room mate Henry Wotton. He went travelling before his four years were up; entered Lincoln's Inn May 6, 1592; was a volunteer under Robert, earl of Essex, on the Cadiz expedition, June to August, 1596. In August 1596 Donne was appointed secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper, and soon became known at court. Most of his poetry was written at this period. About Christmas, 1600, the young poet secretly married Anne More, the sixteenyear-old daughter of Sir George More, and niece of Elizabeth, second wife of the Lord Keeper Egerton. Upon the discovery of this marriage, Sir George More committed Donne to prison. The young man was soon released, but dismissed from his secretaryship. After four years of obscurity and struggle he again attempted to win preferment at court. James was attracted by him and would have advanced him in the church, had the poet been willing. The Pseudo-Martyr was published in quarto, 1610; the Oxford M.A. was received in the same year; Donne was ordained in January 1614-5, and died in 1631.

Let us note first the points of resemblance between Donne and the Ovid of Poetaster. Both are poets by nature and preference. Ovid is nobly born, while Donne may fairly be called a gentleman. Ovid is forced by his father to study law, which in the play he hates and abandons, but which in actual life he seems to have practised; Donne takes up the study of law voluntarily, but does not practise. Ovid is presented by Jonson as the accepted lover of the dissolute Julia, daughter of Augustus, and the amour is the alleged cause of his banishment from court; Donne marries in secret the young daughter of an English knight, is imprisoned and deprived of his office therefor. Both men may be called courtiers. On the other hand, the elder Donne died when his son was but three years old, while Ovid's father, who sees his poet-son grown to manhood, appears in the play. Ovid forsakes the ancestral profession of arms, but Donne, whose father was a peaceable iron

monger, takes some share in Essex's famous capture of Cadiz, 1596. Ovid is a libertine; Donne honorably, if rashly, woos and weds a virtuous maiden, whom he loves devotedly throughout her life. Ovid is not a noble or impressive character in Poetaster; he is scarcely individualized even as courtier, reveler, and poet; while Donne is a truly noble friend, whom Jonson loved and admired, a man, therefore, whom we might expect to be unmistakably and adequately represented, if represented at all.

It seems most appropriate to speak here, rather than under the name JULIA, of Fleay's notion that the mature and dissolute princess of the Poetaster is really meant for Anne More, courted in her aunt's home, and married at sixteen to a good man whom she purely loved. Donne and Anne More were wedded at Christmas-tide, 1600; it is hardly likely that anything can have occurred during the preceding year which should prompt Jonson to identify them with his ignoble Romans, poet and princess though they be.

Grosart has noted a curious coincidence between certain incidents in the careers of Ovid and of Marston, suggested to him by Marston's What You Will, act 1, scene I:

Randulfo . . . as we see the sonne of a divine

Seldome proves preacher, or a lawers sonne
Rarely a pleader (for they strive to run

A various fortune for their auncestors.

'It is a somewhat singular coincidence further,' writes Grosart (Marston's Poems xi) 'that in the Poetaster, already quoted from, the opening of the Comedy introduces Ovid jun. provoking Ovid sen. his father, by giving himself up to rhyming instead of the study of the Law. Of course Ovid jun. was not Marston any more than Ovid sen. was his father. Yet it is just possible that preliminary to bringing "Crispinus" (i. e. John Marston) on the stage, Ben Jonson hit at him in this through Ovid jun. Indeed a good deal in the character of Ovid jun. is equally applicable to Marston with what is said of him as Crispinus; and

in some respects more pointedly so.' Grosart's citation is interesting, but I do not see that anything else is developed concerning Ovid jun. which is notably applicable to Crispinus-Marston, while we have already seen the historic faithfulness of the Ovid portrait. The suggestion that in presenting Ovid jun. as grieving the paternal heart by a disinclination to the pursuit of law, Jonson was striking a sort of preparatory blow at Marston, is wholly unconvincing. Jonson preferred direct rather than oblique attacks, and he accomplished in this instance an arraignment of Marston as Crispinus that seems to have driven the lesser poet into retirement for a considerable period. Jonson may or may not have known that the elder Marston was disappointed in that his second son preferred poetry to law; but it is quite unlikely that he ever heard of the expressions of regret in the father's will.1 The audience, moreover, cannot be supposed to have possessed all this information, even if Jonson did. Grosart himself has overlooked another point of similarity between the real Ovid and Marston: both were second sons. It is unlikely that the Elizabethan audience, particularly when observing the character Ovid jun. in a play which definitely presented Crispinus as the dramatist Marston, would have known or cared whether such minute correspondence might be discovered between the Roman poet and the English satirist. Only as a coincidence, therefore, does Grosart's parallel deserve attention.

An unsigned article on 'Ben Jonson's Quarrel with Shakespeare,' in the No. Brit. Rev., 1870, vol. 52, makes a fantastic effort (pp. 410-1) to identify Ovid of Poetaster with Shakespeare. As the conjecture is not supported by a single valid fact, and has never been maintained by any but this anonymous author, it requires no discussion here. This same article (p. 424) furnishes us with one more assumption, which I here record as quite the most astounding thing

1

Dated 24 Oct. 1599, proved 29 Nov. 1599; cf. Grosart, Marston's Poems x-xi.

of its kind that I have run across. Jonson in The Poetaster, following the fashion of his time, had summed up the political cause of Essex in the person of Julia, the Emperor's "base and revolted daughter."

Plautia. The Gens Plautia (Plotia) was a plebian gens at Rome; several members of the family attained the consulship. Jonson's choice of the name Plautia for the mistress of Tibullus is interesting. In the first book of the elegies Tibullus addresses his mistress by the name of Delia (cf. Poetaster 1. 3. 33); in the second book we find Delia superseded by Nemesis (cf. Poetaster 4. 3. 95); and in the third Neaera reigns. Now Apuleius is authority for the real name of this Delia of Bk. 1. I quote from the Apologia (ed. G. Krueger, 1864, p. 15): Accusent et Tibullum, quod ei sit Plania in animo Delia in uersu. For Plania, Krueger notes that the reading of Casaubon is Flauia; the codex Florentinus has in the margin, Deliam pro Plania. But in his Elegiac Extracts from Tibullus and Ovid (Glasgow, 1840, p. 7), Wm. Ramsay notes that Elmenhorst in his edition of Apuleius' Apologia (p. 279) gives the alternative readings Plautia and Flavia, for Plania. Now Elmenhorst published the Opera of Apuleius at Frankfort in 1621, the year of his death. This cannot, therefore, have been Jonson's source for the name Plautia, and we must suppose it to have occurred in some still earlier edition to which our poet had

access.

Players. Certain players are referred to by nicknames, but do not appear on the stage. The bitterness of the allusions leaves no room for surprise that Jonson was censured for them, as appears from his reply in the Apologetical Dialogue (128-139):

Now, for the Players, it is true, I tax'd 'hem,

And yet, but fome;

Onely amongst them, I am forry for

Some better natures, by the reft fo drawne,
To run in that vile line.

'It has been thought,' comments Whalley, 'that Shakespeare was here alluded to, under the expression of better natures. But I see no reason to confine the phrase to so particular a restriction. It makes good sense to take it in the most obvious meaning: nor does it appear there was any difference now subsisting between Shakespeare and our author.' Gifford goes further. 'Thus far Whalley is right. He might have added, to the confusion of the thinkers, that if their ingenious supposition were true, it would go near to prove not that Jonson was hostile to Shakspeare, but that Shakspeare was captiously disinclined to Jonson. But, in fact, there is no allusion whatever to Shakspeare, or to the company with which he was connected. The commentators are absolutely mad: they will allow Jonson neither to compliment nor criticize any one but our great poet; and this merely for the pleasure of taxing him with hypocrisy in the one case and envy in the other. I have already observed that the actors ridiculed belonged to the Fortune playhouse; and the critics must have discovered, if their judgment had been as active as their enmity, a very frequent recurrence throughout the Poetaster, and the Apology, to the poverty and low estimation of this unfortunate company.

"If it gave them meat,

Or got them clothes, 'tis well; that was their end." Could this be said of Allen and Shakspeare, of Burbage, Lowin, and Taylor? Without question the Fortune possessed more actors than the "lean Poluphagus" and the "politic Aesop," and to some of those the poet might allude: "the better natures" were not confined, I trust, in Jonson's days any more than in our own, to a single person, or even a single theatre.' That Gifford was here talking not without provocation, appears from the words of Thomas Davies (Dram. Misc. 2. 81): 'Some of the players he [Jonson] characterizes under feigned names: such as "the lean Poluphagus," by whom I conjecture he