Ben Jonson left an unfinished dramatic pastoral, entitled the Sad Shepherd. It is a story of Robin Hood, in connection with a shepherd who has gone melancholy mad for the supposed death of his mistress—a lucky character for the exalted wilfulness of the author’s style. The lover opens the play with the following elegant extravagance:—
Æglamour. Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:
The world may find the spring by following her.
This is a truly lover-like fancy; and the various, impulsive, and flowery versification is perfect. Ben Jonson can never leave out his learning. The lost mistress must be compared, in the impossible lightness of her step, with Virgil’s Camilla, who ran over the tops of corn:—
For other print her airy steps ne’er left;
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk.
What unsubstantial womanhood! How different from the bride of Bedreddin Hassan!
“Up, up in haste!” the young man cries:
Ah! slender waist! she cannot rise
For heavy hips, that say, “Sit still,”
And make her linger ’gainst her will.
—Torrens’s Arabian Nights.
The best passage in the Sad Shepherd is a description of a witch and her habits—a subject which every way suited the arbitrary and sullen side of the poet’s notions of power. It also enabled him to show his reading, as he takes care to let us know, by means of one of the bystanders:—
Alken.Know ye the witch’s dell?
Scathlock. No more than I do know the ways of hell.
Alken. Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell,
Down in a pit, o’ergrown with brakes and briers,
Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey,
Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground,
’Mongst graves and grots, near an old charnel-house,
Where you shall find her sitting in her form,
As fearful and melàncholic as that
She is about with caterpillars’ kells
And knotty cobwebs, rounded in with spells.
Thence she steals forth to revel in the fogs
And rotten mists upon the fens and bogs,
Down to the drownèd lands of Lincolnshire;
To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow,
The housewife’s tun not work, nor the milk churn!
Writhe children’s wrists, and suck their breath in sleep,
Get vials of their blood; and where the sea
Casts up its slimy ooze, search for a weed
To open locks with, and to rivet charms,
Planted about her in the wicked feat
Of all her mischiefs, which are manifold.
John. I wonder such a story could be told
Of her dire deeds.
George.I thought a witch’s banks
Had enclosed nothing but the merry pranks
Of some old woman.
Scarlet.Yes, her malice more.
Scathlock. As it would quickly appear had we the store
Of his collects.
George.Ay, this good learned man
Can speak her rightly.
Scarlet.He knows her shifts and haunts.
Alken. And all her wiles and turns. The venom’d plants
Wherewith she kills; where the sad mandrake grows,
Whose groans are dreadful; the dead-numbing nightshade,
The stupifying hemlock, adder’s tongue,
And martagan; the shrieks of luckless owls
We hear, and croaking night-crows in the air;
Green-bellied snakes, blue fire-drakes in the sky,
And giddy flitter-mice with leather wings,
And scaly beetles with their habergeons,
That make a humming murmur as they fly.
There, in the stocks of trees, white faies do dwell,
And span-long elves that dance about a pool
With each a little changeling in their arms!
And airy spirits play with falling stars,
And mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon,
While she sits reading (by the glow-worm’s light,
Of rotten wood, o’er which the worm hath crept)
The baneful schedule of her nocent charms.
The idea of “span-long elves” who dance about a pool, carrying each a stolen infant, that must be bigger than themselves, is a very capital and fantastic horror.
Old burly and strong-sensation-loving Ben (as his friend Chapman, or Mr. Bentham, might have called him) could show, however, a great deal of delicacy when he had a mind to it. He could turn his bluster into a zephyr that inspired the young genius of Milton. Some of his court masques are pastoral; and the following is the style in which he receives the king and queen. Maia (the goddess of May) says—