The dramatist has bolder delineations of profligacy and ambition-portraits in which the family likeness of two centuries and a half ago may yet be traced, if we make due allowances for the differences between the antique ruff and the costume of our unpicturesque days :

"Here stalks me by a proud and spangled sir,

That looks three handfuls higher than his foretop;

Savours himself alone, is only kind

And loving to himself; one that will speak
More dark and doubtful than six oracles;
Salutes a friend as if he had a stitch;
Is his own chronicle, and scarce can eat
For registering himself; is waited on
By ninnies, jesters, panders, parasites,'
And other such-like prodigies of men.
He pass'd, appears some mincing marmoset
Made all of clothes and face; his limbs so set
As if they had some voluntary act
Without man's motion, and must move just so
In spite of their creation: one that weighs
His breath between his teeth, and dares not smile
Beyond a point, for fear t' unstarch his look;
Hath travell'd to make legs, and seen the cringe
Of several courts and courtiers; knows the time
Of giving titles, and of taking walls;

Hath read court commonplaces; made them his :
Studied the grammar of state, and all the rules
Each formal usher in that politic school

Can teach a man. A third comes, giving nods
To his repenting creditors, protests

To weeping suitors, takes the coming gold
Of insolent and base ambition,

That hourly rubs his dry and itchy palms;
Which grip'd, like burning coals, he hurls away
Into the laps of bawds and buffoons' mouths.
With him there meets some subtle Proteus, one
Can change and vary with all forms he sees;

Be anything but honest; serves the time;
Hovers betwixt two factions, and explores

The drifts of both, which, with cross face, he bear

To the divided heads, and is receiv'd

With mutual grace of either."

There was, however, in that age, amidst these follies and vices, something much higher, even within the precincts of the court itself. Its luxuries and affectations had in truth something gorgeous and refined in their conception. The very pretences to wit and poetry grew out of a reverence for intellectual

things. If there was much mere gallantry, there was some earnest and real affection. In the courts of Elizabeth and James the love of high literature was in some degree the salt which preserved the heart and the understanding untainted. The ladies, for the most part, were thoroughly accomplished, in the best sense of the word. Sydney's sister, according to Jonson's epitaph, was

"Learn'd, and fair, and good."

The epithet "learn'd" does not here imply anything extraordinary. Sydney's dedication of his Arcadia' to this beloved sister is an address to one whose taste and judgment are absolute :-" You desired me to do it, and your desire, to my heart, is an absolute commandment. Now, it is done only for you, only to you; if you keep it to yourself, or commend it to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done." Many an immortal poem has thus been read "in loose sheets of paper," with a tearful eye and a swelling heart, by some young votaress who has felt that there is something better in the world than the splendours with which riches and power have surrounded her.

It was in the spirit of a high literature that the Masques of the courts of Elizabeth and James were conceived. The dramatic entertainments-Shakspere's especially

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those flights upon the banks of Thames

That so did take Eliza and our James,"

were open to all the world; and the great showed their good sense in cherishing those wonderful productions, which could not have been what they are if they had been conceived in a spirit of exclusiveness. But the Masque was essentially courtly and regal. It was produced at great expense. It was, like the Italian Opera, conceived in that artistical spirit which makes its own laws and boundaries. It did not profess to be an imitation of common life. To be understood, it assumed that a certain portion of classical knowledge and taste existed in the spectator. Hurd, in his Dialogues,' says, "I should desire to know what courtly amusements even of our time are comparable to the shows and masques which were the delight and improvement of the court of Elizabeth." The masques of the time of Elizabeth were, however, not in the slightest degree comparable with those produced in the reign of James; in which such men as Jonson, and Daniel, and Fletcher, were the artificers-" artificer" is the expression which Jonson applies to himself in connexion with these performances. The masques of Elizabeth were little more than the old pageants, in which heathen deities. walked in procession amidst loud music; and the cloth of gold and the silver tinsel constituted a far higher attraction than the occasional speeches of the performers.

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Bacon, whose own mind was essentially poetical, has an essay Of Masques and Triumphs. His notions are full of taste:-"It is better they should be graced with elegancy than daubed with cost. Dancing to song is a thing of great state and pleasure." Choirs placed one over against another, scenes abounding with light,-colours of white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green,-graceful suits, not after examples of known attires,-sweet odours suddenly coming forth; these are Bacon's notions of the chief requisites of a masque. His ideas were realized in the masques of Jonson.

A volume, not only interesting to the antiquary, but full of romantic and

historical associations, might be written on the subject of Jonson's masques. Let us hastily run through them in the order of their dates. Upon the death of Elizabeth, James, with his Queen and Prince Henry, set out from Edinburgh to London; but the Queen and Prince remained a few days at Althorp, the seat of Sir Robert Spencer. They were here welcomed with Jonson's first masque, 'The Satyr.' The masques of Kenilworth had then probably been nearly forgotten; but this mode of entertaining the new Court soon passed into a fashion; and Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate, and Lord Salisbury at Theobald's, gave similar entertainments, which Jonson superintended. The City was ambitious to take a part in these elegant welcomes; and Jonson's fame had found its way into the hall of the Merchant Tailors' Company, whose records tell us that "Sir John Swynnerton is entreated to confer with Master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, about a speech to be made to welcome his Majesty, and about music. and other inventions which may give liking and delight; by reason that the Company doubt that their schoolmaster and scholars be not acquainted with such kind of entertainments." From 1606 to 1633 Jonson continued to produce masques at Court. His prose descriptions of the pageantry and machinery, introducing his verses, are written with great pomp and elegance. The very titles of some of them are gorgeous; such as, 'The Characters of two Royal Masques, the one of Blackness, the other of Beauty, personated by the most magnificent of Queens, Anne, Queen of Great Britain, &c., with her honourable Ladies, 1605 and 1608, at Whitehall.' There is a poetical and prosaic side to most things. Jonson himself thus describes one part of his pageantry :-"The masquers were placed in a great concave shell, like mother-of-pearl, curiously made to move on those waters and rise with the billow. On sides of the shell did swim six

of

huge sea-monsters." Sir Dudley Carleton gave an account to Winwood of this exhibition, which presents us with the other side of the shield:-" At night we had the Queen's Masque in the Banqueting House: there was a great engine at the lower end of the room, which had motion, and in it were the images of seahorses, with other terrible fishes, which were ridden by Moors: the indecorum was, that there was all fish and no water." In 1606 Jonson wrote the masque Hymenæi,' to celebrate the politic marriage of two children, the Earl of Essex, and Frances, the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. In seven years more Whitehall saw another masque, when Lady Essex had been divorced, and she was again married to the minion Somerset. Jonson, fortunately for his fame, did not write the masque on that occasion. The marriage of Lord Haddington in 1608 called for another masque of Jonson's; which, according to a contemporary authority, cost twelve noblemen three hundred pounds each. When Lord Hay, whom Clarendon describes as a man of the greatest expense in his own person of any in the age he lived," had returned from his French embassy, he provided, in 1617, a great entertainment for the ambassador of France. The man whose ostentation was such that, when he gave a supper, he had one course for show only, which was removed untouched, and another course for consumption; and whose horse was shod with silver shoes when he entered Paris in procession,such a person was not likely to have spared any cost in producing Jonson's 'Masque of Lethe.' The Court and the nobility went on masquing wherever the King abode. The Gipsies Metamorphosed' was presented to James at Burleigh, at Belvoir, and at Windsor. Pan's Anniversary' was the last enter

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tainment which Jonson offered to his old master. James, in 1621, would have
forced the honour of knighthood upon his poet; but Jonson's good sense contrived
to avoid it." The wisest fool in Christendom" died in 1626, and bequeathed a
distracted kingdom to his successor. One almost of the latest masques of Jonson
which was presented before James I., Time Vindicated,' whispers an echo of
that turmoil whose hoarse sounds were still distant. This, which was also called
The Prince's Masque,' was performed at Whitehall on Sunday, the 6th of
January, 1623. "The antemasques were of tumblers and jugglers. The Prince
did lead the measures with the French ambassador's wife. The measures, brawls,
corantos, and galliards being ended, the masquers with the ladies did dance two
contrey dances, where the French ambassador's wife and Mademoiselle St. Luke
did dance." Two "ragged rascals" are thus described in the antemasque :-
"One is his printer in disguise, and keeps

Ilis press in a hollow tree, where, to conceal him,
He works by glow-worm light, the moon 's too open.
The other zealous rag is the compositor,

Who, in an angle where the ants inhabit,

(The emblems of his labours,) will sit curl'd

Whole days and nights, and work his eyes out for him."

This was the age of libels-" straws," as Selden has it, "thrown up to show which way the wind blows." The "press in a hollow tree" was no mere poetical exaggeration. That terrible machine did its work in silence and darkness. It laboured like a mole. If it was sought for in the garret, it was in the cellar; if it was hunted to the hovel, it found a hiding-place in the palace. The minds of men were in a state of preternatural activity. Prerogative had tampered with opinion, and opinion was too strong for it. The public mind, for the first time in England, began to want news-coarse provender for opinion to chew and ruminate. Jonson wrote his 'Staple of News,' in which we have an office with a principal and clerks busily employed in collecting and recording news, to be circulated by letter. The country woman at the office would have

“A groatworth of any news, I care not what,

To carry down this Saturday to our vicar."

There was then, in reality, a weekly pamphlet of news published under the highsounding editorial name of Mercurius Britannicus. Jonson had a right notion of what gave authority to such a publication:--

"See divers men's opinions! unto some

The very printing of 'em makes them news,
That have not the heart to believe anything
But what they see in print."

Jonson called the newspaper " a weekly cheat to draw money ;" and he sets about ridiculing the desire for news, as if it were an ephemeral taste casily put down, and people had a diseased appetite for news, "made all at home, and no syllable of truth in them." The people were thirsting for pamphlets of news because therein they found glimpses of truth. Gifford, in his criticism on this play, says, "Credulity, which was then at its height, was irritated rather than fed by impositions of every kind; and the country kept in a feverish state of deceitful expectation by stories of wonderful events, gross and palpable, to use the words of Shakspere, as the father of lies who begat them." Of news for the credulous the dramatist has given some amusing specimens, almost as good