which contains the following very curious passage:— "Since you were with me I have lost one of my com pany, which hurteth me greatly-that is Gabrell, for he is slain in Hogsden Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." This letter is dated in September, 1598. The use of the term " bricklayer," to designate Jonson's calling, is most remarkable. Either Henslow was ignorant (which appears very improbable) that the man who slew "Gabrell was one of his own authors; or Jonson, with that manly independence which we cannot enough admire in his character, followed his step-father's laborious occupation even at the time when he was struggling to attain the honours of a poet. That he unhappily killed a man in a duel there can be no doubt; he himself told the story to Drummond. "Since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary, which hurt him in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his; for the which he was imprisoned and almost at the gallows." Gifford supposes that this unfortunate event happened in 1595; but if there be no error as to the date of Henslow's letter," Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer," was a poet of no mean reputation at the time of this event. His enemies never forgot that he had wielded the trowel. Dekker calls him the "lime-and-mortar poet." Jonson had precisely the mind to prefer the honest labour of his hands to the fearful shifts and hateful duplicities to which the unhappy man of genius was in those days too often degraded. Thus, then, about four years before the death of Elizabeth, there was 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 66 merely contemplative spirit: he had high courage and ardent passions, and whether with the sword or the pen he was a dangerous antagonist. This humbly-born man, with the badge of the "hod and trowel" fixed on him by his enemies-twitted with ambling by a playwaggon 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 eylet-holes, like the cover of a warming-pan"-described by himself as remarkable for "His mountain belly and his rocky face”— with 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 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. 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. 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 belong 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 "His 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. 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 inciters; and the stage, taken altogether, was an engine of great power, either for good or evil. In the hands of Shakspere and Jonson it is impossible to overestimate 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 had 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 illustrious writer and his disciples. Jonson was always poor, often embarrassed; but his proper intellectual ascendency over many minds was never doubted. Something of this ascendency may be attributed to his social habits. In the year 1599, when Henslow, 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 othershe 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; 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 Thought I would try if shame could win upon 'em ; |