"Yes, mother, he has had divers moneys already Not much, I wot, seeing the labour he has given to this Comedy of Humours '-five shillings, and ten shillings, and, once, a pound."—" No matter, daughter, he will be famous: I always knew he would be famous." A calamity clouds that fame. The play-writer has quarrels on every side. In the autumn of 1598, Philip Henslowe, the manager of "the Lord Admiral's men," writes thus to his sonin-law, Alleyn :-"Since you were with me, I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly -that is, Gabriel; for he is slain in Hogsden Fields, by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." Twenty years after, the great dramatist, the laureat, thus relates the story to Drummond :-" Being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary, which had him hurt in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his; for the which he was imprisoned, and almost at the gallows." There is the proud Shadow of a Roman Matron hovering about his cell, in those hours when the gallows loomed darkly in the future.

The scholar and the poet has won his fame. Bricklayer no longer, Ben is the companion of the illustrious. Shakspere hath "wit-combats with him; Camden and Selden try his metal in learned controversies; Raleigh, and Beaumont, and Donne, and Fletcher, exchange with him "words of subtle flame" at "The Mermaid." But a new trouble arises- James is come to the throne. Hear Jonson's account of a remarkable transaction :-" He

was delated by Sir James Murray to the King, for writing something against the Scots, in a play, 'Eastward Ho,' and voluntarily imprisoned himself, with Chapman and Marston, who had written it amongst them. The report was, that they should then have had their ears cut, and noses." They are at length released. We see the shadow of a banquet, which the poet gave to his friends in commemoration of his deliverance. There is a joyous company of immortals at that feast. There, too, is that loving and faithful Mother. The wine-cups are flowing; there are song and jest, eloquence, and the passionate earnestness with which such friends speak when the heart is opened. But there is one, whose Shadow we now see, more passionate and more earnest than any of that company. She rises, with a full goblet in her hand :-" Son, I drink to thee. Benjamin, my beloved son, thrice I drink to thee. See ye this paper; one grain of the subtle drug which it holds is death. Even as we now pledge each other in rich canary, would I have pledged thee in lusty strong poison, had thy sentence taken execution. Thy shame would have been my shame, and neither of us should have lived after it."

"She was no churl," says Benjamin.

ENGLISH POETS IN SCOTLAND.

I HAVE not hesitated to express a belief that Shakspere visited Scotland in 1601, as one of the company of English players who performed at Aberdeen that year, under the management of Lawrence Fletcher. The question cannot be satisfactorily settled; but in the following paper I have taken a rapid view of the supposed journey, as an illustration of the aspects which Scotland would present to an Englishman a little while before the accession of James.*

In the summer of 1618 Ben Jonson undertook the extraordinary task of travelling to Edinburgh on foot. Bacon said to him, with reference to his project, "He loved not to see poesy go on other foot than poetical Dactylus and Spondæus."+ Jonson seems to have been proud of his exploit ; for in his News from the New World discovered in the Moon,' a masque, presented at Court in 1620, he makes a printer say, "One of our greatest poets (I know not how good a one) went to Edinburgh on foot, and came back." According to Drum

6

*This, and two preceding papers, p. 169 and p. 184, formed chapters in the original edition of William Shakspere, a Biography;' but were omitted by me in the succeeding editions.

† Conversations with Drummond.

mond he was "to write his foot pilgrimage hither, and call it a discovery." We have no traces of Jonson in this journey, except what we derive from the Conversations with Drummond,' and the notice of honest John Taylor, in his 'Pennilesse Pilgrimage':-"I went to Leith, where I found my long-approved and assured good friend, Master Benjamin Jonson, at one Master John Stuart's house." Jonson remained long enough in Scotland to become familiar with its hospitable people and its noble scenery. He wrote a poem, in which he called Edinburgh

"The heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye."

"He hath intention," saith Drummond, "to write a fisher or pastoral play, and set the stage of it in the Lomond Lake." After his return to London he earnestly solicits Drummond, by letter, to send him "some things concerning the Loch of Lomond." We find nothing in Jonson's poetry that gives us an impression that he had caught any inspiration from the country of mountains and lakes. We have no internal evidence at all that he had been in Scotland. We have no token of the impress of its mountain-scenery upon his mind approaching to the distinctness of a famous passage in Shakspere-a solitary passage in a poet who rarely indeed describes any scenery, but one which could scarcely have been written without accurate knowledge of the realities to which "black Vesper's pageants" have resemblance :

،، Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A vapour, sometime, like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,

A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon 't that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air."*

John Taylor, homely as he is, may better enable us to trace Shakspere's probable course, assuming that the journey was undertaken. Taylor, travelling on foot, was a week in reaching Lichfield, passing through Coventry. He was another week, filling up some time with over-much carousing, before he got out of Manchester. Preston detained him three days with its jollity; and it was another week before, passing over the hills of Westmoreland, he reached Carlisle. Shakspere, setting out on horseback from Stratford, would reach Carlisle by easy stages in six days. Taylor stops not to describe the merry city. It was more to his purpose to enjoy the "good entertainment" of which he there "found store," than to survey its castle and its cathedral; or to look from its elevated points upon fertile meadows watered by the Eden or the broad Frith, or the distant summits of Crossfell and Skiddaw. Would he had preserved for us some of the ballads that he must have heard in his revelries, that told of the wondrous feats of the bold outlaws who lived in the greenwood around

"Carlisle, in the north countree."

* Antony and Cleopatra, one of Shakspere's later plays.