It is quite possible that all these men I have named will have encountered, off and on, at their tavern gatherings, the lithe, youngish fellow, large browed and with flashing eyes, who loves Rhenish too in a way, but who loves the altitudes of poetic thought better; who is just beginning to be known poet-wise by his “Venus and Adonis”--whose name is William Shakespeare--and who has great aptitude at fixing a play, whether his own or another man’s; and with Burbage for the leading parts, can make them take wonderfully well. Possibly, too, in these tavern gatherings would be the young, boyish Earl of Southampton, who is associated with some of the many enigmas respecting Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and whom we Americans ought to know of, because he became interested thereafter in schemes for colonizing Virginia, and has left his name of Southampton to one of the Virginia counties; and, still better, is associated with that beautiful reach of the Chesapeake waters which we now call “Hampton Roads.” In that company too--familiar with London taverns in later Elizabethan years--the beefy Ben Jonson was sure to appear, with his great shag of hair, and his fine eye, and his coarse lip, bubbling over with wit and with Latin: he, quite young as yet; perhaps just now up from Cambridge; ten years the junior of Shakespeare; and yet by his bulky figure and doughty air dominating his elders, and sure to call the attention of all idlers who hung about the doors of the Mermaid. He may be even now plotting his first play of “Every Man in his Humour,” or that new club of his and Raleigh’s devising, which is to have its meeting of jolly fellows in the same old Cheapside tavern, and to make its rafters shake with their uproarious mirth. For the present we leave them all there--with a May sun struggling through London fogs, and gleaming by fits and starts upon the long range of jewellers’ shops, for which Cheapside was famous--upon the White Cross and Conduit, whereat the shop-girls are filling their pails--upon the great country wains coming in by Whitechapel Road--upon the tall spire of St. Mary le Bow, and upon the diamond panes of the Mermaid tavern, to whose recesses we have just seen the burly figure of Ben Jonson swagger in. CHAPTER VIII.