APPENDIX.

HEADS OF A CONVERSATION BETWIXT THE FAMOUS POET BEN JOHNSON AND WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF

HAWTHORNDEN, JANUARY, 1619.n

(From Drummond's Works, page 224.)

HE (BEN JOHNSON) said, that his Grandfather came from Carlisle, to which he had come from Annandale in Scotland; that he served King Henry VIII., and was a gentleman, His Father lost his estate under Queen Mary, having been cast in prison and forfeited, and at last he turned Minister. He was posthumous, being born a month after his father's death, and was put to school by a friend. His master was Camden. Afterwards he was taken from it, and put to another craft, viz: to be a Bricklayer, which he could not endure, but went to the Low-Countries, and returning home again, he betook himself to his wonted studies. In his service in the Low-Countries he had, in the view of both the armies, killed an enemy, and taken the opima spolia from him; and since coming to England, being appealed to a duel, he had killed his adversary, who had hurt him in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his. For this crime he was imprisoned, and almost at the gallows. Then he took his religion on trust of a Priest, who visited him in prison; he was 12 years a Papist; but after this he was reconciled to the Church of

n The Conversations in their abridged form is subjoined as a necessary portion of the volume. A comparison will satisfy the reader, that, if an injudicious, it was at least not an unfair abridgment.

England, and left off to be a Recusant.

(At his first Communion, in token of his true reconciliation, he drunk out the full cup of wine.) He was Master of Arts in both Universities. In the time of his close imprisonment under Queen Elizabeth there were spies to catch him, but he was advertised of them by the Keeper. He has an Epigram on the Spies. He married a wife, who was a shrew, yet honest to him. When the King came to England, about the time that the Plague was in London, he (Ben Johnson) being in the country at Sir Rob. Cotton's house with old Camden, he saw in a vision his eldest.son, then a young child and at London, appear unto him with the mark of a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cut with a sword; at which, amaz'd, he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came to Mr. Camden's chamber to tell him, who persuaded him it was but an apprehension at which he should not be dejected: In the meantime there come letters from his wife of the death of that boy in the Plague. He appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape, and of that growth he thinks he shall be at the Resurrection.

He was accused by Sir James Murray to the King for writing something against the Scots in a play called Eastward Hoe, and voluntarily imprisoned himself with Chapman and Marston, who had written it amongst them: It was reported that they should have their Ears and Noses cut. After their delivery he entertained all his friends, there were present Camden, Selden, and others. In the middle of the feast his old mother drank to him, and shewed him a paper, which she designed (if the sentence had passed) to have mixed among his drink, and it was strong and lusty poison, and that she was no churl, she told she designed first to have drunk it herself.

He said, he had spent a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination. He wrote all his verses first in prose, as his master Camden taught him, and said, that verses stood by sense without either colours or accent.

He used to say, that many Epigrams were ill, because they expressed in the end what should have been understood by what was said before; as that of Sir John Davies. That he had a Pastoral intitled the May Lord, his own name is Alkin, Ethra the Countess of Bedford, Mogbel Overbery the old Countess of Suffolk, an En

chantress; other names are given to Somerset, his lady, Pembroke, the Countess of Rutland, Lady Wroth. In his first scene, Alkin comes in mending his broken pipe. He bringeth in, says our Author, Clowns making mirth and foolish sports, contrary to all other Pastorals. He had also a design to write a Fisher or Pastoral Play, and make the stage of it in the Lomond Lake; and also to write his foot-pilgrimage hither, and to call it a Discovery, in a poem he calleth Edinburgh;

"The Heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye."

That he had an intention to have made a play like Plautus's Amphytruo, but left it off, for that he could never find two so like one to the other, that he could persuade the spectators that they were one.

That he had a design to write an Epick Poem, and was to call it Chorologia of the Worthies of his Country raised by fame, and was to dedicate it to his Country: It is all in couplets, for he detested all other rhymes. He said he had written a Discourse of Poetry both against Campion and Daniel, especially the last, where he proves couplets to be the best sort of verses, especially when they are broke like Hexameters, and that cross Rhimes and Stanzas, because the purpose would lead beyond 8 lines, were all forced. His censure of the English Poets was this; that Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as well as himself; Spencer's Stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter; the meaning of the Allegory of his Fairy Queen he had delivered in writing to Sir Walter Rawleigh, which was, that by the Bleating Beast he understood the Puritans, and by the false Duessa the Queen of Scots. He told, that Spencer's goods were robbed by the Irish, and his house and a little child burnt, he and his wife escaped, and after died for want of bread in King Street; he refused 20 pieces sent him by my Lord Essex, and said he was sure he had no time to spend them. Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children, and was no Poet; and that he had wrote the Civil Wars, and yet hath not one battle in all his book. That Michael Drayton's Polyolbion, if he had performed what he promised, to write the deeds of all the Worthies, had been excellent. That he was challenged for intituling one book Mortimariades. That Sir John Davis play'd on Drayton in an Epi

gram, who in his Sonnet concluded his Mistress might have been the ninth worthy, and said, he used a phrase like Dametas in Arcadia, who said, his Mistriss, for wit, might be a giant. That Silvester's translation of Du Bartas was not well done, and that he wrote his verses before he understood to confer; and these of Fairfax were not good. That the translations of Homer and Virgil in long Alexdrines were but prose. That Sir John Harrington's Ariosto, under all translations, was the worst. That when Sir John Harrington desired him to tell the truth of His Epigrams, he answered him, that he loved not the truth, for they were narrations, not Epigrams. He said, Donne was originally a Poet, his grandfather on the mother side was Heywood the Epigrammatist. That Donne for not being understood would perish. He esteemed him the first Poet in the world for some things; his verses of the lost Ochadine he had by heart, and that passage of the Calm, that dust and feathers did not stir, all was so quiet. He affirmed that Donne wrote all his best pieces before he was twenty-five years of age. The Conceit of Donne's Transformation or Merepvxóois, was, that he sought the soul of that apple that Eva pulled, and thereafter made it the soul of a bitch, then of a she-wolf, and so of a woman; his general purpose was to have brought it into all the bodies of the Hereticks from the Soul of Cain; and at last left it in the body of Calvin. He only wrote one sheet of this, and since he was made Doctor, repented hugely, and resolved to destroy all his poems. He told Donne, that his anniversary was prophane and full of blasphemies, that if it had been written on the Virgin Mary, it had been tolerable. To which Donne answered, that he described the idea of a Woman, and not as she was. He said Shakespear wanted art and sometimes sense; for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men, saying they had suffered ship-wrack in Bohemia, where is no sea near by 100 miles. That Sir Walter Rawleigh esteemed more fame than conscience; the best wits in England were imployed in making his History. Ben himself had written a piece to him of the Punick War, which he altered, and set in his book. He said there was no such ground for an heroick poem as King Arthur's Fiction; and that Sir P. Sidney had an intention to have transformed all his Arcadia to the Stories of King Arthur. He said, Owen was a poor pedantick Schoolmaster,