Jonson says that his memory was once excellent, till he was past 40. Certainly it had ceased to be trustworthy: he attributes to Homer what Homer never said, and to Orpheus what Homer did say. Ben finds the new poems in his old age so bad that a man "never would light his tobacco with them". We all remember his sentences on Shakespeare: and "how there was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned". He had three ways of viewing Shakespeare: one when he had well drunk, and was magnificent, as Howell tells us, about himself and his Muse. Thus he said to Hawthornden that Shakespeare "wanted art," and did not know that Bohemia lacks a sea-coast. The second way is that of his "Discoveries". The third and excellent way is in his poem, in which he speaks of Shakespeare as the mind of the great world does,
He was not for an age but for all time,
was greater than
the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome,
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
To the oratory of Bacon he gives the same praise in the same noble measure. "I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself..." Against Machiavel's "a Prince should exercise his cruelty by his ministers and not by himself," Jonson nobly replies, "But I say he puts off man, and goes into a beast, that is cruel," though indeed beasts are not wittingly cruel, and the man that is cruel goes into a devil. Jonson is always manly: his thoughts are ponderous and just rather than remarkable for novelty; they do not cling, like Bacon's, to the memory of the race, nor shine in so many facets with such imperishable colours.
[1] They also ran every chance of becoming desperately wicked dogs, according to Charles Kingsley in his essay, "Plays and Puritans".
[2] See an interesting discussion in Mr. Darrell Figgis's "Shakespeare" (1911), Chap. III.
[3] Marlowe was summoned before the Privy Council, and "entered his appearance" on 20 May, 1593. The Council had heard of a "school of Atheists," and Marlowe appears to have been named among them. There is no hint of atheism in the fragmentary paper which Kyd said that he had from Marlowe, who was at liberty in the end of May, but was killed at Deptford, and buried on 1 June. On Whitsun Eve, 2 June, a horrible libel against Marlowe was brought to the Privy Council. The circumstances are mysterious. Cf. Mr. Boas, "Works of Thomas Kyd," 1901, and Mr. Ingram, "Christopher Marlowe and His Associates," 1904.
[4] The curious, almost verbal coincidences, between passages in Shakespeare and passages in the Athenian tragedians are probably due to parity of genius, not to imitation. On the other side see Mr. Churton Collins's "Studies in Shakespeare," p. 72, et sqq.