and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry.  There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson’s, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid law of mine and thine must now restore to William Browne of Tavistock the famous lines beginning:  “Underneath this sable hearse.”  Jonson is unsurpassed, too, in the difficult poetry of compliment, seldom falling into fulsome praise and disproportionate similtude, yet showing again and again a generous appreciation of worth in others, a discriminating taste and a generous personal regard.  There was no man in England of his rank so well known and universally beloved as Ben Jonson.  The list of his friends, of those to whom he had written verses, and those who had written verses to him, includes the name of every man of prominence in the England of King James.  And the tone of many of these productions discloses an affectionate familiarity that speaks for the amiable personality and sound worth of the laureate.  In 1619, growing unwieldy through inactivity, Jonson hit upon the heroic remedy of a journey afoot to Scotland.  On his way thither and back he was hospitably received at the houses of many friends and by those to whom his friends had recommended him.  When he arrived in Edinburgh, the burgesses met to grant him the freedom of the city, and Drummond, foremost of Scottish poets, was proud to entertain him for weeks as his guest at Hawthornden.  Some of the noblest of Jonson’s poems were inspired by friendship.  Such is the fine “Ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Moryson,” and that admirable piece of critical insight and filial affection, prefixed to the first Shakespeare folio, “To the memory of my beloved master, William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.” to mention only these.  Nor can the earlier “Epode,” beginning “Not to know vice at all,” be matchedin stately gravity and gnomic wisdom in its own wise and stately age.

But if Jonson had deserted the stage after the publication of his folio and up to the end of the reign of King James, he was far from inactive; for year after year his inexhaustible inventiveness continued to contribute to the masquing and entertainment at court.  In “The Golden Age Restored,” Pallas turns from the Iron Age with its attendant evils into statues which sink out of sight; in “Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,” Atlas figures represented as an old man, his shoulders covered with snow, and Comus, “the god of cheer or the belly,” is one of the characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget.  “Pan’s Anniversary,” late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and “The Gipsies Metamorphosed” displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable.  These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where