

deeds, and language, such as men do use, And persons such as comedy would choose, When she would show an image of the times, And sport with human follies, not with crimes. Jonson was the real founder and first worthy exponent of classicism in English literature. But he was fortunate in living in a romantic age, so that the bonds of the classic were never tight upon him. The conventionality which lay heavy as frost and deep almost as life on so much of the literature of the eighteenth century and earlier is not to be seen in his work. In a word, he was free, and wrote as he did because it pleased him.

The Alchemist (first performed in 1610, and printed in 1612) has usually been recognized as his masterpiece. It was played till the theaters closed in 1642, and was one of the first comedies revived after the Restoration; Pepys the diarist thought it incomparable; indeed at this time Jonson was if anything preferred to Shakespeare, and Restoration comedy shows much of his influence. The play remained popular in the eighteenth century, when Garrick played both Face and Abel Drugger. Coleridge deemed the plots of Sophocles' Edipus, The Alchemist, and Fielding's Tom Jones the three most perfect ever devised, and Swinburne called the play a faultless work of art. It is too hard and cold in its realism to be beloved or widely popular; Jonson wrote from and appeals to the head and not the heart; the play has been appreciated best in satirical times and by those who respond most to supreme technical skill.