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. Gifford has remarked that there is a singular resemblance between Benjamin Jonson and Samuel Johnson. Nothing can be more true; and the similarity is increased by the reflection that they are both of them essentially London men: for them there is no other social state. Of London they know all the strange resorts: they move about with the learned and the rich with a thorough independence and self-respect; but they know that there are other aspects of life worthy to be seen, and they study them in obscure places where less robust writers are afraid to enter. The subject of “Ben Jonson's London" is a very large one, and in looking therefore at his living pictures, either separately or in the aggregate, we pretend to no completeness. But if we fail to amuse our readers, we shall at any rate make them more familiar with some things that are worth remembering. Ben Jonson has been somewhat neglected; but he belongs to that band of mighty minds whose works can never perish.

We have said that Ben Jonson is essentially of London. He did not, like his illustrious namesake, walk into the great city from the midland country, and throw his huge bulk upon the town as if it were a wave to bear up such a leviathan. Fuller traces him "from his long coats;" and from that poor dwelling "in Hartshorn Lane near Charing Cross" he sees him through "a private school in St. Martin's Church" into the sixth form at "Westminster." What wanderings must the bricklayer's stepson have had during those school-days, and in the less happy period when they were passed! And then, when the strong man came back from the Low Countries, and perhaps on one day was driven to the taverns and the playhouses by the restlessness of his genius, and on another ate the sweeter bread of manual labour, how thoroughly must he have known that town in which he was still to live for forty years; and how familiarly must all its localities have come unbidden into his mind! There is no writer of that age, not professedly descriptive, who surrounds us so completely with London scenes. as Ben Jonson does. As his characters could only have existed in the precise half-century in which he himself lived, so they could only have moved in the identical places which form the background in these remarkable groups. We open Every Man in his Humour: Master Stephen dwells at Hogsden, but he despises the archers of Finsbury and the citizens that come a-ducking to Islington ponds." We look upon the map of Elizabeth's time, and there we see Finsbury Field covered with trees and windmills; and we understand its ruralities, and picture to ourselves the pleasant meadows between the Archery-ground and Islington. But the dwellers at Hoxton have a long suburb to pass before they reach London. "I am sent for this morning by a friend in the Old Jewry to come to him; it is but crossing over the fields to Moorgate." The Old Jewry presented the attraction of "the Windmill" tavern; and near it dwelt Cob, the waterman, by the wall at the bottom of Coleman Street, "at the sign of the Water Tankard, hard by the Green Lattice." Some thirty years after this we have in The Tale of a Tub' a more extended picture of suburban London.

The characters move about in the fields near Pancridge (Pancras) to Holloway, Highgate, Islington, Kentish Town, Hampstead, St. John's Wood, Paddington, and Kilburn: Totten-Court is a mansion in the fields: a robbery is pretended to be committed in "the ways over the country" between Kentish Town and Hampstead Heath, and a warrant is granted by a "Marribone" justice. In London the peculiarities of the streets become as familiar to us as the names of the taverns. There is "a rare motion (puppet-show) to be seen in Fleet Street," and "a new motion of the city of Nineveh with Jonas and the Whale at Fleet Bridge."+ This thoroughfare was the great show-place up to the time of the Restoration. Cromwell, according to Butler's ballad, was to be there exhibited. The Strand was the chief road for ladies to pass through in their coaches; and there Lafoole in the Silent Woman' has a lodging, "to watch when ladies are gone to the china-houses, or the Exchange, that he may meet them by chance and give them presents." Cole-Harbour, in the parish of All Hallows the Less, is not so genteel-it is a sanctuary for spendthrifts. Sir Epicure Mammon, in The Alchymist,' would buy up all the copper in Lothbury; and we hear of the rabbit-skins of Budge Row and the stinking tripe of Panyer Alley. At the bottom of St. Martin's Lane was a nest of alleys (some remains of which existed within the last twenty years) the resort of infamy in every shape. Jonson calls them "the Straits," "where the quarrelling lesson is read," and the "seconds are bottle-ale and tobacco."§ The general characteristics of the streets before the Fire are not forgotten. In 'The Devil is an Ass' the Lady and her lover speak closely and gently from the windows of two contiguous buildings. Such are a few examples of the local proprieties which constantly turn up in Jonson's dramas.

Before we proceed to our rapid and necessarily imperfect review of the more prominent exhibitions of the social state of London to be found in Jonson's comedies, we may properly notice the personal relations in which this great dramatist stood in regard to his literary compeers; for indeed his individual history, as exhibited in his writings, is not an unimportant chapter in the history of the social state of London generally. 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 over-estimate 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 made 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 Every Man out of his Humour. § Ib.

* The Fox.

Bartholomew Fair.

the illustrious writer and his disciples. Jonson was always poor, often embar rassed; 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 others-he 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;

For if he shame to have his follies known,

First he should shame to act 'em: my strict hand

Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe
Squeeze out the humour of such spongy souls
As lick up every idle vanity."

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 :—

They did provoke me with their petulant styles

On every stage and I at last, unwilling,

But weary, I confess, of so much trouble,

Thought I would try if shame could win upon 'em ;

And therefore chose Augustus Cæsar's times,

When wit and arts were at their height in Rome,

To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest

Of those great master-spirits, did not want
Detractors then, or practisers against them:
And by this line, although no parallel,

I hop'd at last they would sit down and blush ;
But nothing I could find more contrary.
And though the impudence of flies be great,
Yet this hath so provok'd the angry wasps,
Or, as you said, of the next nest, the hornets,
That they fly buzzing, mad, about my nostrils,
And, like so many screaming grasshoppers
Held by the wings, fill every ear with noise."

If Dekker and Marston were the

wasps" and "hornets attacked under the names of Crispinus and Demetrius, he has bestowed the most lavish praise upon another of his contemporaries under the name of Virgil. We believe with Gifford that the following lines were meant for the most illustrious of Jonson's contemporaries; and that "all this is as undoubtedly true of Shakspere, as if it were pointedly written to describe him :"—

His learning savours not the school-like gloss
That most consists in echoing words and terms,
And soonest wins a man an empty name;
Nor any long or far-fetch'd circumstance
Wrapp'd in the curious generalties of arts;
But a direct and analytic sum

Of all the worth and first effects of arts.
And for his poesy, 't is so ramm'd with life,
That it shall gather strength of life with being,
And live hereafter more admir'd than now."

In The Poetaster' Jonson is characterised as Horace; and his enemy, Demetrius, says, "Horace is a mere sponge-nothing but humours and observations. He goes up and down sucking upon every society, and when he comes home squeezes himself dry again." This reminds one of Aubrey:-" Ben Jonson and he (Shakspere) did gather humours of men daily wherever they came." They used their observations, however, very differently; the one was the Raphael, the other the Teniers, of the drama. When we look at the noble spirit with which Jonson bore poverty, it is perhaps to be lamented that he was so impatient of censure. If the love of fame be

"The last infirmity of noble minds,"

the horror of ridicule or contempt is too often its companion. The feelings are mixed in the fine lines with which Jonson concludes the Apologetical Dialogue :'

"I, that spend half my nights, and all my days,
Here in a cell to get a dark, pale face,

To come forth with the ivy or the bays,

And in this age can hope no other grace

Leave me! There's something come into my thoughts

That must and shall be sung high and aloof,

Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof."

The actors come in for some share of Jonson's ridicule; and he seems to

point more especially at some at the Fortune Theatre. But enough of these quarrels.

Every one has heard of the wit-combats between Shakspere and Ben Jonson, described by Fuller:-" Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-ofwar: Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser 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." When Fuller says "I behold," he meant with his "mind's eye;" for he was only eight years of age when Shakspere died-a circumstance which appears to have been forgotten by some who have written of these matters. But we have a noble record left of the wit-combats in the celebrated epistle of Beaumont to Jonson :

:

"Methinks the little wit I had is lost

Since I saw you; for wit is like a rest
Held up at tennis, which men do the best

With the best gamesters: what things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been

So nimble, and so full of subtile flame,

As if that every one from whence they came

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

And had resolv'd to live a fool the rest

Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown

Wit able enough to justify the town

For three days past-wit that might warrant be

For the whole city to talk foolishly

'Till that were cancell'd: and when that was gone

We left an air behind us, which alone

Was able to make the two next companies

Right witty; though but downright fools, mere wise."

Gifford has thus described the club at the Mermaid:" About this time [1603] Jonson probably began to acquire that turn for conviviality for which he was afterwards noted. Sir Walter Raleigh, previously to his unfortunate engagement with the wretched Cobham and others, had instituted a meeting of beaux esprits at the Mermaid, a celebrated tavern in Friday Street. Of this club, which combined more talent and genius than ever met together before or since, our author was a member; and here for many years he regularly repaired with