With cares men break their sweet repose
Like wheels that wear with turning round;
With beasts calm thoughts their eyelids close
And in soft sleep all cares are drowned.
[166] How little Newcastle must have known of cats and dogs if he thought that they were never jealous! And how pleased dogs are at seeing another dog beaten. As to “dissembling,” a bird, at any rate, will pretend to have a broken wing in order to draw away attention from her brood. And has not the fox a reputation for “dissembling ways”?
Probably Newcastle shone more as a patron, than as a producer, of literature. Besides the men-of-letters whom he placed on the staff of his army in the North, he befriended Ben Jonson, a poet who was often in need of help in a pecuniary form, and also Shadwell, who, like Newcastle, only on an infinitely humbler scale, had lost a large part of his fortune in the service of his King. Both Jonson and Shadwell were Poets Laureate. Shirley and Flecknoe were also patronized by Newcastle.
Here is a begging letter from Ben Jonson to Newcastle: “My Noblest Lord and Best Patron. I send no borrowing epistle to provoke your lordship, for I have neither fortune to repay, nor security to engage that will be taken; but I make a most humble petition to your lordship’s bounty to succour my present necessities this good time of Easter, and it shall conclude all begging requests hereafter on behalf of your truest beadsman and most thankful servant, B. J.” (Harleian MSS. 4955).[167] In another letter he thanks Newcastle for his “lordship’s timely gratuity”.
[167] Quoted in Cunninghame’s Jonson, vol. I, p. lvi.
One of Newcastle’s most intimate literary friends was not a poet, but a dry old philosopher. A good many letters written to Newcastle by Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, are among the Welbeck manuscripts, and from these a few extracts shall be given. At the time they were written, Hobbes was travelling with the young Earl of Devonshire, then a lad of 17 or 18.