In 1616, soon after Shakespeare's retirement, he stopped writing for the stage and gave himself up to study and serious work. In 1618 he traveled on foot to Scotland, where he visited Drummond, from whom we have the scant records of his varied life. His impressions of this journey, called _Foot Pilgrimage_, were lost in a fire before publication. Thereafter he produced less, and his work declined in vigor; but spite of growing poverty and infirmity we notice in his later work, especially in the unfinished _Sad Shepherd_, a certain mellowness and tender human sympathy which were lacking in his earlier productions. He died poverty stricken in 1637. Unlike Shakespeare's, his death was mourned as a national calamity, and he was buried with all honor in Westminster Abbey. On his grave was laid a marble slab, on which the words "O rare Ben Jonson" were his sufficient epitaph. WORKS OF BEN JONSON. Jonson's work is in strong contrast with that of Shakespeare and of the later Elizabethan dramatists. Alone he fought against the romantic tendency of the age, and to restore the classic standards. Thus the whole action of his drama usually covers only a few hours, or a single day. He never takes liberties with historical facts, as Shakespeare does, but is accurate to the smallest detail. His dramas abound in classical learning, are carefully and logically constructed, and comedy and tragedy are kept apart, instead of crowding each other as they do in Shakespeare and in life. In one respect his comedies are worthy of careful reading,--they are intensely realistic, presenting men and women of the time exactly as they were. From a few of Jonson's scenes we can understand--better than from all the plays of Shakespeare--how men talked and acted during the Age of Elizabeth. Jonson's first comedy, _Every Man in His Humour_, is a key to all his dramas. The word "humour" in his age stood for some characteristic whim or quality of society. Jonson gives to his leading character some prominent humor, exaggerates it, as the cartoonist enlarges the most characteristic feature of a face, and so holds it before our attention that all other qualities are lost sight of; which is the method that Dickens used later in many of his novels. _Every Man in His Humour_ was the first of three satires. Its special aim was to ridicule the humors of the city. The second, _Cynthia's Revels_, satirizes the humors of the court; while the third, _The Poetaster_, the result of a quarrel with his contemporaries, was leveled at the false standards of the poets of the age. The three best known of Jonson's comedies are _Volpone, or the Fox, The Alchemist_, and _Epicoene, or the Silent Woman. Volpone_ is a keen and merciless analysis of a man governed by an overwhelming love of money for its own sake. The first words in the first scene are a key to the whole comedy: