BEN JONSON 97 Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life ; then where there hath been thrown Wit able enough to justify the town For three days past : wit that might warrant be For the whole city to talk foolishly Till that were cancelled." But these splendid years were ushered in by domestic calamity and political persecution. In 1603 the plague is said to have carried off 30,000 persons in London alone. Drummond, to whose notes we must continually recur, as they were taken down fresh from Jonson's own lips, reports : " When the King came in England at that tyme the pest was in London, he [our poet] being in the country at Sir Robert Cotton's house with old Cambden, he saw in a vision his eldest sone, then a child [seven years old] and at London, appear unto him with the mark of a bloodie crosse on his forehead, as if it had been cutted with a sword, at which amazed he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came to Mr. Cambden's chamber to tell him ; who persuaded him it was but ane apprehension of his fantasie, at which he sould not be disjected; in the mean tyme comes there letters from his wife, of the death of that boy in the plague. He appeared to him (he said) of a manlie shape, and of that grouth that he thinks he shall be at the resurrection."* Epigram 45 is dedicated to
- It seems well to remark here what might have been remarked
earlier, in reference to what appears the rather incongruous spelling of some of these notes, that what is termed the " literal transcript " may be not quite literal, although strictly verbal, having been made by the well-known Edinburgh antiquary and physician. Sir Robert Sibbald, probably about the end of the eighteenth century. He may have sometimes modernised, sometimes not. G
