Perhaps Baconians and Mr. Greenwood might say, “as long as Ben believed that the works were those of an Actor-Playwright, he thought them execrable.  But when he learned that they were the works of Bacon (or of some Great One), he declared them to be more than excellent”—­But not to Drummond.  I am reluctant to think that Jonson was the falsest and meanest of snobs.  I think that when his old rival, by his own account his dear friend, was dead, and when (1623) Ben was writing panegyric verses about the first collected edition of his plays (the Folio), then between generosity and his habitual hyperbolical manner when he was composing commendatory verses, he said,—­not too much in the way of praise,—­but a good deal more than he later said (1630?), in prose, and in cold blood.  I am only taking Ben as I find him and as I understand him.  Every step in my argument rests on well-known facts.  Ben notoriously, in his many panegyric verses, wrote in a style of inflated praise.  In conversation with Drummond he censured, in brief blunt phrases, the men whom, in verse, he had extolled.  The Baconian who has not read all Ben’s panegyrics in verse, and the whole of his conversations with Drummond, argues in ignorance.

We now come to Ben’s panegyrics in the Folio of 1623.  Ben heads the lines,

“To the memory of my beloved
the author
Mr. William Shakespeare
and
what he hath left us.”

Words cannot be more explicit.  Bacon was alive (I do not know when
Mr. Greenwood’s hidden genius died), and Ben goes on to speak of the
Author, Shakespeare, as dead, and buried.  He calls on him thus: 

“Soul of the Age! 
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage! 
My Shakespear rise:  I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room: 
Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.”

Beaumont, by the way, died in the same year as Shakespeare, 1616, and, while Ben here names him with Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, his contemporaries have left no anecdotes, no biographical hints.  In the panegyric follow the lines: 

“And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund’ring AEschylus,”

and the other glories of the Roman and Attic stage, to see and hear how Shakespeare bore comparison with all that the classic dramatists did, or that “did from their ashes come.”

Jonson means, “despite your lack of Greek and Latin I would not shrink from challenging the greatest Greek and Roman tragedians to see how you bear comparison with themselves”?