Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/112

96 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES managers, because they kept them in their own hands as long as possible. With the accession of James I., in 1603, when Ben Jonson was thirty, we enter upon our poet's golden prime. Now begins that splendid series of entertain- ments and masques, stately, fantastic, humorous, composed for princes (as Lord Bacon says) and by princes performed; wherein ** the supposed rugged old bard " lavished such inexhaustible stores of exquisite invention and lyrical grace. Now shall come forth — "The 'Fox,' the 'Alchemist' and 'Silent Woman,' Done by Ben Jonson, and outdone by no man." Now we find him at the Mermaid, whose very name is a thrill of inspiration ; in that Club founded by Sir Walter Raleigh, and composed of Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Donne, and others only less illustrious, a constellation of genius perhaps un- equalled before or since, save by the Periclean guests of the Banquet of Plato. In these reunions occurred those friendly wit-combats between Shakespeare and Jonson, so excellently characterised by Fuller, who, however, must have been guided by tradition, as he was too young at the time to witness them himself. Beaumont's lines on the subject are so hackneyed that one is rather ashamed to quote them once more, but also so fine and apposite that one can scarcely omit them from a notice of Rare Ben, to whom they are specially addressed from the dull-witted country : — " What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been So nimV)le, and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came