Whilst thy immortal, never-with'ring bays
Shall yearly flourish in thy readers' praise.
And when more spreading titles are forgot,
Or spite of all their lead and cere-cloth rot,
Thou wrapp'd and shrin'd in thine own sheets wilt lie,
60A relic fam'd by all posterity.
Ben. Jonson.] In orig., as so often, 'Johnson'. A contribution to Jonsonus Virbius, which, printed nearly twenty years before these Poems, has one slight variant = 'that' for 'who' in l. 7.
5 scythe] Orig. 'sithe', which some great ones (including even the other Johnson) will have to be the proper spelling, and which is certainly usual in Middle English. But 'scythe' is consecrated by the only Sainte Ampoule of orthography—usage; 'sithe' also means 'a path' and 'a sigh', and may be mistaken for 'since', while 'scythe' is unmistakable. And for my part, if I may not have 'scythe' I stickle for 'sigðe'—the undoubted original.
38 It was a little dangerous, in Ben's lifetime, to praise others in company with him. But King here corroborates Drummond's Conversations, in which Ben is made to speak well of Chapman on several occasions, and (more particularly) to declare his Iliad, or part of it, 'well done'.
42 It is rather curious that Drummond (in one of those Marginalia in which he relieves his feelings somewhat subacidly) declares that his robustious guest 'neither understood French nor Italian'.