To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakspeare, and what he hath left us.

To draw no envy, Shakspeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book, and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such,

As neither man, nor muse, can praise too much;
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage: but these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise:
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seemed to raise :
These are, as some infamous bawd, or whore,
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them; and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need:
I, therefore, will begin:-Soul of the age,
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,
My Shakspeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser; or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room :*
Thou art a monument, without a tomb;
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses;
I mean, with great but disproportion'd muses:
For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers;
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,t
Or sporting Kyd,+ or Marlowe's mighty line.§

to make thee a room :] See the preceding verses by Basse. Malone.

our Lyly outshine,] Lyly wrote nine plays during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, viz. Alexander and Campaspe, T. C.; Endymion, C.; Galatea, C.; Loves Metamorphosis, Dram. Past.; Maids Metamorphosis, C.; Mother Bombie, C.; Mydas, C.; Sapho and Phao, C.; and Woman in the Moon, C. To the pedantry of this author perhaps we are indebted for the first attempt to polish and reform our language. See his Euphues and his EngSteevens.

land.

or sporting Kyd,] It appears from Heywood's Actor's Vindication that Thomas Kyd was the author of the Spanish Tragedy. The late Mr. Hawkins was of opinion that Soliman and Perseda was by the same hand. The only plece, however, which has descended to us, even with the initial etters of his name affixed to it, is Pompey the Great his fair Cornelia's Tragedy, which was first published in 1594, and, with some alteration in the title.

And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greck,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Eschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles, to us,

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordoua dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage: or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone; for the comparison

Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughty Rome,
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain! thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time;
And all the muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm.

page, again in 1595. This is no more than a translation from Robert Garnier, a French poet, who distinguished himself during the reigns of Charles IX, Henry III, and Henry IV, and died at Mans in 1602, in the 56th year of his age. Steevens.

S — or Marlowe's mighty line.] Marlowe was a performer as well as an author. His contemporary, Heywood, calls him the best of our poets. He wrote six tragedies, viz. Dr. Faustus's Tragical History; King Edward II; Jew of Malta; Lust's Dominion; Massacre of Paris; and Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts. He likewise joined with Nash in writing Dido Queen of Carthage, and had begun a translation of Museus's Hero and Leander, which was finished by Chapman, and published in 1606.

Steevens.

Christopher Marlowe was born probably about the year 1566, as he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge, in 1583. I do not believe that he ever was an actor, nor can I find any authority for it higher than the Theatrum Poetarum of Philips, in 1674, which is inaccurate in many circumstances. Beard, who four years after Marlowe's death gave a particular account of him, does not speak of him as an actor. "He was," says that writer, "by profession a scholler, brought up from his youth in the universitie of Cambridge, but by practice a playmaker and a poet of scurrilitie." Neither Drayton, nor Decker, nor Nashe, nor the author of The Return from Parnassus, 1606, nor Heywood in his prologue to The Jew of Malta, give the slightest intimation of Marlowe's having trod the stage. He was stabbed in the street, and died of the wound, in 1593. His Hero and Leander was published in quarto, in 1598, by Edward Blount, as an imperfect work. The fragment ended with this line:

"Dang'd down to hell her loathsome carriage." Chapman completed the poem, and published it as it now appears, in 1600. Malone.

Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines;
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit:
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please;
But antiquated and deserted lie,

As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art,
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part:*-
For, though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion: and that he,
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the muses' anvil; turn the same,
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,-
For a good poet 's made, as well as born:

And such wert thou. Look, how the father's face
Lives in his issue; even so the race

Of Shakspeare's mind, and manners, brightly shines
In his well-torned and true-filed lines;t

thy art,

My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part:] Yet this writer in his conversation with Mr. Drummond of Hawthornden, in 1619, said, that Shakspeare "wanted art, and sometimes sense.' Malone.

t. true-filed lines,] The same praise is given to Shak speare by a preceding writer. "As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speak with Plautus his tongue, if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakspeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.” Wit's Treasury, by Francis Meres, 1598.

It is somewhat singular that at a subsequent period Shak speare was censured for the want of that elegance which is here justly attributed to him. "Though all the laws of Heroick Poem," says the author of Theatrum Poetarum, 1674, "all the laws of tragedy, were exactly observed, yet still this tour entrejanté, this poetick energie, if I may so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines through the roughest, most unpolish'd and antiquated language, and may haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed. Let us observe Spenser, with all his rustick obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn clouterly phrases, yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a graceful and poetick majestie: in like manner Shakspeare, in spite of all his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested. fancies, the laughter of the critical, yet must be confess'd a poet above many that go beyond him in literature some degrees."

Malone.

In his well-torned and true-filed lines;] Jonson is here trans

In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were,
To see thee in our waters yet appear;

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James!

But stay; I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc'd, and made a constellation there:-
Shine forth, thou star of poets; and with rage,

Or influence, chide, or cheer, the drooping stage;

Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like

night,

And despairs day, but for thy volume's light!

BEN JONSON.*

lating the classick phrases tornati & limati versus. Does not the poet in the next line, by the expression shake a lance, intend to play on the name of Shakspeare? So, in Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs, by Thomas Bancroft, Lond. 1639, 4to:

"TO SHAKSPEARE.

"Thou hast so used thy pen, (or shooke thy speare,)
"That poets startle, nor thy wit come near.".

Dryden, in the Dedication to his Translation of Juvenal, terms these verses by Jonson an insolent, sparing, and inviduous panegyrick. H. White.

extinctus amabitur idem.

This observation of Horace was never more completely verified than by the posthumous applause which Ben Jonson has bestowed on Shakspeare:

66

the gracious Duncan

"Was pitied of Macbeth:-marry, he was dead."

Let us now compare the present eulogium of old Ben with such of his other sentiments as have reached posterity.

In April, 1748, when The Lover's Melancholy, by Ford, (a friend and contemporary of Shakspeare,) was revived for a benefit, the following letter appeared in the General, now the Public Advertiser:

It is hoped that the following gleaning of theatrical history will readily obtain a place in your paper. It is taken from a pamphlet written in the reign of Charles I, with this quaint title: Old Ben's Light Heart made heavy by Young John's Melancholy Lover;' and as it contains some historical anecdotes and altercations concerning Ben Jonson, Ford, Shakspeare, and The Lover's Melancholy, it is imagined that a few extracts from it at this juncture, will not be unentertaining to the publick."

'Those who have any knowledge of the theatre in the reigns of James and Charles the First must know, that Ben Jonson, from great critical language, which was then the portion but of very few, his merit as a poet, and his constant association

Upon the Lines, and Life, of the famous Scenick Poet,
Master William Shakspeare.

Those hands which you so clapp'd, go now and wring,
You Britains brave; for done are Shakspeare's days;
His days are done that made the dainty plays,

Which made the globe of heaven and earth to ring:

with men of letters, did, for a considerable time, give laws to the stage.

Ben was by nature splenetic and sour; with a share of envy, (for every anxious genius has some) more than was warrantable in society. By education rather critically than politely learned; which swell'd his mind into an ostentatious pride of his own works, and an overbearing inexorable judgment of his contempo

raries.

This raised him many enemies, who towards the close of his life endeavoured to bethrone this tyrant, as the pamphlet stiles him, out of the dominion of the theatre. And what greatly contributed to their design, was the slights and malignances which the rigid Ben too frequently threw out against the lowly Shakspeare, whose fame since his death, as appears by the pamphlet, was grown too great for Ben's envy either to bear with or round?

It would greatly exceed the limits of your paper to set down all the contempts and invectives which were uttered and written by Ben, and are collected and produced in this pamphlet, as unanswerable and shaming evidences to prove his ill-nature and ingratitude to Shakspeare, who first introduced him to the theatre and fame.

But though the whole of these invectives cannot be set down at present, some few of the heads may not be disagreeable, which are as follow."

"That the man had imagination and wit none could deny, but that they were ever guided by true judgment in the rules and conduct of a piece, none could with justice assert, both being ever servile to raise the laughter of fools and the wonder of the ignorant. That he was a good poet only in part,-being ignorant of all dramatick laws,—had little Latin-less Greek-and speaking of plays, &c.

'To make a child new swaddled, to proceed
'Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
'Past threescore years: or, with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars.
'He rather prays you will be pleas'd to see
'One such to-day, as other plays should be;

'Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,' &c.

This and such like behaviour, brought Ben at last from being lawgiver of the theatre to be the ridicule of it, being personally