for Shakespeare if he had blotted a thousand (or, say, five hundred) lines. And, despite the completely antipathetic nature of Shakespeare's genius, Ben's noble lines in the folio of 1623 are an obelisk of appreciation to a man who as yet was very far from being even on nodding terms with Theobald, Coleridge and Sir Sidney Lee. It were indeed enough for Ben's vindication had he only written the fifty or so prefatory poems he actually did. There has been no man of letters in English literature so generously alive to the qualities of other writers' work as this carping, crabbed Ben. No wonder that so many poets were proud to be his "sons." But you immortals, my revered X (Fielding, in an age that knew him not, said of him in the preface to "Joseph Andrews" that "of all men he knew the ridiculous best "), will have given him his due. But to my muttons. Ben Jonson's profuse dedications, do they not throw an interesting light upon the drama? Until the Jacobean era proper and the semi-official patronage of the court, plays were surreptitiously published by disreputable booksellers. None of the dramatists, Shakespeare included, seem to have cared two groats what became of their work. The usual method of the booksellers was to send a copyist to the theatres to take shorthand notes of the plays. Or the theatrical managers would sometimes let them have prompt-book copies for a consideration.* Henslowe of the Globe was, I think, one of these malefactors. So that the dignity of the prefatory poem does not encroach upon such sansculottes. There are extremely few examples of a dedicatory poem * Needless to say, this was written before Professor Pollard's remarkable book, "Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates." to the shoddily got up and printed editions of Elizabethan plays. But there is an appreciable amount of material if you take a jump into the twenties, thirties, and forties of the seventeenth century. Fourteen dullish poems are prefixed to Ford's plays. Ford actually has a poem from Crashaw, one of the few prefatory poems of his which exists : "Thou cheat'st us, Ford; mak'st one seem two by art, What is Love's Sacrifice but the Broken Heart? Massinger's works have nineteen poems-two from Sir Aston Cokaine, the knight who tried so hard to unravel the mystery of who was Beaumont and who Fletcher in their collaborations, and one from Shirley, that admirable stylist who edited the sumptuous first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647. That folio was a splendid tonic to the vitality of the prefatory poem. There are thirty-six poems in it, many from the poets whom all generations will honour, two from the rarest of prefatorists, Herrick and Lovelace. Ben Jonson ("How do I love thee Beaumont and thy Muse!"), Herrick and Corbet appear on one page; Waller and Denham opposite each other-a visual testimony to the fact that the transition from seventeenth to eighteenth-century taste in verse is gradual and not abrupt. Others are from Earle, the author of the Microcosmographie "-character vignettes, in the manner of Overbury and on the precedent of Theophrastus; Jasper Maine, the spirited translator of Lucian; "I. M.," who cannot be John Milton, but is probably James Mabbe, the Spa: ish scholar, who trans lated Fonseca's "Divine Meditations" and Mateo Aleman's picaresque novel "The Rogue" into the breeziest idiomatic English; Habington of the "Castara" (who, like me, is a little apt to like a gesture about his age,) "Great tutelary Spirit of the Stage! Before thy Workes, 'gainst their officious crime the excellent "metaphysical" poets Stanley and Cartwright; Sir Aston Cokaine; the pamphleteer and translator of Aesop, L'Estrange; and, since all must have a finger in the pie, the stationer. "If this Booke faile," he says, burning his boats, "'tis time to quit the trade." At the beginning of this magnificent folio is a fine portrait of Fletcher by the engraver William Marshall. Lamb possessed the second folio of 1679 (vide “Old China"). I (down, thou autobiographical imp!) possess the first! Beside such apparel as this Shakespeare presents but a russet appearance. There are four prefatory poems to the 1623 folio-from Hugo Holland, the mysterious "I. M.", Sir Dudley Digges and-Ben Jonson. But at the beginning is the Droeshout portrait, and that poem from Ben is surely the morning star of a constellation which, except for the first edition of "Obiter Dicta," has sunk for ever 'neath the ocean bed. Pursuing this so delectable subject of the "Encomiastick" with pedantic zeal, I will now present you with the brush-the ninety odd poems prefixed to "Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five Moneths travells; Newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset (the author's birth-place) and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdom" (1611). There is no other edition of this rare and whimsical book until the latter half of the eighteenth century. The poems are written by many of the most famous wits, sages and poets of the day-Donne, who has three to his "Great Lunatick," Ben Jonson, Sir John Harington (no mean jester, as "Nugæ Antiquæ " bear him witness), Sir Dudley Digges (one of the motley four who wrote poems in the first Shakespeare folio), John Davies of Hereford, Campion, Bishop Corbet, Drake, Hugo Holland (another of the four pall-bearers), Inigo Jones, John Owen, the epigrammatist, Drayton and Henry Peacham, the author of "The Complete Gentleman” (in the mode of Castiglioni's " Courtier "), under whose signature are reproduced the shoes upon which Coryat tramped Europe, entwined with a laurel wreath. The point of this unique series of macaronic verses is twofold. Coryat, amateur buffoon as he was at James's Court and merchant of the most ingenious fopperies in style he could devise, has not only written a direct narrative of his experiences in France, Italy and Germany, in all good faith and sober interest (only varied by the freakish naïveté of interspersing gratuitous and illdigested scraps of classical learning), but accepts these tributes of ridicule with the most elegant and formal seriousness. That might be part of the joke, but Coryat had an excellent conceit of his book, as indeed its lively and methodical observation well warranted. Our "Odcombian Legstretcher" was not unlike the clown, whose tragic ambition it was to be taken seriously. Except that, to his mind, he realized it. Poor Tom's a-cold! For instance, "An Introduction to the Ensuing Remarks" : "The Princes Highnesse (Who hath most graciously deigned to be the Hyperaspist and Maecenas of my booke) understanding that I meant to suppress so many, gave me a strict and expresse commandement to print all those verses which I had read to His Highnesse." Which shows that that charming figure, Prince Henry (there is a delicate portrait of him in Drayton's "Polyolbion "), was not only a generous patron of the arts but a young man with a fruitful turn of humour. For one hundred and fifty pages a pelting hail, a rack and scud of puns, alliterative anagrams, acrostics, ribaldry and mock-heroic burlesque overwhelm the pious simplicity of poor Tom. Ben Jonson leads the ball with: "Certain opening and drawing distiches to be applied as mollifying Cataplasmes to the tumors, Carnosities or difficult Pimples, appearing in the Authors Front, conflated of Stipticke and glutinous Vapours arising out of the Crudities." An "explication," in short, of Hole's engraved frontispiece. Laurence Whitaker-"To the most peerlesse, poetical, prose-writer, the most transcendant, tramontane traveller, and the most single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted Observer, the Odcombian Gallobelgicus." A French sonnet, composed in the style of Marot, compares him to Pantagruel. Drake moralizes in Welsh, Peacham "in the Utopian tongue," Donne in four lines of mingled Latin, Greek and black-letter English, others in Gaelic, Italian and Spanish. Another addresses his poem to "Topographicall, Typographicall Thomas" and draws a parallel with Don Ulysses of |