Atlantic Monthly | Page 6

[13]
An aspiration fortunately unrealized.
It was not long before the death of Ben, that John Suckling, one of his boon companions
"At those lyric feasts, Made at 'The Sun,' 'The Dog,' 'The Triple Tun,' Where they such clusters had As made them nobly wild, not mad," [14]
handed about among the courtiers his "Session of the Poets," where an imaginary contest for the laurel presented an opportunity for characterizing the wits of the day in a series of capital strokes, as remarkable for justice as shrewd wit. Jonson is thus introduced:--
"The first that broke silence was good old Ben, Prepared with Canary wine, And he told them plainly he deserved the bays, For his were called works, while others' were but plays;
"And bid them remember how he had purged the stage Of errors that had lasted many an age; And he hoped they did not think 'The Silent Woman,' 'The Fox,' and 'The Alchymist' outdone by no man.
"Apollo stopt him there, and bid him not go on; 'Twas merit, he said, and not presumption, Must carry it; at which Ben turned about, And in great choler offered to go out;
"But those who were there thought it not fit To discontent so ancient a wit, And therefore Apollo called him back again, And made him mine host of his own 'New Inn.'"
This _jeu d'esprit_ of Suckling, if of no value otherwise, would be respectable as an original which the Duke of Buckinghamshire,[15] Leigh Hunt,[16] and our own Lowell[17] have successfully and happily imitated.
In due course, Laureate Jonson shared the fate of all potentates, and was gathered to the laurelled of Elysium. The fatality occurred in 1637. When his remains were deposited in the Poet's Corner, with the eloquent laconism above them, "O Rare Ben Jonson!" all the wits of the day stood by the graveside, and cast in their tribute of bays. The rite over, all the wits of the day hurried from the aisles of Westminster to the galleries of Whitehall to urge their several claims to the successorship. There were, of the elder time, Massinger, drawing to the close of a successful career,--Ford, with his growing fame,--Marmion, Heywood, Carlell, Wither. There was Sandys, especially endeared to the king by his orthodox piety, so becoming the son of an archbishop, and by his versions of the "Divine Poems," which were next year given to the press, and which found a place among the half-dozen volumes which a decade later solaced the last hours of his royal master. There were the names, in the junior class, of Tom Carew, noted for his amatory songs and his one brilliant masque,--Tom Killigrew, of pleasant humor, and no mean writer of tragedy,--Suckling, the wittiest of courtiers, and the most courtly of wits,--Cartwright, Crashaw, Davenant, and May. But of all these, the contest soon narrowed down to the two latter. William Davenant was in all likelihood the son of an innkeeper at Oxford; he was certainly the son of the innkeeper's wife. A rumor, which Davenant always countenanced, alleged that William Shakspeare, a poet of some considerable repute in those times, being in the habit of passing between Stratford-on-the-Avon and London, was wont to bait and often lodge at this Oxford hostelry. At one of these calls the landlady had proved more than ordinarily frail or the poet more than ordinarily seductive,--who can wonder at even virtue stooping to folly when the wooer was the Swan of Avon, beside whom the bird that captivated Leda was as a featherless gosling?--and the consequence had been Will Davenant, born in the year of our Lord 1605, Shakspeare standing as godfather at the baptism. A boy of lively parts was Will, and good-fortune brought those parts to the notice of the grave and philosophic Greville, Lord Brooke, whose dearest boast was the friendship in early life of Sir Philip Sidney. The result of this notice was a highly creditable education at school and university, and an ultimate introduction into the foremost society of the capital. Davenant, finding the drama supreme in fashionable regard, devoted himself to the drama. He also devoted himself to the cultivation of Ben Jonson, then at the summit of renown, assisting in an amateur way in the preparation of the court pageants, and otherwise mitigating the Laureate's labors. From 1632 to 1637, these aids were frequent, and established a very plausible claim to the succession. Thomas May, who shortly became his sole competitor, was a man of elevated pretensions. As a writer of English historical poems and as a translator of Lucan he had earned a prominent position in British literature; as a continuator of the "Pharsalia" in Latin verse of exemplary elegance, written in the happiest imitation of the martyred Stoic's unimpassioned mannerism, he secured for British scholarship that higher respect among Continental scholars which Milton's