Or urge thy greedy flame thus to devour
So many my years' labors in an hour?
I ne'er attempted, Vulcan, 'gainst thy life ;
Nor made least line of love to thy loose wife;
Or in remembrance of thy affront and scorn,
With clowns and tradesmen, kept thee closed in
horn.53

'Twas Jupiter that hurled thee headlong down,
And Mars that gave thee a lanthorn for a crown.
Was it because thou wert of old denied,
By Jove, to have Minerva for thy bride;
That since, thou tak'st all envious care and pain
To ruin any issue of the brain?

Had I wrote treason there, or heresy, Imposture, witchcraft, charms, or blasphemy, I had deserved then thy consuming looks, Perhaps to have been burned with my books. But, on thy malice, tell me, didst thou spy

was destroyed, and with it a large quantity of his MSS., including some unfinished, and some complete. He seems to have borne his irreparable loss with extraordinary composure, satisfying his vexation by this pleasant revenge upon misfortune. He here enumerates most of the MSS. that perished - a life of Henry V., nearly completed; an account of his journey into Scotland; The Rape of Proserpine; the poem on the ladies of Great Britain, alluded to in his epistle to the Countess of Rutland (see ante, p. 117); some dramas; an English grammar, of which considerable fragments have been preserved; and the gleanings of twenty-four years' study in philosophy and divinity. - B.

53 A joke of very ancient standing: Heus tu, qui Vulcanum conclusum in cornu geris! - PLAUT. Amphytr. — W.

Any least loose or scurrile paper lie
Concealed, or kept here, that was fit to be,
By thy own vote, a sacrifice to thee?

Did I there wound the honors of the crown?
Or tax the glories of the church and gown?
Itch to defame the state, or brand the times,
And myself most, in some self-boasting rhymes?
If none of these, then why this fire? Or find
A cause before, or leave me one behind.

Had I compiled from Amadis de Gaul,
Th' Esplandians, Arthurs, Palmerins, and all
The learned library of Don Quixote,
And so some goodlier monster had begot;
Or spun out riddles, and weaved fifty tomes
Of logogriphs, and curious palindromes,
Or pumped for those hard trifles, anagrams,
Or eteostichs, or those finer flams
Of eggs, and halberds, cradles, and a hearse,
A pair of scissors, and a comb in verse,
Acrostics, and telestichs on jump names :
Thou then hadst had some color for thy flames,

54

54 In this passage Jonson collects the names of some of the fantastical exercises in verse which were in high vogue, and which Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, 1589, attempts to trace to China and Tartary. He calls them "geometrical figures," and says that they were sometimes square, round, or oval, and sometimes took the shapes of lozenges, eggs, tapers, triangles, &c.; but, in justice to the writer of that curious old treatise, it is only fair to add, that he does not claim a place for them amongst the legitimate forms of poetry, frankly acknowledging they are only "conceits" and "courtly trifles." - B.

On such my serious follies. But, thou'lt say,
There were some pieces of as base allay,
And as false stamp there; parcels of a play,
Fitter to see the firelight than the day;
Adulterate moneys, such as would not go:
Thou shouldst have stayed till public Fame said

so;

She is the judge, thou executioner;

Or, if thou needs wouldst trench upon her power,
Thou mightst have yet enjoyed thy cruelty
With some more thrift, and more variety:
Thou mightst have had me perish piece by piece,
To light tobacco, or save roasted geese,
Singe capons, or poor pigs, dropping their eyes,
Condemned me to the ovens with the pies;
And so have kept me dying a whole age,
Not ravished all hence in a minute's rage.
But that's a mark whereof thy rites do boast,
To make consumption ever where thou go'st.

55

Had I foreknown of this, thy least desire To have held a triumph, or a feast of fire, Especially in paper; that that steam Had tickled your large nostril; many a ream, To redeem mine, I had sent in: Enough! Thou shouldst have cried, and all been proper stuff.

The Talmud and the Alcoran had come,

55 The MS. of this piece in the British Museum reads, with more variety,

"Clothe spices, or guard sweetmeats from the flies.". -G.

With pieces of the Legend; 56 the whole sum
Of errant knighthood, with the dames and dwarfs;
The charmed boats, and the enchanted wharfs,
The Tristrams, Lancelots, Turpins, and the Peers,
All the mad Rolands, and sweet Olivers;
To Merlin's marvels, and his Cabal's loss,
With the chimera of the Rosy-cross,
Their seals, their characters, hermetic rings,
Their gem of riches, and bright stone that brings
Invisibility, and strength, and tongues;
The art of kindling the true coal by Lungs;
With Nicholas' Pasquils,58 Meddle with your

match.

57

And the strong lines that so the times do catch; Or Captain Pamphlet's horse and foot, that sally Upon th' Exchange still, out of Pope's-head alley; 59

60

The weekly courants, with Paul's seal; and all

57 The name given to the under-operators in the chemists' laboratories, whose business it was to blow the fire. It occurs several times in Jonson's plays: here is an example:"His lungs, his zephyrus, he that puffs his coals."

Alchemist, II. 1. —-- B.

58 Gifford thinks this alludes to Nicholas Breton, who wrote several pieces under the name of Pasquil. - B.

59 A footway leading from Lombard-street to Cornhill. The figure is intended to represent the route of news-venders who passed out by that avenue to the Exchange. - B.

60 A sarcastical allusion to the stories fabricated by the idle walkers in St. Paul's, and weekly detailed by Butter and others as authentic intelligence.-G.

The admired discourses of the prophet Ball."1
These, hadst thou pleased either to dine or sup,
Had made a meal for Vulcan to lick up;
But, in my desk, what was there to excite
So ravenous and vast an appetite?

I dare not say a body, but some parts

There were of search, and mastery in the arts; All the old Venusine, in poetry,

62

And lighted by the Stagyrite, could spy,"
Was there made English; with the grammar too,
To teach some that their nurses could do,
The purity of language; and, among
The rest, my journey into Scotland song,
With all the adventures: three books, not afraid
To speak the fate of the Sicilian maid,
To their own ladies; and in story there
Of our fifth Henry, eight of his nine year;
Wherein was oil, beside the succor spent,
Which noble Carew, Cotton, Selden lent;
And twice twelve years stored up humanity,
With humble gleanings in divinity,
After the fathers, and those wiser guides,
Whom faction had not drawn to study sides.
How in these ruins, Vulcan, thou dost lurk,

01 "The prophet Baal to be sent over to them,
To calculate a time," &c. - Staple of News, III. 2.
The title is applied to any fanatical leader, like John Ball, a
Kentish minister, who was concerned in the rebellion of Wat
Tyler.

B.

62 He alludes to his translation of Horace's Art of Poetry, illustrated with notes from Aristotle's Poetics.-W.