lines in a way to delight the old Norman troubadours.  He soon returned to England, and married precipitately when only nineteen or twenty years old.  Five years later we find him employed, like Shakespeare, as actor and reviser of old plays in the theater.  Thereafter his life is a varied and stormy one.  He killed an actor in a duel, and only escaped hanging by pleading “benefit of clergy";[154] but he lost all his poor goods and was branded for life on his left thumb.  In his first great play, Every Man in His Humour (1598), Shakespeare acted one of the parts; and that may have been the beginning of their long friendship.  Other plays followed rapidly.  Upon the accession of James, Jonson’s masques won him royal favor, and he was made poet laureate.  He now became undoubted leader of the literary men of his time, though his rough honesty and his hatred of the literary tendencies of the age made him quarrel with nearly all of them.  In 1616, soon after Shakespeare’s retirement, he stopped writing for the stage and gave himself up to study and serious work.  In 1618 he traveled on foot to Scotland, where he visited Drummond, from whom we have the scant records of his varied life.  His impressions of this journey, called Foot Pilgrimage, were lost in a fire before publication.  Thereafter he produced less, and his work declined in vigor; but spite of growing poverty and infirmity we notice in his later work, especially in the unfinished Sad Shepherd, a certain mellowness and tender human sympathy which were lacking in his earlier productions.  He died poverty stricken in 1637.  Unlike Shakespeare’s, his death was mourned as a national calamity, and he was buried with all honor in Westminster Abbey.  On his grave was laid a marble slab, on which the words “O rare Ben Jonson” were his sufficient epitaph.

WORKS OF BEN JONSON.  Jonson’s work is in strong contrast with that of Shakespeare and of the later Elizabethan dramatists.  Alone he fought against the romantic tendency of the age, and to restore the classic standards.  Thus the whole action of his drama usually covers only a few hours, or a single day.  He never takes liberties with historical facts, as Shakespeare does, but is accurate to the smallest detail.  His dramas abound in classical learning, are carefully and logically constructed, and comedy and tragedy are kept apart, instead of crowding each other as they do in Shakespeare and in life.  In one respect his comedies are worthy of careful reading,—­they are intensely realistic, presenting men and women of the time exactly as they were.  From a few of Jonson’s scenes we can understand—­better than from all the plays of Shakespeare—­how men talked and acted during the Age of Elizabeth.