The garden-flowers follow in equal fulness of array; and get an even better setting in one of his Nymphals, where they are garlanded about the head of Tita; and in these pretty Nymphals, and still more in the airy, fairy _Nymphidia_--with their elfins and crickets and butterflies, one will get an earlier smack of our own “Culprit Fay.” Those who love the scents of ancient garden-grounds--as we do--will relish the traces of garden love in this old Warwickshire man. In his Heroic Epistles, too, one will find a mastership of ringing couplets: and there are spirit and dash in that clanging battle ode of his which sets forth the honors and the daring of Agincourt. Its martial echoes--kept alive by Campbell (“Battle of the Baltic”) and revived again in Tennyson’s “Balaclava,” warrant me in citing two stanzas of the original:-- “Warwick in blood did wade, Oxford the foe invade, And cruel slaughter made Still as they ran up; Suffolk his axe did ply, Beaumont and Willoughby Bear them right doughtily, Ferrers and Fanhope. “They now to fight are gone; Armour on armour shone, Drum now to drum did groan, To hear, was wonder; That, with the cries they make, The very earth did shake, Trumpet to trumpet spake, Thunder to thunder.”[110] _Ben Jonson._ I now go back to that friend of Drayton’s--Ben Jonson,[111] whom we saw at the closing of the last chapter going into the tavern of the Mermaid. He goes there, or to other like places, very often. He is a friend no doubt of the landlady; he is a friend, too, of all the housemaids, and talks university chaff to them; a friend, too, of all such male frequenters of the house as will listen to him, and will never dispute him; otherwise he is a slang-whanger and a bear. He was born, as I have said, some years after Shakespeare, but had roared himself into the front ranks before the people of London were thoroughly satisfied that the actor-author of “Richard III.” was a better man than Ben. Very much of gossip with respect to possible jealousies between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may be found in the clumsy, bundled-up life of the latter by William Gifford.[112]