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historical associations, might be written on the subject of Jonson's masques. Let us hastily run through them in the order of their dates. Upon the death of Elizabeth, James, with his Queen and Prince Henry, set out from Edinburgh to London; but the Queen and Prince remained a few days at Althorp, the seat of Sir Robert Spencer. They were here welcomed with Jonson's first masque, 'The Satyr.' The masques of Kenilworth had then probably been nearly forgotten; but this mode of entertaining the new Court soon passed into a fashion; and Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate, and Lord Salisbury at Theobald's, gave similar entertainments, which Jonson superintended. The City was ambitious to take a part in these elegant welcomes; and Jonson's fame had found its way into the hall of the Merchant Tailors' Company, whose records tell us that "Sir John Swynnerton is entreated to confer with Master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, about a speech to be made to welcome his Majesty, and about music and other inventions which may give liking and delight; by reason that the Company doubt that their schoolmaster and scholars be not acquainted with such kind of entertainments." From 1606 to 1633 Jonson continued to produce masques at Court. His prose descriptions of the pageantry and machinery, introducing his verses, are written with great pomp and elegance. The very titles of some of them are gorgeous; such as, 'The Characters of two Royal Masques, the one of Blackness, the other of Beauty, personated by the most magnificent of Queens, Anne, Queen of Great Britain, &c., with her honourable Ladies, 1605 and 1608, at Whitehall.' There is a poetical and prosaic side to most things. Jonson himself thus describes one part of his pageantry :-" The masquers were placed in a great concave shell, like mother-of-pearl, curiously made to move on those waters and rise with the billow. *** On sides of the shell did swim six huge sea-monsters." Sir Dudley Carleton gave an account to Winwood of this exhibition, which presents us with the other side of the shield :-" At night we had the Queen's Masque in the Banqueting House: there was a great engine at the lower end of the room, which had motion, and in it were the images of seahorses, with other terrible fishes, which were ridden by Moors: the indecorum was, that there was all fish and no water." In 1606 Jonson wrote the masque of 'Hymenæi,' to celebrate the politic marriage of two children, the Earl of Essex, and Frances, the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. In seven years more Whitehall saw another masque, when Lady Essex had been divorced, and she was again married to the minion Somerset. Jonson, fortunately for his fame, did not write the masque on that occasion. The marriage of Lord Haddington in 1608 called for another masque of Jonson's; which, according to a contemporary authority, cost twelve noblemen three hundred pounds each. When Lord Hay, whom Clarendon describes as "a man of the greatest expense in his own person of any in the age he lived," had returned from his French embassy, he provided, in 1617, a great entertainment for the ambassador of France. The man whose ostentation was such that, when he gave a supper, he had one course for show only, which was removed untouched, and another course for consumption; and whose horse was shod with silver shoes when he entered Paris in procession,such a person was not likely to have spared any cost in producing Jonson's Masque of Lethe.' The Court and the nobility went on masquing wherever the King abode. The Gipsies Metamorphosed' was presented to James at Burleigh, at Belvoir, and at Windsor. Pan's Anniversary' was the last enter

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tainment which Jonson offered to his old master. James, in 1621, would have
forced the honour of knighthood upon his poet; but Jonson's good sense contrived
to avoid it. "The wisest fool in Christendom" died in 1626, and bequeathed a
distracted kingdom to his successor. One almost of the latest masques of Jonson
which was presented before James I., Time Vindicated,' whispers an echo of
that turmoil whose hoarse sounds were still distant. This, which was also called
The Prince's Masque,' was performed at Whitehall on Sunday, the 6th of
January, 1623. "The antemasques were of tumblers and jugglers. The Prince
did lead the measures with the French ambassador's wife. The measures, brawls,
corantos, and galliards being ended, the masquers with the ladies did dance two
contrey dances, where the French ambassador's wife and Mademoiselle St. Luke
did dance." Two "ragged rascals" are thus described in the antemasque :—
"One is his printer in disguise, and keeps

His press in a hollow tree, where, to conceal him,
He works by glow-worm light, the moon 's too open.
The other zealous rag is the compositor,

Who, in an angle where the ants inhabit,

(The emblems of his labours,) will sit curl'd

Whole days and nights, and work his eyes out for him."

This was the age of libels" straws," as Selden has it, "thrown up to show which way the wind blows." The "press in a hollow tree" was no mere poetical exaggeration. That terrible machine did its work in silence and darkness. It laboured like a mole. If it was sought for in the garret, it was in the cellar; if it was hunted to the hovel, it found a hiding-place in the palace. The minds of men were in a state of preternatural activity. Prerogative had tampered with opinion, and opinion was too strong for it. The public mind, for the first time in England, began to want news-coarse provender for opinion to chew and ruminate. Jonson wrote his 'Staple of News,' in which we have an office with a principal and clerks busily employed in collecting and recording news, to be circulated by letter. The countrywoman at the office would have "A groatworth of any news, I care not what,

To carry down this Saturday to our vicar."

There was then, in reality, a weekly pamphlet of news published under the highsounding editorial name of Mercurius Britannicus. Jonson had a right notion of what gave authority to such a publication :—

"See divers men's opinions! unto some

The very printing of 'em makes them news,

Tha have not the heart to believe anything
But what they see in print."

Jonson called the newspaper " a weekly cheat to draw money ;" and he sets about ridiculing the desire for news, as if it were an ephemeral taste easily put down, and people had a diseased appetite for news, "made all at home, and no syllable of truth in them." The people were thirsting for pamphlets of news because therein they found glimpses of truth. Gifford, in his criticism on this play, says, "Credulity, which was then at its height, was irritated rather than fed by impositions of every kind; and the country kept in a feverish state of deceitful expectation by stories of wonderful events, gross and palpable, to use the words of Shakspere, as the father of lies who begat them." Of news for the credulous the dramatist has given some amusing specimens, almost as good

as the American sea-serpent, and some inventions nearer home. The age was indeed credulous; but credulity and curiosity are nearly allied; and curiosity goes before comparison, and comparison goes before discontent, and discontent goes before revolt; and so in less than twenty years after Jonson's 'Staple of News' the country was plunged in civil war. We may trace in Jonson many of the evidences of a turbid state of public opinion. Amidst the luxuries and gaieties of those times there were some awful things which are quite unknown to us. The plague, for example, would break out in London: the Court would hurry to the country; every man of substance would follow the Court; all the places of public amusement would be shut; the voice of lamentation would be heard in the streets; with preachers denouncing God's judgments against the devoted city, in company with astrologers foretelling bad harvests, or recovering lost spoons. These things, upon the whole, made the people serious. The Puritans arose-James reasoned first with, and then persecuted them. The dramatists laughed at them. All Jonson's later comedies, as well as those of almost every other writer for the stage in the days of James, have a gird at Puritans. Subtle, in the 'Alchymist,' accuses the pastors and deacons who come to him in search of the philosopher's stone of endeavouring to win widows to give legacies, or make wives to rob their husbands. Jonson points boldly at their supposed ambition :—

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In his Bartholomew Fair,' written in 1614, the "Rabbi Busy" is the butt of

the audience from the first act to the last. The satire is not so bitter as that of

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the Tartuffe,' but the Puritans must have

felt it deeply, for it rendered them objects of contempt rather than of hatred. They had their revenge; which a dramatic writer after the Restoration has well described

"Many have been the vain attempts of wit

Against the still prevailing hypocrite.
Once, and but once, a poet got the day,

And vanquish'd Busy in a puppet-play!

But Busy, rallying, fill'd with holy rage,

Possess'd the pulpit and pull'd down the stage."

The literary life of Ben Jonson extended over nearly forty years: upon the whole, it was a successful literary life. He did not, like Shakspere, realize a competency by adding the business of a theatrical manager to the pleasanter labours of a poet. His plays, no doubt, produced him money; but his occasional productions for the Court and the City made him wealthier than most of his brethren. Aubrey tells us of his habitations :-"Long since, in King James's time, I have

heard my uncle Danvers say (who knew him) that he lived without Temple Bar, at a comb-maker's shop, about the Elephant and Castle. In his later time he lived in Westminster, in the house under which you pass as you go out of the churchyard into the old palace, where he died." He had a library so stored with rare and curious books that Selden could find there volumes which he vainly sought in other places. He appears at this time to have lived a life of learned ease, enjoying stipends from the Crown and from the City. From 1616 to 1625 he wrote no plays. After the death of James want probably drove him again to the stage. His later dramas are not to be compared with The Alchymist' and The Fox.' Disease and penury had come upon him. In the epilogue to The New Inn,' produced in 1630, he says,

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In the same epilogue he has a touching allusion to the King and Queen; and Charles instantly sent him an hundred pounds. The play itself was hooted from the boards; and Jonson took his revenge upon the town in his well-known ode:

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Supported by an increased pension, to which Charles added the "tierce of Canary," which the poets-laureat have ever since enjoyed, Jonson continued to write masques and other little poems for the Court. His quarrel with Inigo Jones, from whatever cause proceeding, is a painful circumstance; and it is well that the satire which he wrote upon the illustrious architect is suppressed. He died in 1637, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Aubrey says, He lies buried in the north aisle, in the path of square stone (the rest is lozenge), opposite to the scutcheon of Robertus de Bos, with this inscription only on him, in a pavement square, blue marble, about 14 inches square-O RARE BEN JONSON!'-which was done at the charge of Jack Young (afterwards knighted), who, walking there when the grave was covering, gave the fellow eighteen-pence to cut it."

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XXIII. RANELAGH AND VAUXHALL.

Ir were a curious study to trace the progress of the public taste in matters of amusement, and to endeavour to investigate the causes of the variety of changes it has undergone. The latter, however, would, we suspect, be a difficult task to accomplish satisfactorily. Take, for instance, the once prosperous as well as famous places of entertainment mentioned at the head of this paper-and how should we explain the fact that one has long since disappeared, whilst the other, having made bankrupts of its latest proprietors, is now about, most probably, to give place to the formidable array of bricklayers and carpenters, who already look upon its beautiful groves as their own, and can neither listen to the melodies of the birds nor to the glorious harmonies of the mightier human performers, for the ringing blows of the axe and the crash of the falling trees, which they hear as it were by anticipation? We shall regret this destruction, if Vauxhall be destroyed, as we regret the fall of Ranelagh, were it only for the length of time both places have existed, and the agreeable link they made between ourselves and the generations that have passed away; but they have claims to favourable remembrance of a more important character. What reader of Addison, of Fielding, of Goldsmith, or of Johnson, but will miss the place they have so often visited for materials to minister to our instruction and delight? What lover of the beautiful but would like still to be able to look upon that spot (Ranelagh) which the author of the Rambler' said presented the finest coup d'œil he had ever seen; or to keep the other, whilst it is yet possible, of which a forgotten poet of the

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