“A woful cry
    To Sir Robert Pye,”

before some small instalment of long arrearages could be procured.  And when, rarely, very rarely, his Majesty condescended to remember the necessities of “his and the Muses’ servant,” and send a present to the Laureate’s lodgings, its proportions were always so small as to excite the ire of the insulted Ben, who would growl forth to the messenger, “He would not have sent me this, (scil. wretched pittance,) did I not live in an alley.”

We now arrive at the true era of the Laureateship.  Charles, in 1630, became ambitious to signalize his reign by some fitting tribute to literature.  A petition from Ben Jonson pointed out the way.  The Laureate office was made a patentable one, in the gift of the Lord Chamberlain, as purveyor of the royal amusements.  Ben was confirmed in the office.  The salary was raised from one hundred marks to one hundred pounds, an advance of fifty per cent, to which was added yearly a tierce of Canary wine,—­an appendage appropriate to the poet’s convivial habits, and doubtless suggested by the mistaken precedent of Chaucer’s daily flagon of wine.  Ben Jonson was certainly, of all men living in 1630, the right person to receive this honor, which then implied, what it afterward ceased to do, the primacy of the diocese of letters.  His learning supplied ballast enough to keep the lighter bulk of the poet in good trim, while it won that measure of respect which mere poetical gifts and graces would not have secured.  He was the dean of that group of “poets, poetaccios, poetasters, and poetillos,” [11] who beset the court.  If a display of erudition were demanded, Ben was ready with the heavy artillery of the unities, and all the laws of Aristotle and Horace, Quintilian and Priscian, exemplified in tragedies of canonical structure, and comedies whose prim regularity could not extinguish the most delightful and original humor—­Robert Burton’s excepted—­that illustrated that brilliant period.  But if the graceful lyric or glittering masque were called for, the boundless wealth of Ben’s genius was most strikingly displayed.  It has been the fashion, set by such presumptuous blunderers as Warburton and such formal prigs as Gifford, to deny our Laureate the possession of those ethereal attributes of invention and fancy which play about the creations of Shakspeare, and constitute their exquisite charm.  This arbitrary comparison of Jonson and Shakspeare has, in fact, been the bane of the former’s reputation.  Those who have never read the masques argue, that, as “very little Latin and less Greek,” in truth no learning of any traceable description, went to the creation of Ariel and Caliban, Oberon and Puck, the possession of Latin, Greek, and learning generally, incapacitates the proprietor for the same happy exercise of the finer and more gracious faculties of wit and fancy.  Of this nonsense Jonson’s masques are the best refutation.