Song: 'Love still has something of the Sea' Song (from The Mulberry Garden) 'Ah! Chloris The Jesuits (from the Second Satire upon them) Prologue to Aureng-Zebe, or the Great Mogul To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Music 1590 BEN JONSON. [Born 1573; educated at Westminster School and (according to Fuller) at St. John's College, Cambridge. After a brief connexion with the trade of his step-father, a master-bricklayer, he served as a volunteer in the Low Countries, and settled in London as a playwright not later than 1597. His first important comedy, Every Man in his Humour, was acted 1598; his first tragedy, Sejanus, 1603. His masques chiefly belong to the reign of James I, more especially to its earlier part. He wrote nothing for the stage from 1616 to 1625. After this he produced a few more plays, without permanently securing the favour of the public. Of these plays the last but two was The New Inn, the complete failure of which on the stage provoked Jonson's longer Ode to Himself. He enjoyed however in his later years, besides a fluctuating court patronage, the general homage of the English world of letters as its veteran chief. He died in London, August 6, 1637. The First Folio edition of his Works, published in 1616, included the Book of Epigrams, and the lyrics and epistles gathered under the heading The Forest in the same Folio: the Second Folio, published posthumously in 1641, contained the larger and (as its name implies) supplementary collection, called Underwoods by its author.] Though the readers of Ben Jonson are relatively few, there is no securer fame in our literature than his. He lived long, and ended his days in a very different world of letters as well as of politics from that upon which, after his return from military service in the Netherlands, he had launched the earliest of his great comedies. In his old age, when he had survived both the heat of the quarrels in which he had exulted and the fulness of the popularity which he had contemned,—when his powers were declining and his troubles increasing,—he was generally acknowledged as the chief of his art. His society was courted by grave seniors and by youthful aspirants to literary honours, while by an inner circle of devotees he was venerated as their 'metropolitan in poetry,' and honoured after death with a collection of tributes such as even in that age of panegyrics would have overweighted the remembrance of any other man. During the Restoration period his reputation as an English dramatist was still second to none, so far as critical opinion was concerned. But a poet's name is not kept green by critical opinion, and the name of a dramatic poet perhaps least of all. In his old age, as Jonson informed King Charles I, the 'less poetic boys' had judged 'parts of him decayed'; to posterity he gradually came to seem over-full and over-difficult. And thus in the end his inability or unwillingness (often expressed with unnecessary frankness) to come to terms with the larger public has revenged itself by his writings having been long and unworthily neglected. To sink irresistibly into the souls of men, or lightly to move the mirth of the multitude, was and is beyond the power of his poetic genius. To dissolve its inspirations in wantonness, or to satisfy coarse appetites with the husks of its fruits, was incompatible with the character of his mind. No writer was ever at once so varied and so serious, so voluminous and so conscientious. Few have been so careful about what they wrote before publication, and so careless about it afterwards. He thought that he could trust his reputation to the judgment of those who can 'understand and define what merit is'; and upon the whole it may be said that both the audience to which he appealed, and that whose opinion he professed neither to love nor to fear, have taken him at his word. His fame as a dramatist-on which his general fame will always essentially depend-must therefore remain within the keeping of those who are 'sealed of the tribe of Ben'; but of these the succession is certain to remain unbroken. One quite special cause has in the course of time not less unjustly than unfortunately interfered with the posthumous popularity of Ben Jonson. Not only has his poetic fame-as was inevitable-been overshadowed by that of Shakspere; but he was long believed to have entertained, and to have taken frequent opportunities of expressing, a malign jealousy of one both greater and more successful than himself. This rather musty charge was elaborately examined and refuted by Jonson's editor, Gifford, to whose efforts on this head nothing remains to be added, though perhaps here and there something may with advantage be taken away from them. With pen and with tongue Ben Jonson was always, consciously or unconsciously, exerting his critical faculty; and like his great namesake of the eighteenth century, who in many respects (not including creative gifts) so strangely resembles him, he loved to measure and qualify even the praise which came |