again his swagger and pretension were all gone! A game cock who had just had his spurs cut could not have looked more crest-fallen. I may do Jones an injustice-but give a Jones an ill name, and hang him: it might not have been him. Was it any indiscreet member or officer of the Animals' Friend Society who was guilty of this abduction of dear Mr. Nobbs's spurs, out of an over-excess of tenderness for horse-flesh? They never were more in error in their humanity for I do not hesitate to assert that their rowels were as innocent of horse-hurting as this pen! The utmost harm they ever did since they were spurs was tearing a Turkey carpet and a lady's Cachemere shawl. Poor Nobbs! knowing all this, no wonder he took on so, and was so utterly inconsolable. Lord Frederick, like the friend he is, "My dear Nobbs"-ed him perpetually, but all to no purpose: he could not make him forget that he had lost his first pair of spurs -his metronomes, measuring the time of his steps! He felt he could not walk the streets without the timeful, tuneful accompaniment of their clink, clink, clink over the stones! Even the stones of the Clink Liberty would not now "prate of his whereabout" if he dared venture thereupon. His spurs-those spurs, like a Knight's of St. George, had made him a gentleman and a foot-cavalier-had un-Thames-street-ed him, and dusted off all the dry salter from his City soul. How could he lose them so dishonourably, and not feel somewhat like a disgraced Knight, who had had them hacked off from his heels? To have them unscrewed from his Hobys was as unbearable a thought! I did not wonder-did not I-I was too much alive to his feelings-at his excitement first, and his paralyzed state of helplessness afterwards! I marvelled not that his legs refused to "go off the stand" without those regulators and timists of their steps. They did try to go, but ineffectually: they were plainly put out-confused, confounded, and could not keep time without them! They began to shamble, and slip, and slide about, just as they used to misbehave themselves in Thames-street, and up

and down Addle-hill, when they had no pretensions to be anything more than a decent pair of mercantile legs, top-booted, but never spurred, and now and then indulged with pumps, silk stockings, and a country-dance at Christmas and at Clapham. They could not easily forget that they had since learned to quadrille, and to galop, and to strut about the West End with Lord Frederick Fitznobody. I really felt for the legs, and for their incompetent governor, poor, crest-fallen, down-fallen Isaac Digby Datchet Nobbs? Lord Frederick saw the pitiable state his friend was in, and exerted himself to hold up his hand and beckon a cab to come to his assistance. His signal of distress was answered-one of those vehicles which are like nothing vehicular, saving and excepting a carboy with flat sides-or a big doctor's bottle, with a driver at the top for a stopper-or just enough of omnibus for two-one of those abortions drew up, and the debilitated Nobbs was got into it, and taken away somewhere, but whether to St. George's Hospital, or to Crockford's, I cannot say.

Poor Nobbs!-after all, he looked not so happy as even the unhappy Sampson Simpson, or ragged Pat, in much less harmful custody. "To each his own." Poor Simpson and poor Patrick are, I am thinking, better boys, both of them, than Isaac Digby Datchet Nobbs, Esquire? I can foretel, indeed, that Sampson will gradually rise to the dignity and trust of keeping a chandler's shop (set up by his old masters, out of gratitude for past services); and that Pat, with seven children, will be one of his worst customers: while Nobbs-whose double-barrelled gun (what with its expensive pigeon-shooting at the Red House, and its introducing him to the dangerous friendship of Lord F. Fitznobody) has already made him a double-barrelled fool-will be, long before that time, thoroughly cleaned out, and then cut by his Lordship; and, lastly, will be glad to slink back to Thames-street and dry-salting, with his tail, very much trod upon and hurt, tucked painfully tight between his legs. I would rather be Sampson Simpson, all the world to nothing,

BEN JONSON.

We know too little of the men of genius we would give our hearts away to know more about. We would know, accurately, no matter how minutely, what they were-what they looked like-how they "lived, moved, and had their being"-what were their daily difficulties-how mastered-how they were encouraged-how thwarted-and how they surmounted all, and rose at last pre-eminent. There is a craving void-if not an aching void-in our desire to learn what Shakspeare really and truly waswhat were his daily habits of study, labour, ease, and enjoyment-who were his friends-his enemies, if that gentle spirit could have had enemies-how he rose, and by what gradations, to the great height of his eternal fame-and how, when he had performed "the work of his high calling," forgetful of himselfcareless even to injustice to himself-he modestly, with no noise, walked down into the quiet vale of years, and was seen and heard no more!-for let the contemners of his genius say what they will, his was a high and mighty task, well worked out, and nobly and completely finished.

A highly-amusing and instructive book might be written upon the little that is known of the lives of all our early poets-piecing and dove-tailing all the scattered facts and allusions made by themselves and their contemporaries to the habits and manners of the men-who were their companions, and who their friends, social, worldly, and literary-what were their sources of instruction, how employed-and in how much they were under obligations to them-their competitors, and their imitations and rivalries of each other-how their geniuses grew, and what was their progression. And when facts and data failed the historian of their lives and writings, he should have large liberty of conjecture allowed him to fill up the voids, and work up the mental whole-length portraits of the men. No living writer could, perhaps, do

greater justice to such a task than the elder D'Israeli. He has partly performed this labour; but there is room for a completer work, bringing every scattered line and trait together-the least and most slight allusion-the commendatory couplets of contemporaries -letters-all: so that one might have at one grasp all that appertains to the history of the men and their works: the book to be compiled and heaped together in the admiring spirit and in the exactest letter of good old gossiping Mr. John Nichols, in his anecdotes of literature and literary men of the last century.

I was led to entertain this wish by meeting with two or three facts-(for such I take them to be)-in the private history of Ben Jonson, which have, as far as I have seen, escaped his most industrious biographers. You learn more, perhaps, of the personal habits of the poet from a jocund verse of Robert Herrick's than you gain from many a page of sober prose.You get, at least, at the convivial character of the man; and if you have any speculation in your eyes, may easily complete the picture-and great, goodhumoured, sober and unsober Ben stands visibly be. fore you living as he looked.

Ben was, it must be told, a little too fond of the Mermaid, and no wonder !-for under the auspices of that fish-and-flesh landlady met a greater combination of men of talent and genius than ever mingled together before or since. The celebrated club held at that equally-celebrated tavern originated with Sir Walter Raleigh; and there, for many a long year, Ben Jonson repaired with Shakspeare, the inseparable pair Beaumont and Fletcher, Selden, Carew, Martin, Donne, Robert Herrick, Alleyne the player, and many others, whose names, even at this distant period, call up a mingled feeling of reverence and regret. Here the wit-combats, which Fuller speaks of in his book of Worthies, took place, Describing these, he says Many were the wit-combats between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. I behold them, like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learn

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ing-solid, but slow in his performances: Shakspeare, like the latter, less in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention." Who that now sips his claret at Crockford's would not prefer to have dropt in at the Mermaid in Cornhill, where these brave battles of the brain were fought, and where the quaint and humourous old Ben, forgetting all rivalry with the simple-hearted and unambitious Shakspeare, kept his table-roarers about him, as long as butts would flow, and life would let him, trolling his fine old rough-flavoured songs with a tongue sweet and smooth with canary or sherris sack?

His

What was said of Herrick will apply without alteration to his friend Ben:-"Our poet seems to have been gifted with no small portion of the conviviality and propensity of that bon-vivant, Falstaff. relish for sack he records himself in pretty marked characters: whether, like the facetious knight, he flavoured it with sugar, the legend does not inform us." Herrick, perhaps, took so kindly to his cups out of "nice affection" and true filial piety for his poetical father, Jonson: he followed his precepts and his practice-because both were agreeable. Jonson was no wine-and-water poet: he was for no dilutions -no weakenings of the "frantick liquor:" he was for wine, and wit, the heightener of wine: he would not, as Herrick says, "prevaricate" in his loving, unadulterous allegiance to Sack; and when, as Sir John Mennis sings.

"Old sack

Young Herrick took, to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein,"

Ben drew up his stool to the table, and did not care if he tossed off a glass with the Reverend Robert-a parson of the true old Protestant, anti-Presbyterian stamp-loving a verse and a tierce of wine in equal proportions and hating nothing but empty flasks and puritanical Round-heads, as friends and canters-off of water, and enemies and canters against wit. Ben knew right well that wine made him, as it made Herrick,