The symposium to which I have referred is celebrated in a copy of macaronic Latin verses, entitled Mr. Hoskins, his Convivium Philosophicum;[96] and I may be pardoned if I quote from the contemporary translation by John Reynolds of New College, the opening stanzas, since one is set to wondering how many other of the jolly souls "convented," beside Brooke and Jones and Nevill, our Beaumont knew.—
Whosoever is contented
That a number be convented,
Enough but not too many;
The Miter is the place decreed,
For witty jests and cleanly feed,
The betterest of any.
There will come, though scarcely current,
Christopherus surnamèd Torrent
And John yclepèd Made;
And Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foe
To sup, his dinner will forgoe—
Will come as soon as bade.
Sir Robert Horse-lover the while,
Ne let Sir Henry count it vile
Will come with gentle speed;
And Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows
And John surnamèd Little-hose
Will come if there be need.
And Richard Pewter-Waster best
And Henry Twelve-month-good at least
And John Hesperian true.
If any be desiderated
He shall be amerciated
Forty-pence in issue.
Hugh the Inferior-Germayne,
Nor yet unlearnèd nor prophane
Inego Ionicke-pillar.
But yet the number is not righted:
If Coriate bee not invited,
The jeast will want a tiller.
In his edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives, Dr. Clark supplies the glossary to these punning names. Torrent is, of course, Brooke. Johannes Factus, or Made, is Brooke's chamber-fellow of Lincoln's Inn, John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and correspondent in well known epistles of Henry Twelve-month-good, the Sir Henry Goodere, or Goodeere, who married Frances (Drayton's Panape), one of the daughters of "the first cherisher of Drayton's muse." Ne-let Sir Henry count it vile is the elder Nevill under cover of his family motto, Ne vile velis. Inigo Jones, Ionicke-pillar is even more thinly disguised in the Latin original as Ignatius architectus, Hugh Holland (the Inferior-Germayne) was of Beaumont's Mermaid Club, the writer—beside other poems—of commendatory verses for Jonson's Sejanus in 1605, and of the sonnet Upon the Lines and Life of that other frequenter of the Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare." Holland's "great patronesse," by the way, was the wife of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, whose daughter married Beaumont's kinsman, Sir John Villiers; and it was by the great Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, that Holland was introduced to King James. Also, of the Mermaid in Beaumont's time was Tom Coryate, the "legge-stretcher of Odcombe" without whose presence this Convivium Philosophicum would "want its tiller." Of the Mermaid, too, was Richard Martin (the Pewter-waster). He was fond of the drama; had organized a masque at the Middle Temple at the time of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage; and it is to him that Ben Jonson dedicates the folio of The Poetaster (1616). In 1618, as Recorder of London, he was the bosom friend of Brooke, Holland, and Hoskins: he died of just such a "symposiaque" as this, a few years later, and he lies in the Middle Temple. Last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic Latin verses of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself (surnamed Little-hose). He had been a freshman of the Middle Temple in the year when Beaumont was beginning at the Inner. He was an incomparable writer of drolleries, over which we may be sure that Beaumont many a time held his sides,—a wag whose "excellent witt gave him letters of commendacion to all ingeniose persons," a great friend of Beaumont's Jonson, and of Raleigh, Donne, Selden, Camden, and Daniel.
Of the participants in Serjeant Hoskins's Convivium Philosophicum, we find, then, that several were of those who came into personal contact with Beaumont, and that of the rest, nearly all moved in the field of his acquaintance. Concerning a few, Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foe (Cranefield), Sir Robert Horse-lover (Phillips), Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows (Conyoke or Connock), and John Hesperian (West), I have no information pertinent to the subject.
FOOTNOTES:
[95] The Ghost of Richard III, I, viii (1614).