known hand, ‘not liked’); but he there makes the printer say: ‘He [Jonson] has been restive, they say, ever since [his return from Scotland], for we have had nothing from him.’ The following year (1621) was likewise spent largely in the country, the ‘Masque of Gypsies,’ the most popular, though by no means the best, of all his masques, being performed successively at Burleigh, Belvoir, and Windsor (August 1621). In the following October the king indicated his favour by granting to Jonson the reversion of the office of master of the revels after the deaths of Sir George Buc [q. v.] and Sir John Astley. The latter eventually survived him. James was, moreover, according to the gossip of the time, desirous of knighting Jonson, and was with difficulty induced by influential friends of the latter to refrain. He, however, raised Jonson's pension from a hundred marks to 200l. Between this date and 1623 occurred the greatest calamity of Jonson's private life, the burning of his library, which, although repeatedly impoverished by forced sales (Conversations, § 13), was probably among the richest in England, and was moreover stored with poetic and scholarly lucubrations of his own. His ‘Execration against Vulcan,’ in which he made poetic capital of his loss, enables us to appreciate its exact extent.
The accession of Charles opened the least fruitful and the least prosperous period of Jonson's career. The new king, with a finer taste in literature, had not his predecessor's regard for learning, and his generosity was intermittent and his favour inconstant. In the early part of 1626 Jonson was attacked by palsy, followed somewhat later by dropsy. Both diseases gradually strengthened their hold upon him, and during his last years confined him to his bed. He had returned to the stage in 1625 under the pressure, it is supposed, of want; but the ‘Staple of News,’ his last great play (1625), though apparently not ill received, had for four years no successor. His masque ‘The Fortunate Isles’ was performed on Twelfth Night, 1626, at court, as introduction to the ‘Neptune's Triumph,’ in which, in 1624, he had celebrated Charles's return from Spain. But the court masques of the following three winters, perhaps through the influence of Inigo Jones, were placed in the hands of others. In September 1628 his means were somewhat increased by his election to the post of chronologer to the city of London, vacated by the death of Middleton, and worth one hundred nobles a year, and before the year closed he was once more busy for the stage. The result was the most disastrous failure he experienced. The ‘New Inn’ (performed by the king's men, January 1629) was, as Jonson angrily asserted on the title-page two years later, ‘not acted but most negligently played’ and ‘more squeamishly beheld and censured.’ It was not heard to the end, and the pathetic epilogue, in which Jonson betrays for the first and last time a consciousness of failing powers, was not spoken. But the ignominious rejection of his work fired his pride at once, and in the ‘Ode to Himself’ he turned upon his critics in a strain which reaches the highest note of lyrical invective. It evoked several ‘answers,’ both hostile and friendly: Owen Feltham's parody, ‘Come leave this saucy way,’ alone surviving of the former; while Cleveland's is the most enthusiastic, and Carew's the most judicious, of the latter. The unspoken epilogue found recognition of another kind. His hint that ‘had he lived the care of king and queen’ he would have written better, elicited from Charles a present of 100l. ‘in his sickness, 1629’ (acknowledged by the poet in ‘Underwoods,’ No. 80). He was also commissioned to write a masque for the ensuing new year, Inigo Jones again devising the scenery. This was the slight ‘Love's Triumph through Callipolis.’ It apparently pleased, for he was called upon to provide the Shrovetide masque (‘Chloridia’); and a poetical epistle addressed in January 1630 to Charles (ib. No. 95), requesting that his allowance of one hundred marks might be ‘converted into pounds,’ produced immediate assent, with the addition of an annual terce of canary (ib. No. 86; Rawl. MS. V. A. 28912). But this aftermath of court favour was brief. ‘Chloridia’ was not successful, and its failure led to differences with his collaborator Jones, who is said further to have resented Jonson's publication of it with his own name first. The literary element in the court masques was now in reality subordinate to the scenic. Jones's position at court was better assured than Jonson's, and Jones used his power without scruple. Jonson thenceforth disappeared from the court, and his fierce and repeated attacks upon Jones harmed only himself. In the autumn of 1631 the city withdrew his salary as chronologer from the no longer fashionable poet, who had indeed done no work as holder of the office. The masque for 1632 was put into the hands of Aurelian Townshend [q. v.] Jonson was forced once more to try the stage. His comedy, ‘The Magnetic Lady,’ performed in the autumn term, reminded society that he was still alive. It was ostentatiously ridiculed by Jonson's enemies—Jones, Nathaniel Butter, Alexander Gill—the last of whom Jonson castigated with a score of ineffectively
