His father was

for Carlisle, and then served Henry VIII. imprisoned under Mary, lost his estate, and became a preacher of the reformed doctrine. He died a month before the birth of his son Benjamin in 1573. The son afterwards shortened his Christian name always into Ben, and desired to be known as Ben Jonson. For that reason only he is so called.

Ben Jonson's mother married again when her boy was not yet two years old, and gave him a master bricklayer or builder for stepfather. They are said then to have lived in Hartshorn Lane (now Northumberland Street), by Charing Cross.

From his first school inside the church at St. Martin's-inthe-Fields, the child was taken by William Camden, the historian, and placed at Camden's own charges in Westminster School, of which he was then second master. Ben Jonson reached the sixth form in Westminster School, then he was put into his stepfather's business, but soon left it to go as a volunteer to the war against tyranny of Spain in the Low Countries.

After one campaign he returned. Directed by the instincts of a rare dramatic genius, he then joined the players. Like Shakespeare, he made himself useful in any way to his companions, acted, and altered plays. He produced a play, not extant, perhaps never printed, on "Richard Crookback," and he added its best passages to "The Spanish Tragedy," in which he played the part of Hieronimo.

Captain Tucca, who, in "Satiromastix," does the personal bullying of Ben Jonson, or Horace Junior, is made to say: "I know thour't an honest low-minded pigmy, for I have seen thy shoulders lapped in a player's old cast cloak, like a sly knave as thou art; and when thou ran'st mad for the death of Horatio, thou borrowed'st a gown of Roscius the stager (that honest Nicodemus), and sent it home lousy, did'st not? Respond, did'st not?"

In the poor beginning of his life as dramatist Ben Jonson, no doubt, joined a travelling company of actors, and played Hieronimo-Burbage's part-to country audiences. His sense of the absurdity of much that he declaimed may even then have caused him to write for himself, and interpolate as actor, a few passages more to his taste, while he tried also to write a play in the approved fashion. Out of this may have come afterwards Henslowe's entries in his diary: "Lent unto Mr. Alleyn the 25 September, 1600, to lend unto Bengemen Johnson upon his writing of his adycions to Jeronimo, xxxx s." And again: "Lent unto Bengemy Johnsone at the apoyntment of E. Alleyn and William Birde, the 22 of June, 1602; in earnest of a booke called Richard Crookback, and for new adycions for Jeronimo, the some of x lb." Alleyn would have advantage over Burbage in playing Jeronimo with Ben Jonson's additions.

"Every Man in his Humour."

Jonson married early, and had deaths of children in 1599 and 1600. His "Every Man in his Humour" in its first form, with Italian characters and a scene laid in Florence, was acted eleven times between the 25th of November, 1596, and the 10th of May, 1597, at the Rose Theatre. In 1598 it was produced, in the form by which it is known to us, with the characters and scene made English, at the Curtain Theatre, where Shakespeare was one of its actors. Friendship between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson must date at latest from that incident of fellowship. "Every Man in his Humour" was a pure comedy, with its fable carefully constructed, and the unity of time preserved. It opens at six o'clock in the morning, and marks cunningly the lapse of the day throughout. "It's six o'clock," says Cob, the water-bearer, in the third scene of the First Act, "I should have carried two turns by this." In the next scene, Bobadil, in Cob's house, asks how the day passes, and is told,

"Faith, some half-hour to seven." In the first scene of the

Second Act, at Kitely's house, the bell rings to breakfast (half-past seven). In the second scene of the Third Act, Kitely asks Cash, "What's o'clock," and is answered, "Exchange-time, sir"; ten in the morning. Incidents of the Fourth Act are timed in the first scene of the Fifth as "between one and two" and "after two," and the adventures of the day end with a supper. The next three pieces, produced annually about Christmastide, were of another kind: rather dramatic satires than dramatic tales. The first of them, "Every Man out of his Humour," satirised many follies of the time, especially those of the City. The second, "Cynthia's Revels," satirised chiefly the affectations of the Court. In each of these Ben Jonson sought to lift men's minds-too much by way of scorn, though of a noble scorn-above the grovelling vanities of life; and, as he said in "Cynthia's Revels,"

"Cynthia's Revels."

66

by that worthy scorn, to make them know How far beneath the dignity of man

Their serious and most practised actions are."

His labour was

"That these vain joys, in which their wills consume

Such powers of wit and soul as are of force

To raise their beings to eternity,

May be converted on works fitting men :
And, for the practice of a forcéd look,
An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase,
Study the native frame of a true heart,

An inward comeliness of bounty, knowledge,

And spirit that may conform them actually

To God's high figures, which they have in power."

Every Man out of his Humour" in 1599, and “Cynthia's Revels" in 1600, were followed in 1601 by the third piece in this trilogy of dramatic satires, "The Poetaster." This play was levelled against the false art of the poet, and maintained the honour

"The Poetaster."

of the true. The real poet treats, with highest aim, of the essentials of life; the poetaster, with a low aim, of its accidents. This broad and firm distinction is drawn very clearly in the play, which crowned the offences of the dramatist for those who would only see personal attacks in pieces that dealt with principles of life and thought.

"Satiro

mastix."

Misunderstood in these his younger days by fellow-poets who saw personality where the whole aim was to lift the public sense of what true Literature means, Ben Jonson found himself put on the stage in a piece called "Satiromastix" by his friends Dekker and Marston. They paid him back in what they took to be his own coin, and set one of his own characters, Captain Tucca, to bully him; but in the characters through which they themselves spoke, they clearly expressed their own friendship and admiration for him, which asked only that he should put away what they regarded as his fault. Says one of them—

"Where one true

And wholly virtuous spirit for thy best part
Loves thee, I wish one ten with all my heart.

I make account, I put up as deep share

In every good man's love which thy worth earns
As thou thyself. We envy not to see
Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesie.
No, here the gall lies, we that know what stuff
Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk
On which thy learning grows, and can give life
To thy, once dying, baseness, yet must we
Dance antics on your paper."

"Fannius!" he interrupts ; and his friend adds—

"This makes us angry, but not envious.

No, were thy warpt soul put in a new mould,

I'd wear thee as a jewel set in gold."

Ben Jonson, as we learn from "Satiromastix," was at that time of his life tall, meagre, large-boned, with a pock

marked face and eager eyes. He was a poet and keen satirist, with a true reverence for all that was noble, a lofty sense of the aims of literature, and a young zeal to set the world to rights, sustained by a bold temper and blemished with an over-readiness for self-assertion.

Too much stress is not to be laid on the personalities of the "Satiromastix." The retort was made in a tone which showed the quarrel to be, as a Latin motto to the printed book expressed, among friends only. The motto said, “I speak only to friends, and that upon compulsion." If Ben Jonson's fellow-dramatists shared the common belief that a real Captain Hannam sat for Captain Tucca of the "Poetaster," and that their comrade attacked them personally when he brought off the poetaster's stomach many words * that had been used in plays of theirs, they could give him a taste of his own whip by way of correction, while expressing hearty admiration of his genius, as in the "Satiromastix" they distinctly did through their own assumed characters of Crispinus and Demetrius Fannius. Ben Jonson is shown by an entry in Henslowe's Diary to have been fellow-worker with Dekker upon two plays in 1599. The "Poetaster" was in 1601; "Satiromastix" was in 1602. 1603, Ben Jonson and Dekker were joint-authors of the pageant prepared in London for the reception of James I. In 1604 John Marston dedicated "The Malcontent" to Ben Jonson as "his candid and cordial friend." Men strong in intellect can wrestle intellectually without narrow spite, and if they lose temper it can soon be found again.

In March,

The words condemned are, retrograde (then recently used by Shakespeare in "Hamlet," "It is most retrograde to my desire "), reciprocal, incubus, glibbery, lubrical, defunct, magnificate, chilblained, clumsy, spurious, snotteries, puffy, inflate, turgidous, ventosity, oblatrant, furibund, fatuate, strenuous, prorumped, clutcht, obstupefact, with the phrases, "balmy froth," "snarling gusts," "conscious damp," and "quaking custard."