Beaumont lyes here; and where now shall we have
A Muse like his, to sigh upon his grave?
Ah, none to weepe this with a worthy teare,
But he that cannot, Beaumont that lies here.
Who now shall pay thy Tombe with such a Verse
As thou that Ladies didst, faire Rutlands Herse?
A Monument that will then lasting be,
When all her Marble is more dust than she.
In thee all's lost: a sudden dearth and want
Hath seiz'd on Wit, good Epitaphs are scant;
We dare not write thy Elegie, whilst each feares
He nere shall match that coppy of thy teares.
Scarce in an Age a Poet,—and yet he
Scarce lives the third part of his age to see,
But quickly taken off, and only known,
Is in a minute shut as soone as showne....
Why should Nature take such pains to perfect that which ere perfected she shall destroy?—
Beaumont dies young, so Sidney died before;
There was not Poetry he could live to, more:
He could not grow up higher; I scarce know
If th' art it self unto that pitch could grow,
Were 't not in thee that hadst arriv'd the hight
Of all that wit could reach, or Nature might....
The elegist likens Beaumont to Menander,
Whose few sententious fragments show more worth
Than all the Poets Athens ere brought forth;
And I am sorry I have lost those houres
On them, whose quicknesse comes far short of ours,
And dwelt not more on thee, whose every Page
May be a patterne to their Scene and Stage.
I will not yeeld thy Workes so mean a Prayse—
More pure, more chaste, more sainted than are Playes,
Nor with that dull supinenesse to be read,
To passe a fire, or laugh an houre in bed....
Why should not Beaumont in the Morning please,
As well as Plautus, Aristophanes?
Who, if my Pen may as my thoughts be free,
Were scurrill Wits and Buffons both to Thee....
Yet these are Wits, because they'r old, and now
Being Greeke and Latine, they are Learning too:
But those their owne Times were content t' allow
A thriftier fame, and thine is lowest now.
But thou shall live, and, when thy Name is growne
Six Ages older, shall be better knowne;
When thou'rt of Chaucers standing in the Tombe,
Thou shall not share, but take up all his roome.[131]
A panegyric liberal in the superlatives of youth but, in view of passages to be quoted elsewhere, one of the sanest as well as earliest appreciations of Beaumont's distinctive quality as a dramatist; an appreciation such as the historian might expect from a collegian who, a dozen years later, was not only one of the most genial and refined scholars of his generation but, perhaps, the most accurate observer and epitomist of the familiar types and minor morals of his day,—a writer who in 1628 is still championing the cause of contemporary poetry. In his characterization of the Vulgar-Spirited Man "that is taken only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses anything too deep for him; that cries, Chaucer for his money above all our English poets, because the voice has gone so, and he has read none," the Earle of the Microcosmographie is but repeating the censure of his elegy on Beaumont in 1616.
About 1620, we find a contemporary of altogether different class from that of the university student acknowledging the fame of Beaumont, the Thames waterman, John Taylor. This self-advertising tramp and rollicking scribbler mentions him in The Praise of Hemp-seed with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and others, as of those who, "in paper-immortality, Doe live in spight of death, and cannot die." And not far separated from Taylor's testimonial in point of time is William Basse's prediction of a prouder immortality. Basse who was but two years older than Beaumont, and, as we have seen, was one of the pastoral group with which Beaumont's career was associated, is writing of "Mr. William Shakespeare" who had died six weeks after Beaumont,—and he thus apostrophizes the Westminster poets of the Corner:
Renownèd Spencer, lye a thought more nye
To learnèd Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lye
A little neerer Spencer, to make roome
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.
To lodge all foure in one bed make a shift
Untill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift,
Betwixt this day and that, by Fate be slayne
For whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe.
The date of the sonnet of which these are the opening lines can be only approximately determined. It must be earlier, however, than 1623; for in that year Jonson alludes to it in verses presently to be quoted. And it must be later than the erection of the monument to Shakespeare's memory in Trinity Church, Stratford, in or soon after 1618, for in the lines which follow those given above the writer apostrophizes Shakespeare as sleeping "Under this carvèd marble of thine owne." The sonnet contemplates the removal of Shakespeare's remains to Westminster, and arranges the poets already lying there not in actual but chronological order.[132]
To these verses Jonson, as I have said, alludes in the series of stanzas prefixed to the Shakespeare folio of 1623,—To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us. Ben Jonson intends, however, no slight to Beaumont and the other poets mentioned by Basse, when, in his rapturous eulogy, he declines to regard them as the peers of Shakespeare. On the contrary this lover at heart, and in his best moments, of Beaumont, bestows a meed of praise: they are "great Muses,"—Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont,—but merely "disproportioned," if one judge critically, in the present comparison, as are, indeed, Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Not these, but "thundering Æschylus," Euripides, and Sophocles, Pacuvius, Accius, "him of Cordova dead," must be summoned