His two daughters lived to maturity—both marrying; the favorite and elder daughter, Susanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-established physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who became his executor. Shakespeare was—so far as known—watchful and tender of his children’s interest: nor is there positive evidence that he was otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long absences are not prima-facie evidence of a lack of domestic harmonies; do indeed often promote them in a limited degree; and at worst, may possibly show only a sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that would be inevitable.

It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare’s marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof entailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and mother—both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,[15] and with whom—specially the mother—most affectionate relations are undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement.

But we must not, and cannot reckon the Stratford poet as a paragon of all the virtues; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause—or both—may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy’s death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his family and towns-people.

His journeyings to and fro, probably on horseback, may have taken him by way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of “Banbury-Cross” buns); or, more likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest, which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of which the poet may possibly have known, and looking out wonderingly and reverently for glimpses of wood, or field, or flood, that may have caught the embalmment of his verse. It was worth getting up betimes to verify such lines as these:—

or those others, telling how the gentle day

Again, there was delightful outlook for

or, perhaps it was the

that caught the eye; or, yet again, the picturesque hedge-rows, which,

and these flanked by some

What a wondrous light upon all the landscape along all the courses of his country journeyings! Nor can I forbear to tell how such illumination once made gay for me all the long foot-tramp from Chipping-Norton to Stratford—past Long Compton, and past Shipston (with lunch at the “Royal George”)—past Atherton Church, and thence along the lovely Stour banks, and some weary miles of grassy level, till the spire of Trinity rose shimmering in the late sunlight; afterward copses of elms, and willows clearly distinguishable, and throwing afternoon shadows on the silvery stretch of the Avon; then came sight of lazy boats, and of Clopton bridge, over which I strolled foot-weary, into streets growing dim in the twilight; coming thus, by a traveller’s chance, into the court of the Red-Horse Tavern, and into its little back-parlor, where after dinner one was served by the gracious hostess with a copy of Irving’s “Sketch Book” (its Stratford chapter all tattered and thumb-worn). In short, I had the rare good fortune to stumble upon the very inn where Geoffrey Crayon was quartered twenty odd years before, and was occupying, for the nonce, the very parlor where he had thrust his feet into slippers, made a sceptre of the poker, and enjoyed the royalties of “mine inn.”

Shakespeare in London.

But how fares our runaway Shakespeare in London? What is he to do there? We do not positively know that he had a solitary acquaintance established in the city; certainly not one of a high and helping position. He was not introduced, as Spenser had been, by Sir Philip Sidney and by Raleigh to the favor of the Queen. He has no literary backing of the colleges, or of degrees, or of learned associates; nay, not being so high placed, or so well placed, but that his townsmen of most respectability shook their heads at mention of him.

But he has heard the strolling players; perhaps has journeyed up in their trail; he has read broadsides, very likely, from London; we may be sure that he has tried his hand at verses, too, in those days when he went courting to the Hathaway cottage. So he drifts to the theatres, of which there were three at least established, when he first trudged along the Strand toward Blackfriars. He gets somewhat to do in connection with them; precisely what that is, we do not know. But he comes presently to be enrolled as player, taking old men’s parts that demand feeling and dignity. We know, too, that he takes to the work of mending plays, and splicing good parts together. Sneered at very likely, by the young fellows from the universities who are doing the same thing, and may be, writing plays of their own; but lacking Shakespeare’s instinct as to what will take hold of the popular appetite, or rather—let us say—what will touch the human heart.

There are poems, too, that he writes early in this town life of his, dedicated to that Earl of Southampton[16] of whom I have already spoken, and into whose good graces he has somehow fallen. But the Earl is eight or ten years his junior, a mere boy in fact, just from Cambridge, strangely attracted by this high-browed, blue-eyed, sandy-haired young fellow from Stratford, who has shown such keenness and wondrous insight.

Would you hear a little bit of what he wrote in what he calls the “first heir of my invention?” It is wonderfully descriptive of a poor hare who is hunted by hounds; which he had surely seen over and again on the Oxfordshire or Cotswold downs:

It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and played, though not published until some years after. It may have been “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” no matter what: I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly agreed.[17] It is enough that he wrote them; the merry ones when his heart was light, and the tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet this is only partially true; he had such amazing power of subordinating his feeling to his thought.

I wonder how much of his own hopes and possible foretaste he did put into the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play:—

Work and Reputation.

And what was thought of him in those first days? Not overmuch; none looked upon him as largely overtopping his compeers of that day. His Venus and Adonis[18] was widely and admiringly known: so was his Lucrece; but Marlowe’s “sound and fury” in “Tamburlaine” would have very possibly drawn twice the house of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”

He had no coterie behind him; he was hail-fellow with Jonson; probably knew Peele and Marlowe well; undoubtedly knew Drayton; he went to the Falcon and the Mermaid; but there is, I believe, no certain evidence that he ever saw much of Raleigh, or of Spenser, who was living some years after he came to London. It is doubtful, indeed, if the poet of the Faery Queene knew him at all. Sidney he probably never saw; nor did he ever go, so far as appears, to dine with the great Francis Bacon, as Jonson without doubt sometimes did, or with Burleigh, or with Cecil.

His lack of precise learning may have made him inapt for encounter with school-men. But he had a faculty of apprehension that transcended mere scholastic learning—apprehending everywhere, in places where studious ones were blind. I can imagine that Oxford men—just up in town or those who had written theses for university purposes, would sneer at such show of learning as he made;—call it cheap erudition—call it result of cramming—as many university men do nowadays when they find a layman and outsider hitting anything that respects learning in the eye. But, ah, what a gift of cramming! What a gift of apprehension! What a swift march over the hedges that cramp schools! What a flight, where other men walked, and were dazed and discomfited by this unheard-of progress into the ways of knowledge and of wisdom!

Again, these Shakespeare plays do sometimes show crude things, vulgar things, coarse things—things we want to skip and do skip—things that make us wonder if he ever wrote them; perhaps some which in the mendings and tinkerings of those and later days have no business there; and yet he was capable of saying coarse things; he did have a shrewd eye for the appetites of the groundlings; he did look on all sides, and into all depths of the moral Cosmos he was rounding out; and even his commonest utterances, have, after all, a certain harmony, though in lowest key, with the general drift. He is not always, as some of his dramatic compeers were, on tragic stilts. He is never under strain to float high.

Then, too, like Chaucer—his noblest twin-fellow of English poesy—he steals, plagiarizes, takes tales of passion, and love, and wreck, wherever in human history he can find them, to work into his purposes. But even the authors could scarce recognize the thefts in either case, so glorified are they by the changes they undergo under these wonder-making hands.

As with story, so it is with sentiment. This he steals out of men’s brains and hearts by wholesale. What smallest poet, whether in print or talk, could have failed to speak of man’s journey to his last home? Shakespeare talks of

and the sentiment is so imaged, and carries such a trail of agreeing and caressing thoughts, that it supplants all kindred speech.

“This life,” says Shakespeare, “is but a stage;” and the commentators can point you out scores of like similes in older writers—Erasmus among the rest, whose utterance seems almost duplicated; duplicated, indeed, but with a tender music, and a point, and a breadth, that make all previous related similes forgotten. Such utterances grow out of instincts common to us all; but this man, in whom the common instinct is a masterful alembic, fuses all old teachings, and white-hot they run out of the crucible of his soul in such beauteous shapes that they are sought for and gloried in forever after. Many a Hamlet has soliloquized—you and I perhaps; but never a Hamlet in such way as did Shakespeare’s; so crisp—so full—so suggestive—so marrowy—so keen—so poignant—so enthralling.

No, no; this man did not go about in quest of newnesses; only little geniuses do that; but the great genius goes along every commonest road-side, looking on every commonest sight of tree or flower, of bud, of death, of birth, of flight, of labor, of song; leads in old tracks; deals in old truths, but with such illuminating power that they all come home to men’s souls with new penetrative force and new life in them. He catches by intuition your commonest thought, and my commonest thought, and puts them into new and glorified shape.

His Thrift and Closing Years.

Again, this Shakespeare of ours, singing among the stars, is a shrewd, thrifty man; he comes to have an interest in all those shillings and sixpences that go into the till of the Globe Theatre; he makes money. Where he lived in London,[19] we do not definitely know; at one time, it is believed, on the Southwark side, near to the old Bear-garden,[20] but never ostentatiously; very likely sharing chambers with his brother Edmond, who was much time an actor there;[21] he buys a house and haberdasher’s shop somewhere near Blackfriars; and he had previously bought, with his savings—even before Queen Elizabeth was dead—a great house in Stratford. This he afterwards equips by purchase of outlying lands—a hundred acres at one time, and twenty and more at another. He has never forgotten and never forgotten to love, country sights and sounds. These journeyings to and fro along the Oxford and Uxbridge road (on horseback probably), from which he can see sheer over hedges, and note every fieldfare, every lark rising to its morning carol, every gleam of brook, have kept alive his old fondnesses, and he counts surely on a return to these scenes in his great New Place of Stratford. He does break away for that Stratford cover, while the game of life seems still at its best promise; while Hamlet is still comparatively a new man upon the boards; does settle himself in that country home, to gather his pippins, to pet his dogs, to wander at will upon greensward that is his own.

I wish we had record of only one of his days in that retirement. I wish we could find even a two-page letter which he may have written to Ben Jonson, in London, telling how his time passed; but there is nothing—positively nothing. We do not know how, or by what exposure or neglect his last illness came upon him and carried him to his final home, only two years or so after his return to Stratford. Even that Dr. Hall, who had married his favorite daughter, and who attended him, and who published a medical book containing accounts of a thousand and more cases which he thought of consequence for the world to know about, has no word to say concerning this grandest patient that his eye ever fell upon.

He died at the age of fifty-three. No descendant of his daughter Susanna is alive; no descendant of his daughter Judith is alive.[22] The great new home which he had built up in Stratford is torn down; scarce a vestige of it remains. The famous mulberry-tree he planted upon that greensward, where, in after years, Garrick and the rest held high commemorative festival, is gone, root and branch.

Shakespeare—an old county guide-book tells us stolidly—is a name unknown in that region. Unknown! Every leaf of every tree whispers it; every soaring skylark makes a carol of it; and the memory of it flows out thence—as flows the Stratford river—down through all the green valley of the Avon, down through all the green valley of the Severn, and so on, out to farthest seas, whose “multitudinous waves” carry it to every shore.

CHAPTER III.

We were venturing upon almost sacred ground when—in our last chapter—we had somewhat to say of the so-called King James’ Bible; of how it came to bear that name; of those men who were concerned in its translation, and of certain literary qualities belonging to it, which—however excellent other and possible future Bibles may be—will be pretty sure to keep it alive for a very long time to come. Next, I spoke of that king of the dramatists who was born at Stratford. We followed him up to London; tracked him awhile there; talked of a few familiar aspects of his life and character; spared you the recital of a world of things—conjectural or eulogistic—which might be said of him; and finally saw him go back to his old home upon the Avon, to play the retired gentleman—last of all his plays—and to die.

This made a great coupling of topics for one chapter—Shakespeare and the English Bible! No two titles in our whole range of talks can or should so interest those who are alive to the felicities of English forms of speech, and who are eager to compass and enjoy its largest and keenest and simplest forces of phrase. No other vocabulary of words, and no other exemplar of the aptitudes of language, than can be found in Shakespeare and in the English Bible are needed by those who would equip their English speech for its widest reach, and with its subtlest or sharpest powers. Out of those twin treasuries the student may dredge all the words he wants, and all the turns of expression that will be helpful, in the writing of a two-page letter or in the unfolding of an epic. Other books may make needful reservoir of facts, or record of theories, or of literary experimentation; but these twain furnish sufficient lingual armament for all new conquests in letters.

We find ourselves to-day amid a great hurly-burly of dramatists, poets, prose-writers, among whom we have to pick our way—making a descriptive dash at some few of them—seeing the old pedant of a king growing more slipshod and more shaky, till at last he yields the throne to that unfortunate son of his, Charles I., in whose time we shall find some new singing-birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of a different strain.

Webster, Ford, and Others.

All those lesser dramatists going immediately before Shakespeare, and coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high in the Elizabethan heavens; many a one among the lesser men has written something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treasured; but ring however loudly it may, and however musically it may, it will very likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare.

Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long survival may be mentioned John Webster; a Londoner in all probability; working at plays early in the seventeenth century; his name appearing on various title-pages up to 1624 certainly—one time as “merchant tailor;” and there are other intimations that he may have held some church “clerkship;” but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the eighteenth century his name and fame[23] had slipped away from people’s knowledge; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his mellow piping of the dramatist’s deservings; a quarter of a century later Mr. Dyce[24] wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the old conventionalities of encyclopædic writing in declaring this dramatist to be “hardly excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the poetic literature of the world.”

Webster was not a jocund man; he seems to have taken life in a hard way; he swears at fate. Humane and pathetic touches there may be in his plays; but he has a dolorous way of putting all the humanities to simmer in a great broth of crime. At least this may not be unfairly said of his chiefest works, and those by which he is best known—the “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi.” There are blood-curdling scenes in them through which one is led by a guidance that is as strenuous as it is fascinating. The drapery is in awful keeping with the trend of the story; the easy murders hardly appal one, and the breezes that fan the air seem to come from the flutter of bat-like, leaden wings, hiding the blue. There are, indeed, wondrous flashes of dramatic power; by whiles, too, there are refreshing openings-out to the light or sinlessness of common day—a lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and crime’s entanglements; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine, rare panoply of green or blooming things; even the flowers are put to sad offices, and

When a man’s flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it does not carry exhilarating odors with it.

John Ford[25] was another name much coupled in those and succeeding days with that of Webster; he was indeed associated with him in some of his work, as also with Dekker. He was a man of Devonshire birth, of good family;—a little over-boastful of being above any “want for money;” showing traces, indeed, of coarse arrogance, and swaying dramatically into coarse brutalities. He, too, was borne down by enslavement to the red splendors of crime; his very titles carry such foretaste of foulness we do not name them. There are bloody horrors and moral ones. Few read him for love. Murder makes room for incest, and incest sharpens knives for murder. Animal passions run riot; the riot is often splendid, but never—to my mind—making head in such grand dramatic utterance as crowns the gory numbers of Webster. There are strong passages, indeed, gleaming out of the red riotings like blades of steel; now and then some fine touch of pathos—of quiet contemplative brooding—lying amid the fiery wrack, like a violet on banks drenched with turbid floods; but they are rare, and do not compensate—at least do not compensate me—for the wadings through bloody, foul quagmires to reach them.

Marston—another John[26]—if not up to the tragic level of the two last named, had various talent; wrote satires, parodies; his Image of Pygmalion had the honor of being publicly burned; he wrought with Jonson on Eastward Hoe! won the piping praises of Charles Lamb in our century, also of Hazlitt, and the eulogies of later and lesser critics. But he is coarse, unequal, little read now. I steal a piquant bit of his satire on metaphysic study from What you Will; it reminds of the frolic moods of Browning:

Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

Some dozen or more existing plays are attributed to Philip Massinger,[27] and he was doubtless the author of many others now unknown save by name. Of Wiltshire birth, his father had been dependant, or protégé of the Pembroke family, and the Christian name of Philip very likely kept alive the paternal reverence for the great Philip Sidney. Though Massinger was an industrious writer, and was well accredited in his time, it is certain that he had many hard struggles, and passed through many a pinching day; and at the last it would appear that he found burial, only as an outsider and stranger, in that old church of St. Saviours, near to London Bridge, where we found John Gower laid to rest with his books for pillow. If Massinger did not lift his lines into such gleams of tragic intensity as we spoke of in Webster and in Ford, he gave good, workman-like finish to his dramas; and for bloody apparelling of his plots, I think there are murderous zealots, in his Sforza[28] story at least, who could fairly have clashed swords with the assassins of “Vittoria Corombona.” It is a large honor to Massinger that of all the dramas I have named—outside some few of Shakespeare’s—no one is so well known to modern play-goers as the “New Way to Pay Old Debts.” The character of Sir Giles Overreach does not lose its terrible significance. In our times, as in the old times,

When Massinger died tradition says that he was thrust into the same grave which had been opened shortly before for John Fletcher; if not joined there, these two had certainly been fellows in literary work; and there are those who think that the name of Massinger should have recognition in that great dramatic copartnery under style of Beaumont and Fletcher.[29] Certain it is that other writers had share in the work; among them—in at least one instance (that of “Two Noble Kinsmen”)—the fine hand of Shakespeare.

But whatever helping touches or of outside journey-work may have been contributed to that mass of plays which bears name of Beaumont and Fletcher, it is certain that they hold of right that brilliant reputation for deft and lively and winning dramatic work which put their popularity before Jonson’s, if not before Shakespeare’s. The coupling together of this pair of authors at their work has the air of romance; both were well born; Fletcher, son of a bishop; Beaumont, son of Sir Francis Beaumont, of Grace-Dieu (not far away from Ashby-de-la-Zouch); both were university men, and though differing in age by eight or nine years, yet coming—very likely through the good offices of Ben Jonson—to that sharing of home and work and wardrobe which the old gossip Aubrey[30] has delighted in picturing. They wrought charmingly together, and with such a nice welding of jointures, that literary craftsmen, of whatever astuteness, are puzzled to say where the joinings lie. In agreement, however, with opinions of best critics, it may be said that Beaumont (the younger, who died nine years before his mate) was possessed of the deeper poetic fervors, while Fletcher was wider in fertilities and larger in affluence of diction.

The dramatic horrors of Ford and Webster are softened in the lines of these later playwrights. These are debonair; they are lively; they are jocund; they tell stories that have a beginning and an end; they pique attention; there are delicacies, too, and—it must be said—a good many indelicacies; there are light-virtued women, and marital infelicities get an easy ripening toward the over-ripeness and rottenness that is to come in Restoration times. These twain were handsome fellows, by Aubrey’s and all other accounts; Beaumont most noticeably so; and Fletcher—brightly swarthy, red-haired, full-blooded—dying a bachelor and of the plague, down in the time of Charles I., and thrust hastily into the grave at St. Saviours, where Massinger presently followed him.

I must give at least one taste of the dramatic manner for which both of these men were sponsors. It is from the well-known play of “Philaster” that I quote, where Euphrasia tells of the tender discovery of what stirred her heart:—

Nothing better in its way can be found in all their plays. One mentioning word, however, should be given to those delightful lyrical aptitudes, by virtue of which the blithe and easy metric felicities of Elizabethan days were overlaid in tendrils of song upon the Carolan times. I wish, too, that I had space for excerpts from that jolly pastoral of The Faithful Shepherdess—bewildering in its easy gaieties, and its cumulated classicisms—and which lends somewhat of its deft caroling, and of its arch conceits to the later music of Milton’s “Comus.” Another foretaste of Milton comes to us in these words of Fletcher:—

King James and Family.

Meanwhile, how are London and England getting on with their ram-shackle dotard of a King? Not well; not proudly. Englishmen were not as boastful of being Englishmen as in the days when the virgin Elizabeth queened it, and shattered the Spanish Armada, and made her will and England’s power respected everywhere. James, indeed, had a son, Prince Henry, who promised far better things for England, and for the Stuart name, than his pedant of a father.

This son was a friend of Raleigh’s (would, maybe, have saved that great man from the scaffold, if he had lived), a friend, too, of all the high-minded, far-seeing ones who best represented Elizabethan enterprise; but he died, poor fellow, at nineteen, leaving the heirship to that Charles I. whose dismal history you know. James had also a daughter—Elizabeth—a high-spirited maiden, who, amid brilliant fêtes made in her honor, married that Frederic, Elector Palatine, who received his bride in the magnificent old castle, you will remember at Heidelberg. There they show still the great gateway of the Princess Elizabeth, clad in ivy, and the Elizabeth gardens. ’Twas said that her ambition and high spirit pushed the poor Elector into political complications that ruined him, and that made the once owner of that princely château an outcast, and almost a beggar. The King, too, by his vanities, his indifference, and cowardice, helped largely the discomfiture of this branch of his family, as he did by his wretched bringing up of Charles pave the way for that monarch’s march into the gulf of ruin.

In foreign politics this weak king coquetted in a childish way—sometimes with the Catholic powers; sometimes with the Protestant powers of Middle Europe; and at home, with a ridiculous sense of his own importance, he angered the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Puritans of England by his perpetual interferences. He provoked the emigration that was planting, year by year, a New England west of the Atlantic; he harried the House of Commons into an antagonism which, by its growth and earnestness was, by and by, to upset his throne and family together. His power was the power of a blister that keeps irritating—and not like Elizabeth’s—the power of a bludgeon that thwacks and makes an end.

And in losing respect this King gained no love. Courtiers could depend on his promises as little as kingdoms. He chose his favorites for a fine coat, or a fine face, and thereafter, from sheer indolence yielded to them in everything. In personal habits, too, he grew more and more unbearable; his doublets were all dirtier; his wigs shabbier; his coarse jokes coarser; his tipsiness frequenter. A foulness grew up in the court which tempted such men as Fletcher and Massinger to fouler ways of speech, and which lured such creatures as Lady Essex to ruin. A pretty sort of King was this to preach against tobacco!

James had given up poetry-writing, in which he occasionally indulged before coming to England; yet he had poetical tastes; he enjoyed greatly many of Shakespeare’s plays; Ben Jonson, too, was a pet of his, and had easy access to royalty, certainly until his quarrel with the great court architect, Inigo Jones. But, as in all else, the King’s taste in poetry grew coarser as he grew older, and he showed a great liking for a certain John Taylor,[32] called “the Water-Poet,” a rough, coarse creature, who sculled boats across the Thames for hire; who made a foot-trip into Scotland in rivalry of Ben Jonson, and who wrote a Very merry wherry Voyage from London to York, and a Kecksy-Winsey, or a Lerry-cum-twang, which you will not find in your treasures of literature, but which the leering King loved to laugh over in his cups. Taylor afterward was keeper of a rollicking, Royalist tavern in Oxford, and of another in London, where he died at the age of seventy-four.

Tobacco, first introduced in Raleigh’s early voyaging times, came to have a little fund of literature crystallizing about it—what with histories of its introduction and properties, and onslaughts upon it. Bobadil, the braggart, in “Every Man in his Humor,” says: “I have been in the Indies (where this herbe growes), where neither myself nor a dozen gentlemen more (of my knowledge) have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but Tobacco only. Therefore it cannot be, but ’tis most Divine.”

There were many curious stories afloat too—taking different shapes—of the great apprehension ignorant ones felt on seeing people walking about, as first happened in these times, with smoke pouring from their mouths and noses. In an old book called The English Hue and Crie (printed about 1610), it takes something like this form:

King James’ Counterblaste to the Use of Tobacco, had about the same efficacy with the Welshman’s beer-pot. But to show the King’s method of arguing, I give one little whiff of it. Tobacco-lovers of that day alleged that it cleared the head and body of ugly rheums and distillations;

Is it any wonder people kept on smoking? He reasoned in much the same way about church matters; is it any wonder the Scotch would not have Anglicanism thrust upon them?

The King died at last (1625), aged fifty-nine, at his palace of Theobalds, a little out of London, and very famous, as I have said, for its fine gardens; and these gardens this prematurely old and shattered man did greatly love; loved perhaps more than his children. I do not think Charles mourned for him very grievously; but, of a surety there was no warrant for the half-hinted allegation of Milton’s (at a later day) that the royal son was concerned in some parricidal scheme. There was, however, nowhere great mourning for James.

A New King and some Literary Survivors.

The new King, his son, was a well-built young fellow of twenty-five, of fine appearance, well taught, and just on the eve of his marriage to Henrietta of France. He had a better taste than his father, and lived a more orderly life; indeed, he was every way decorous save in an obstinate temper and in absurd notions about his kingly prerogative. He loved play-going and he loved poetry, though not so accessible as his father had been to the buffoonery of the water-poet Taylor, or the tipsy obeisance of old Ben Jonson. For Ben Jonson was still living, not yet much over fifty, though with his great bulk and reeling gait seeming nearer seventy; now, too, since Shakespeare is gone, easily at the head of all the literary workers in London; indeed, in some sense always at the head by reason of his dogged self-insistence and his braggadocio. All the street world[33] knows him, as he swaggers along the Strand to his new jolly rendezvous at the Devil Tavern, near St. Dunstan’s, in Fleet Street—not far off from the Temple Church—where he and his fellows meet in the Apollo Chamber, over whose door Ben has written: