And now, for two years, has the mother—her hopes wholly gone, her love only the same—to bear up under the burden of conflicting duties. The young man duly works at the most menial tasks of his business. He has won his way to handle a trowel; but he is not conformable in all things. "Wife," says Thomas Fowler, "that son of yours will never prosper. Can not he work—and can not he eat his meals—without a Greek book in his vest? This very noon must he seat himself, at dinner-hour, in the shade of the wall in Chancery-lane, on which he had been laboring; and then comes a reverend Bencher and begins discourse with him; and Ben shows him his book—and they talk as if they were equal. Margaret, he is too grand for me; he is above his trade."—"Shame on ye, husband! Does he not work, honestly and deftly? and will you grudge him his books?"—"He haunts the play-houses; he sits in the pit—and cracks nuts—and hisses or claps hands, in a way quite unbeseeming a bricklayer's apprentice. Margaret, I fear he will come to no good." One night there is a fearful quarrel. It is late when Benjamin returns home. In silence and darkness, the son and mother meet. She is resolved. "Benjamin, my son, my dear son, we will endure this life no longer. There is a sword; it was your grandfather's. A gentleman wore it; a gentleman shall still wear it. Go to the Low-Countries. Volunteers are called for. There is an expedition to Ostend. Take with you these few crowns, and God prosper you."
Another year, and Benjamin's campaign is ended. At the hearth in Hartshorn-lane sits Margaret Fowler—in solitude. There will be no more strife about her son. Death has settled the controversy. Margaret is very poor. Her trade is unprosperous; for the widow is defrauded by her servants. "Mother, there is my grandfather's sword—it has done service; and now, I will work for you."—"How, my son?"—"I will be a bricklayer again." We see the Shadow of the Mother, as she strives to make her son content. He has no longer the "lime and mortar" hands with which it was his after-fate to be reproached; but he bestows the master's eye upon his mother's workmen. Yet he has hours of leisure. There is a chamber in the old house now filled with learned books. He reads, and he writes, as his own pleasure dictates. "Mother," he one day says, "I wish to marry."—"Do so, my son; bring your wife home; we will dwell together." So a few years roll on. He and his wife weep
"Mary, the daughter of their youth."
But there is an event approaching which sets aside sorrow. "Daughter," says the ancient lady, "we must to the Rose Playhouse to-night. There is a new play to be acted, and that play is Benjamin's."—"Yes, mother, he has had divers moneys already. Not much, I wot, seeing the labor he has given to this 'Comedy of Humors'—five shillings, and ten shillings, and, once, a pound."—"No matter, daughter, he will be famous; I always knew he would be famous." A calamity clouds that fame. The play-writer has quarrels on every side. In the autumn of 1598, Philip Henslowe, the manager of "the Lord Admiral's men," writes thus to his son-in-law, Alleyn; "Since you were with me, I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly—that is, Gabriel; for he is slain in Hogsden Fields, by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." Twenty years after, the great dramatist, the laureat, thus relates the story to Drummond: "Being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary, which had hurt him in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his; for the which he was imprisoned and almost at the gallows." There is the proud Shadow of a Roman Matron hovering about his cell, in those hours when the gallows loomed darkly in the future.
The scholar and the poet has won his fame. Bricklayer no longer, Ben is the companion of the illustrious. Shakspeare hath "wit-combats" with him; Camden and Selden try his metal, in learned controversies; Raleigh, and Beaumont, and Donne, and Fletcher, exchange with him "words of subtle flame" at "The Mermaid." But a new trouble arises—James is come to the throne. Hear Jonson's account of a remarkable transaction: "He was delated by Sir James Murray to the King, for writing something against the Scots, in a play, 'Eastward Ho,' and voluntarily imprisoned himself, with Chapman and Marston, who had written it among them. The report was, that they should then have had their ears cut, and noses." They are at length released. We see the shadow of a banquet, which the poet gave to his friends in commemoration of his deliverance. There is a joyous company of immortals at that feast. There, too, is that loving and faithful mother. The wine-cups are flowing; there are song and jest, eloquence, and the passionate earnestness with which such friends speak when the heart is opened. But there is one, whose Shadow we now see, more passionate and more earnest than any of that company. She rises, with a full goblet in her hand: "Son, I drink to thee. Benjamin, my beloved son, thrice I drink to thee. See ye this paper; one grain of the subtle drug which it holds is death. Even as we now pledge each other in rich canary, would I have pledged thee in lusty strong poison, had thy sentence taken execution. Thy shame would have been my shame, and neither of us should have lived after it."
"She was no churl," says Benjamin.
LIGHT AND AIR.
Light and Air are two good things: two necessaries of existence to us animals, possessing eyes and lungs: two of the things prayed for by sanitary philosophers in the back streets of London; where, we fear, they might as well be crying for the moon.
Light and Air, then, being two good things, what happens when they come together? Spirit and water combined, says the toper, are two good things spoiled; and how do light and air mix? Pick out of Cheapside the busiest of men, and he will tell you that he loves the sky-blue in its proper place, making a sickly joke about his milk-jug. There is not a Scrub in the whole world who would not think it necessary to show pleasure—yes, and feel some indication of it—over sunset colors, when, by chance, he treads the fields upon a summer evening. We all look up at the stars, and feel that they would seem much less the confidential friends they really are, if they were shining down upon us with a rigid light. There is a beating human pulse which answers to our hearts in their incessant twinkling. And then the rainbow! Light that might pass down to us, and give us sight, but nothing more, gives sight and blesses it at once. Its touch converts the air into a region of delightful visions, ever changing, ever new. To reach us it must penetrate our atmosphere, and it is a fact that He who made the Universe, so made it that, in the whole range of Nature there is not one barren combination. Light must pass through the air; and, from a knowledge of the other laws of Nature, it might confidently be proclaimed, that, in addition to the useful purposes of each, and their most necessary action on each other, beauty and pleasure would be generated also by their union, to delight the creatures of this world.