ABOUT four years before the death of Elizabeth, there appeared a dramatic writer in London, who, though scarcely twenty-five years of age, had studied society under many aspects. He was a scholar, bred up by the most eminent teachers, amongst aristocratic companions; but his home was that of poverty and obscurity, and he had to labour with his hands for his daily bread. He delighted in walking not only amidst the open fields of ancient poetry and eloquence, but in all the by-places of antiquity, gathering flowers amongst the weeds with infinite toil: but he possessed no merely contemplative spirit: he had high courage and ardent passions, and whether with the sword or the pen he was a dangerous antagonist. This humblyborn man, with the badge of the "hod and trowel" fixed on him by his enemies— twitted with ambling "by a play-waggon in the highway "—with a face held up to ridicule as being "like a rotten russet apple when it is bruised," or "punched full of eyelet-holes, like the cover of a warming pan "-described by himself as remarkable for "His mountain belly and his rocky face ་ - with 66 one eye lower than t'other, and bigger," as Aubrey has it—and, according to the same authority, "wont to wear a coat like a coachman's coat, with slits under the arm-pits;"—this uncouth being was for a quarter of a century the favourite poet of the Court,- —one that wrote masques not only for two kings to witness, but for one to perform in,—the founder and chief ornament of clubs where the greatest of his age for wit, and learning, and rank, gathered round him as a common centre ; but, above all, he was the rigid moralist, who spared no vice, who was fearless in his denunciation of public or private profligacy, who crouched not to power or riches, but who stood up in the worst of days a real man. The pictures which Jonson has left of his time are more full, more diversified, and more amusing, than those of any contemporary writer, Dekker not excepted, for his range is not so wide. He possessed a combination of the power of acute and accurate observation with unrivalled vigour in the delineation of what he saw. Aubrey, one of the shrewdest as well as the most credulous of biographers, has a very sensible remark upon the characteristics of Shakspere's comedy, as compared with the writers after the Restoration. "His comedies will remain wit as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum; now, our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and coxcombeities, that twenty years hence they will not be understood." This is precisely the case with Jonson as compared with Shakspere; but he is on this account a far more valuable authority for what essentially belongs to periods and classes. Shakspere has purposely left this field uncultivated; but it is Jonson's absolute domain. Studied with care, as he must be to be properly appreciated, he presents to us an almost inexhaustible series of Daguerreotypes,―forms copied from the life, with absolute certainty, of the manners of three reigns,—when there was freedom enough for men to abandon themselves without disguise to what they called their humours, and the conflicts of opinion had not yet become so violent as to preclude the public satirist from attacking sects and parties. There is a peculiar interest, too, about Jonson and his writings, if we regard him as the representative of the literary class of his own day. In his hands the stage was to teach what the Essayists of a century afterwards were to teach. The age was to be exhibited; its vices denounced; its follies laughed at. Gifford has remarked that there is a singular resemblance between Benjamin Jonson and Samuel Johnson. Nothing can be more true; and the similarity is increased by the reflection that they are both of them essentially London men: for them there is no other social state. Of London they know all the strange resorts: they move about amongst the learned and the rich with a thorough independence and self-respect; but they know that there are other aspects of life worthy to be seen, and they study them in obscure places where less robust writers are afraid to enter. As it is our duty to present a brief general view of the "Times' of Shakspere, we may best illustrate them, however imperfectly, from the writings of Jonson. We have said that Ben Jonson is essentially of London. He did not, like his illustrious namesake, walk into the great city from the midland country, and throw his huge bulk upon the town as if it were a wave to bear up such a leviathan. 66 Fuller traces him "from his long coats ;" and from that poor dwelling "in Hartshorn Lane near Charing Cross he sees him through a private school in St. Martin's Church" into the sixth form at "Westminster." What wanderings must the bricklayer's stepson have had during those school-days, and in the less happy period when they were passed ! And then, when the strong man came back from the Low Countries, and perhaps on one day was driven to the taverns and the playhouses by the restlessness of his genius, and on another ate the sweeter bread of manual labour, how thoroughly must he have known that town in which he was still to live for forty years; and how familiarly must all its localities have come unbidden into his mind! As his characters could only have existed in the precise half-century in which he himself lived, so they could only have moved in the identical places which form the background in these remarkable groups. We open "Every Man in his Humour:" Master Stephen dwells at Hogsden, but he despises the ❝archers of Finsbury and the citizens that come a-ducking to Islington ponds." We look upon the map of Elizabeth's time, and there we see Finsbury Field covered with trees and windmills; and we understand its ruralities, and picture to ourselves the pleasant meadows between the Archery-ground and Islington. But the' dwellers at Hoxton have a long suburb to pass before they reach London. "I am sent for this morning by a friend in the Old Jewry to come to him; it is but crossing over the fields to Moorgate." The Old Jewry presented the attraction of "the Windmill" tavern; and near it dwelt Cob, the waterman, by the wall at the bottom of Coleman Street, "at the sign of the Water Tankard, hard by the Green Lattice." Some thirty years after this we have in "The Tale of a Tub’ a more extended picture of suburban London. The characters move about in the fields near Pancridge (Pancras), to Holloway, Highgate, Islington, Kentish Town, Hampstead, St. John's Wood, Paddington, and Kilburn: Totten-Court is a mansion in the fields : a robbery is pretended to be committed in "the ways over the country" between Kentish Town and Hampstead Heath, and a warrant is granted by a "Marribone justice. In London the peculiarities of the streets become as familiar to us as the names of the taverns. There is "a rare motion (puppet show) to be seen in Fleet Street,' "* and 66 a new motion of the city of Nineveh with Jonas and the Whale at Fleet Bridge."+ The Strand was the chief road for ladies to pass through in their coaches; and there Lafoole in the "Silent Woman" has a lodging, "to watch when ladies are gone to the china-houses, or the Exchange, that he may meet them by chance and give them presents." Cole-Harbour, in the Parish of All Hallows the Less, is not so genteel-it is a sanctuary for spendthrifts. Sir Epicure Mammon, in "The Alchymist," would buy up all the copper in Lothbury; and we hear of the rabbit-skins of Budge Row and the stinking tripe of Panyer Alley. At the bottom of St. Martin's Lane was a nest of alleys (some remains of which existed within the last thirty years) the resort of infamy in every shape. Jonson calls them "the Straits," "where the quarrelling lesson is read," and the "seconds are bottle-ale and tobacco."§ The general characteristics of the streets before the fire are not forgotten. In "The Devil is an Ass" the Lady and her lover speak closely and gently from the windows of two contiguous buildings. Such are a few examples of the local proprieties which constantly turn up in Jonson's dramas. The personal relations in which this great dramatist stood in regard to his literary compeers is not an unimportant chapter in the history of the social state. The influence of men of letters even upon their own age is always great; it is sometimes all-powerful. In Jonson's time the pulpit and the stage were the teachers and the inciters; and the stage, taken altogether, was an engine of great power, either for "Every Man out of his Humour." "Bartholomew Fair." § Ibid. *"The Fox." ន good or evil. In the hands of Shakspere and Jonson it is impossible to over-estimate the good which it produced. The one carried men into the highest region of lofty poetry (and the loftier because it was comprehensible by all), out of the narrow range of their own petty passions and low gratifications: the other boldly lashed the follies of individuals and classes, sometimes with imprudence, but always with honesty. If others ministered to the low tastes and the intolerant prejudices of the multitude, Jonson was ever ready to launch a bolt at them, fearless of the consequences. No man ever laboured harder to uphold the dignity of letters, and of that particular branch in which his labour was embarked. He was ardent in all he did ; and of course he made many enemies. But his friendship was as warm as his enmity. No man had more friends or more illustrious. He was the father of many sons, to use the affectionate phrase which indicated the relation between the great writer and his disciples. Jonson was always poor, often embarrassed; but his proper intellectual ascendancy over many minds was never doubted. Something of this ascendancy may be attributed to his social habits. In the year 1599, when Henslowe, according to his records, was lending Benjamin Jonson twenty shillings, and thirty shillings, and other small sums, in earnest of this play and that-sometimes advanced to himself alone, oftener for works in which he was joined with others—he was speaking in his own person to the audiences of the time with a pride which prosperity could not increase or adversity subdue. In "Every Man out of his Humour," first acted in 1599, he thus delivers himself in the character of "Asper, the Presenter :” "If any here chance to behold himself, Let him not dare to challenge me of wrong; For if he shame to have his follies known, First he should shame to act 'em my strict hand The spirit which dictated these lines was not likely to remain free from literary quarrels. Jonson was attacked in turn, or fancied he was attacked. In 1601 he produced "The Poetaster;" and in his "Apologetical Dialogue which was only once spoken upon the stage," he thus defends his motives for this supposed attack upon some of his dramatic brethren : "Sure I am, three years They did provoke me with their petulant styles On every stage and I at last, unwilling, But weary, I confess, of so much trouble, Thought I would try if shame could win upon 'em ; And therefore chose Augustus Cæsar's times, When wit and arts were at their height in Rome, To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest I hop'd at last they would sit down and blush; In "The Poetaster" Jonson characterises himself as Horace; and his enemy, Deme |