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Here is Ben Jonson: What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew? And this is Pope's improvement: What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
With all my love of enterprise and adventure, I cannot say that I should have particularly chosen the project before me for my evening's amusement, had I been left solely to my own will; but Glanville's situation forbade me to think of self, and so far from shrinking at the danger to which I was about to be exposed, I looked forward with the utmost impatience to the hour of rejoining Jonson.
The celebrated architect, Inigo Jones, who lived in the reign of James the First, put in motion very complicated and artificial machines for the decoration of the Masques of Ben Jonson which were acted at court.
Scarcely was he dead when the first portion of this legacy received some part of its fulfilment in the touching and often quoted words of Ben Jonson: "My conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his place or honors; but I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men and most worthy of admiration that had been in many ages.
I turned round to scrutinize the features of his companion, and, in spite of a great change of dress, a huge pair of false whiskers, and an artificial appearance of increased age, my habit of observing countenances enabled me to recognize, on the instant, my intellectual and virtuous friend, Mr. Job Jonson.
At last Shakspere died , and had not the mead of one melodious tear, as far as we know, from the London wits, in the shape of obituary verses. This fills Mr. Greenwood with amazement. "Was it because 'the friends of the Muses' were for the most part aware that Shakespeare had not died with Shakspere?" Did Jonson perchance think that his idea might be realised when he wrote,
Between Jonson and Shakspere there had already been dramatic skirmishes during several years before the appearance of 'The Poetaster. We shall only be able to touch rapidly upon their meaning, considering that we confine ourselves, in the main, to a statement of that which concerns 'Hamlet.
And, more than all, Americans own with ourselves all literature in the English tongue before the Mayflower sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful for language is the food formative of minds.
It is a princely copy of Ben Jonson, the Illustrious. Southey lent it, when he possessed the magnifico, to Coleridge, who has begemmed it all over with his fine pencillings. As Ben once handled the trowel, and did other honorable work as a bricklayer, Coleridge discourses with much golden gossip about the craft to which the great dramatist once belonged.
In former days it was Jonson whom the critics and commentators of their time saw good to select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare; but a later school of criticism has resigned the notion that the fifth act was retouched and adjusted by the author of Volpone to the taste of his patron James.
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