Lured by such scents as these, our beast of prey may pounce--upon a shadow, or not?--when, having tracked the meandering Browne to the second song of the Second Book, he there hears him rehearse the names of
What shepheards on the sea were seene To entertaine the Ocean's queene,--
the poets of England: Astrophel (Sidney), "the learned Shepheard of faire Hitching hill" (Chapman), all loved Draiton, Jonson, well-languag'd Daniel, Christopher Brooke, Davies of Hereford, and Wither,
Many a skilfull swaine Whose equals Earth cannot produce againe, But leave the times and men that shall succeed them Enough to praise that age which so did breed them,--
and then, _without interim_, proceed:
Two of the quaintest swains that yet have beene Failed their attendance on the Ocean's queene, Remond and Doridon, whose haplesse fates Late sever'd them from their more happy mates.[92]
Browne, who had dropped these companion shepherds of the "pastoral and the rural song" three songs back, now needs them to scour the forests for the vanished Fida of his fiction. If he had not needed them for the narrative here resumed, might they not have attended the Ocean's queen with the other poets of England,--all, but Sidney, his personal friends,--as Fletcher and Beaumont? This is precisely the way in which Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and Rafael introduced into their frescoes the Tornabuoni and Medici of their time. We may leave the inquisitive to follow them to that realm where, forsaking mythical and pastoral romance,
Many weary dayes They now had spent in unfrequented wayes.
About the rivers, vallies, holts, and crags, Among the ozyers and the waving flags, They merely pry, if any dens there be, Where from the Sun might harbour crueltie: Or if they could the bones of any spy, Or torne by beasts, or humane tyranny.
They close inquiry made in caverns blind, Yet what they look for would be death to find.
Right as a curious man that would descry, Led by the trembling hand of Jealousy, If his fair wife have wrong'd his bed or no, Meeteth his torment if he find her so.[93]
I cannot, however, refrain from pointing the venturesome researcher,--with irony--may be not Mephistophelian, but merely pyrrhonic,--to the dramatic misfortunes of Bellario, Aspasia, and Evadne, and other heroines of the dramatized romances in which Beaumont and Fletcher's theatre of the Globe was indulging at the time. And I would ask him after he has read the sage advice of Remond to the disconsolate shepherd, some two hundred lines further down, to turn to Fletcher's poem of 1613 _Upon an Honest Man's Fortune_, and decide whether the poet-philosopher of the one is not very much of the same opinion as the shepherd-philosopher of the other.[94]
FOOTNOTES:
[81] John Chamberlain to Mris. Carleton, 18 February, 1612-3, in _State Papers (Domestic) James I_, LXXII, No. 30. Quoted by Miss Sullivan, _Court Masques of James I_, p. 76 (1913).
[82] Foscarini in _Calendar of State Papers, Venetian_, XII, No. 832.
Quoted by Miss Sullivan, _op. cit._, p. 77.
[83] _Calendar State Papers (Domestic)_, 1611-1618, pp. 171, 172, 175.
[84] Dugdale's _Origines Juridicales_, as cited by Dyce, _B. and F._, II, 453. Inderwick, _op. cit._, II, xxxix-xlii, 72, 77, etc.
Douthwaite, _op. cit._, 231. Nichols's _Progresses of King James_, II, 566, 591.
[85] _To Worthy Persons_, in the volume entitled _The Scourge of Folly_.
[86] Gordon Goodwin, in _The Muses' Library_, 1894, p. 132.
[87] See _Greenstreet Papers_, VIII, Fleay, _Hist. Stage_, 250.
[88] _Brit. Past._, I, 1, 476.
[89] _Ibid._, II, 2, 469.
[90] Li. 405-470.
[91] _Ibid._, I, 3, 297-8.
[92] _Ibid._, II, 2, 247-352.
[93] _Ibid._, II, 2, 510-512.
[94] Cf. especially _Brit. Past._, II, 2, 706-732, with Fletcher's defiance of poverty and independence of criticism in his poem, _Upon an Honest Man's Fortune_.
CHAPTER X
AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT
Christopher Brooke of Lincoln's Inn enters the circle of Beaumont's associates not only as the advocate to whom Beaumont's friends in Shakespeare's company of actors turn for counsel in an important suit at law, and as the encomiast of Shakespeare himself a year or two later:
He that from Helicon sends many a rill, Whose nectared veines are drunk by thirsty men,[95]
but as one of the pastoralists of the Inns of Court. He was also a friend of Beaumont's older associates, Jonson, Drayton, and Davies of Hereford. From an unexpected quarter comes information of Brooke's intimacy with still others who at various points impinged upon Beaumont's career,--with Inigo Jones, for instance, who designed the machinery for Beaumont's _Masque_, and with Sir Henry Nevill, the father of the Sir Henry who, a few years later, supplied the publisher Walkley with the manuscript of Beaumont and Fletcher's _A King and No King_.
When we let ourselves in upon the elder Sir Henry carousing at the Mitre with Brooke and Jones, and others known to Beaumont as members of the Mermaid, in a famous symposium held some time between 1608 and September 1611, we begin to feel that it was not by mere accident that the manuscript _of A King and No King_ fell into the hands of the Nevill family. Sir Henry the elder, of Billingbear, Berkshire, was a relative of Sir Francis Bacon, and a friend of Davies of Hereford, and of Ben Jonson, who dedicated to Nevill about 1611 one of his most graceful epigrams; probably, also, of Francis Beaumont's brother John, who wrote a graceful tribute to the memory of one of the gentlewomen of the family, Mistress Elizabeth Nevill. This Sir Henry was an influential member of Parliament, a statesman, a courtier, and a diplomat, as well as a patron of poets. He came near being Secretary of the realm. It is his name that we find scribbled with those of Bacon and Shakespeare, about 1597, possibly by Davies of Hereford, the admirer of all three, over the cover of the _Northumbrian Manuscript_ of "Mr. Ffrauncis Bacon's" essays and speeches. Sir Henry did not die till 1615, and it is more than likely that the play, _A King and No King_, which was acted about 1611, and of which his family held the manuscript, had his "approbation and patronage" as well as that of Sir Henry the younger "to the commendation of the authors"; and that both father and son knew Beaumont and Fletcher well.
The Mitre Inn, a common resort of hilarious Templars, still stands at the top of Mitre Court, a few yards back from the thoroughfare of Fleet Street.
[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON From the portrait by Paul Van Somer in the National Portrait Gallery, London]
The symposium to which I have referred is celebrated in a copy of macaronic Latin verses, entitled _Mr. Hoskins, his Convivium Philosophicum_;[96] and I may be pardoned if I quote from the contemporary translation by John Reynolds of New College, the opening stanzas, since one is set to wondering how many other of the jolly souls "convented," beside Brooke and Jones and Nevill, our Beaumont knew.--
Whosoever is contented That a number be convented, Enough but not too many; The _Miter_ is the place decreed, For witty jests and cleanly feed, The betterest of any.
There will come, though scarcely current, Christopherus surnamed _Torrent_ And John ycleped _Made_; And Arthur _Meadow-pigmies'-foe_ To sup, his dinner will forgoe-- Will come as soon as bade.
Sir Robert _Horse-lover_ the while, _Ne let_ Sir Henry _count it vile_ Will come with gentle speed; And _Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows_ And John surnamed _Little-hose_ Will come if there be need.
And Richard _Pewter-Waster_ best And Henry _Twelve-month-good_ at least And John _Hesperian_ true.
If any be desiderated He shall be amerciated Forty-pence in issue.
Hugh the _Inferior-Germayne_, Nor yet unlearned nor prophane Inego _Ionicke-pillar_.
But yet the number is not righted: If Coriate bee not invited, The jeast will want a tiller.
In his edition of Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, Dr. Clark supplies the glossary to these punning names. _Torrent_ is, of course, Brooke.
Johannes _Factus_, or _Made_, is Brooke's chamber-fellow of Lincoln's Inn, John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and correspondent in well known epistles of Henry _Twelve-month-good_, the Sir Henry Goodere, or Goodeere, who married Frances (Drayton's Panape), one of the daughters of "the first cherisher of Drayton's muse." _Ne-let_ Sir Henry _count it vile_ is the elder Nevill under cover of his family motto, _Ne vile velis_. Inigo Jones, _Ionicke-pillar_ is even more thinly disguised in the Latin original as Ignatius _architectus_, Hugh Holland (the _Inferior-Germayne_) was of Beaumont's Mermaid Club, the writer--beside other poems--of commendatory verses for Jonson's _Sejanus_ in 1605, and of the sonnet _Upon the Lines and Life_ of that other frequenter of the Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare." Holland's "great patronesse," by the way, was the wife of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, whose daughter married Beaumont's kinsman, Sir John Villiers; and it was by the great Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, that Holland was introduced to King James. Also, of the Mermaid in Beaumont's time was Tom Coryate, the "legge-stretcher of Odcombe" without whose presence this Convivium Philosophicum would "want its tiller." Of the Mermaid, too, was Richard Martin (the _Pewter-waster_). He was fond of the drama; had organized a masque at the Middle Temple at the time of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage; and it is to him that Ben Jonson dedicates the folio of _The Poetaster_ (1616). In 1618, as Recorder of London, he was the bosom friend of Brooke, Holland, and Hoskins: he died of just such a "symposiaque" as this, a few years later, and he lies in the Middle Temple. Last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic Latin verses of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself (surnamed _Little-hose_). He had been a freshman of the Middle Temple in the year when Beaumont was beginning at the Inner. He was an incomparable writer of drolleries, over which we may be sure that Beaumont many a time held his sides,--a wag whose "excellent witt gave him letters of commendacion to all ingeniose persons," a great friend of Beaumont's Jonson, and of Raleigh, Donne, Selden, Camden, and Daniel.
Of the participants in Serjeant Hoskins's _Convivium Philosophicum_, we find, then, that several were of those who came into personal contact with Beaumont, and that of the rest, nearly all moved in the field of his acquaintance. Concerning a few, Arthur _Meadow-pigmies'-foe_ (Cranefield), Sir Robert _Horse-lover_ (Phillips), _Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows_ (Conyoke or Connock), and John _Hesperian_ (West), I have no information pertinent to the subject.
FOOTNOTES:
[95] _The Ghost of Richard III_, I, viii (1614).
[96] In _Cal. State Papers (Dom.)_, under Sept. 2, 1611, I find "Description by Ralph Colphab [Thomas Cariat] of Brasenose College, Oxford, of a philosophical feast the guests at which were Chris Brook, John Donne," and others in exactly the order given below, save for one error. "In Latin Rhymes." Dr. A. Clark in his Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, II, 50-51, gives the Latin verses from an old commonplace book in Lincoln College Library, "authore Rodolpho Calsabro, Aeneacense"; but prefers the attribution of another old copy, owned by Mr. Madan of Brasenose, "per Johannem Hoskyns, London." The translation by Reynolds, who died in 1614, is also given by Dr. Clark.