In 1619, Ben spoke gruffly and briefly of Shakespeare, as to Drummond he also spoke disparagingly of Beaumont, whom he had panegyrised in an epigram in his own folio of 1616, and was again to praise in the commendatory verses in the Folio.  He spoke still more harshly of Drayton, whom in 1616 he had compared to Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, and Tyraeus!  He told an unkind anecdote of Marston, with whom he had first quarrelled and then made friends, collaborating with him in a play; and very generously and to his great peril, sharing his imprisonment.  To Drummond, Jonson merely said that he “beat Marston and took away his pistol.”  Of Sir John Beaumont, brother of the dramatist, Ben had written a most hyperbolical eulogy in verse; luckily for Sir John, to Drummond Ben did not speak of him.  Such was Ben, in panegyric verse hyperbolical; in conversation “a despiser of others, and praiser of himself.”  Compare Ben’s three remarks about Donne, all made to Drummond.  Donne deserved hanging for breaking metre; Donne would perish for not being understood:  and Donne was in some points the first of living poets.

Mr. Greenwood’s effort to disable Jonson’s evidence rests on the contradictions in his estimates of Shakespeare’s poetry, in notices scattered through some thirty years.  Jonson, it is argued, cannot on each occasion mean Will.  He must now mean Will, now the Great Unknown, and now—­both at once.  Yet I have proved that Ben was the least consistent of critics, all depended on the occasion, and on his humour at the moment.  This is a commonplace of literary history.  The Baconians do not know it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows it, ignores it, and bases his argument on facts which may be unknown to his readers.  We have noted Ben’s words of 1619, and touched on his panegyric of 1623.  Thirdly, about 1630 probably, Ben wrote in his manuscript book Discourses an affectionate but critical page on Shakespeare as a man and an author.  Always, in prose, and in verse, and in recorded conversation, Ben explicitly identified Shakspere (William, of Stratford) with the author of the plays usually ascribed to him.  But the Baconian Judge Webb (in extreme old age), and the anti-Shakespearean Mr. Greenwood and others, choose to interpret Ben’s words on the theory that, in 1623, he “had his tongue in his cheek”; that, like Odysseus, he “mingled things false with true,” that they know what is true from what is false, and can undo the many knots which Ben tied in his tongue.  How they succeed we shall see.

In addition to his three known mentions of Shakespeare by name (1619, 1623, 1630?), Ben certainly appears to satirise his rival at a much earlier date; especially as Pantalabus, a playwright in The Poetaster (1601), and as actor, poet, and plagiarist in an epigram, Poet-Ape, published in his collected works of 1616; but probably written as early as 1602.  It is well known that in 1598 Shakespeare’s company acted Ben’s