“Also, I would have 6 or 8 gentlemen; I will have my two coaches--one lined with velvet to myself, with four very fair horses, and a coach for my women lined with cloth, and laced with gold;--otherwise with scarlet and laced with silver, with four good horses. Thereafter, my desire is that you defray all charges for me, and beside my allowance, I would have 20 gowns of apparel a year--six of them excellent good ones. Also, I would have to put in my purse £2,000 or so--you to pay my debts. And seeing I have been so reasonable, I pray you do find my children apparel, and their schooling, and all my servants, men and women, with wages. Also, I must have £6,000 to buy me jewels, and £4,000 to buy me a gold chain. Also, my desire is, that you would pay your debts--build up Ashley House, and lend no money as you love God! When you be an Earl [as he was afterward in Charles I.’s time] I pray you to allow £2,000 more than I now desire and double attendance.” Happy husband! _Ben Jonson again._ We must not forget our literature; and what has become of our friend Ben Jonson in these times? He is hearty and thriving; he has written gratulatory and fulsome verses to the new sovereign. He is better placed with James than even with Elizabeth. If his tragedy of “Sejanus” has not found a great success, he has more than made up the failing by the brilliant masques he has written. The pedantic King loves their pretty show of classicism, which he can interpret better than his courtiers. He battens, too, upon the flattery that is strown with a lavish hand:-- “Never came man more longed for, more desired, And being come, more reverenced, lov’d, admired.”[4] This is the strain; no wonder that the poet comes by pension; no wonder he has “commands,” with goodly fees, to all the fêtes in the royal honor. Yet he is too strong and robust and learned to be called a mere sycophant. The more I read of the literary history of those days the more impressed I am by the predominance of Ben Jonson;--a great, careless, hard-living, hard-drinking, not ill-natured literary monarch. His strength is evidenced by the deference shown him--by his versatility; now some musical masque sparkling with little dainty bits which a sentimental miss might copy in her album or chant in her boudoir; and this, matched or followed by some labored drama full of classic knowledge, full of largest wordcraft, snapping with fire-crackers of wit, loaded with ponderous nuggets of strong sense, and the whole capped and booted with prologue and epilogue where poetic graces shine through proudest averments of indifference--of scorn of applause--of audacious self-sufficiency.