A literal transcript of Drummond's original notes of Jonson's conversations, made by Sir Robert Sibbald about the year 1710, has been published in the collections of the Shakespeare Society. This is a more extended report than that included in Drummond's works, though still not so full as the reader might desire. The stoutness of Ben's character is felt in every utterance. Thus he tells Drummond that "he never esteemed of a man for the name of a lord,"—a sentiment which he had expressed more impressively in his published epigram on Burleigh:—

"Cecil, the grave, the wise, the great, the good,
What is there more that can ennoble blood?"

He had, it seems, "a minde to be a churchman, and, so he might have favour to make one sermon to the King, he careth not what thereafter sould befall him; for he would not flatter though he saw Death." Queen Elizabeth is the mark of a most scandalous imputation, and the mildest of Ben's remarks respecting her is that she "never saw herself, after she became old, in a true glass; they painted her, and sometymes would vermilion her nose." "Of all styles," he said, "he most loved to be named Honest, and hath of that one hundreth letters so naming him." His judgments on other poets were insolently magisterial. "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter"; Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, but no poet; Donne, though "the first poet in the world in some things," for "not keeping of accent, deserved hanging"; Abram Fraunce, "in his English hexameters, was a foole"; Sharpham, Day, and Dekkar were all rogues; Francis Beaumont "loved too much himself and his own verses." Some biographical items in the record of these conversations are of interest. It seems that the first day of every new year the Earl of Pembroke sent him twenty pounds "to buy bookes." By all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds. "Sundry tymes he hath devoured his bookes," that is, sold them to supply himself with necessaries. When he was imprisoned for killing his brother actor in a duel, in the Queen's time, "his judges could get nothing of him to all their demands but I and No. They placed two damn'd villains, to catch advantage of him, with him, but he was advertised by his keeper"; and he added, as if the revenge was as terrible as the offence, "of the spies he hath ane epigrame." He told a few personal stories to Drummond, calculated to moderate our wonder that Mrs. Jonson was a shrew; and, as they were boastingly told, we must suppose that his manners were not so austere as his verse. But perhaps the most characteristic image he has left of himself, through these conversations, is this: "He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, feight in his imagination."

Jonson's fortunes seem to have suffered little abatement until the death of King James, in 1625. Then declining popularity and declining health combined their malice to break the veteran down; and the remaining twelve years of his life were passed in doing battle with those relentless enemies of poets,—want and disease. The orange—or rather the lemon—was squeezed, and both court and public seemed disposed to throw away the peel. In the epilogue to his play of "The New Inn," brought out in 1630, the old tone of defiance is gone. He touchingly appeals to the audience as one who is "sick and sad"; but, with a noble humility, he begs they will refer none of the defects of the work to mental decay.

"All that his weak and faltering tongue doth crave
Is that you not refer it to his brain;
That 's yet unhurt, although set round with pain."

The audience were insensible to this appeal. They found the play dull, and hooted it from the stage. Perhaps, after having been bullied so long, they took delight in having Ben "on the hip." Charles the First, however, who up to this time seems to have neglected his father's favorite, now generously sent him a hundred pounds to cheer him in his misfortunes; and shortly after he raised his salary, as Court Poet, from a hundred marks to a hundred pounds, adding, in compliment to Jonson's known tastes, a tierce of Canary,—a wine of which he was so fond as to be nicknamed, in ironical reference to a corpulence which rather assimilated him to the ox, "a Canary bird." It is to this period, we suppose, we must refer his testimony to his own obesity in his "Epistle to my Lady Coventry."

"So you have gained a Servant and a Muse:
The first of which I fear you will refuse,
And you may justly; being a tardy, cold,
Unprofitable chattel, fat and old,
Laden with belly, and doth hardly approach
His friends, but to break chairs or crack a coach.
His weight is twenty stone, within two pound;
And that 's made up, as doth the purse abound."

As his life declined, it does not appear that his disposition was essentially modified. There are two characteristic references to him in his old age, which prove that Ben, attacked by palsy and dropsy, with a reputation perceptibly waning, was Ben still. One is from Sir John Suckling's pleasantly malicious "Session of the Poets":—

"The first that broke silence was good old Ben,
Prepared before with Canary wine,
And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,
For his were called works where others were but plays.

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