When James VI of Scotland came to the English throne, and lived no longer on the allowance of £3000 a year from Elizabeth, he spent very largely on elaborate masques, courtly entertainments, not unlike the ballets in which Louis XIV later danced his parts. The hosts of Greek mythology were let loose on the stage, all the sea-nymphs, daughters of Oceanus, for example, floating in a shell of mother-of-pearl, among Tritons better schooled in their parts than honest Mike Lambourn in "Kenilworth". The dresses scenery, and decorations, "the bodily parts, were of Master Inigo Jones his design and act" (see "The Masque of Blackness," 1605). The Queen and the Court ladies acted, or at least appeared as sea-nymphs, and Ben produced the words, which were deeply learned, and the exquisite songs. Unrefined as he was, he became intimate with hospitable and generous lords and ladies. Their gifts and his payment from the Royal coffers in pensions were of more profit to him than his plays, for which he said that he received only £200. It is hardly necessary to add that he had bitter quarrels with Inigo Jones. Jonson's Roman tragedy, "Sejanus" (1603) on the fortunes and fall of that favourite of the Emperor Tiberius, is deeply learned. The author, in the printed version, gave references in footnotes, to his authorities, Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, and many others, as if he had been writing a severe work of history. Nothing can be less like Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, with his free handling of North's translation of Plutarch, with his wild mobs, and murder done openly. Ben was classical and accurate; his Romans speak a stately blank verse: his Tiberius, slow, formal, hypocritical, and deceitful above all things, is the Tiberius of Tacitus; his all-daring Sejanus is a less candid Richard III; and though Ben admitted that the ancient Chorus, with its chants, was impossible on the English stage, he was, in other respects, conscientiously classical. The whole heavy air of Rome, the terror, the duplicity, the political influence of women, their passion, the servility and the discontent, live in the somewhat ponderous blank verse, of which Ben first wrote the matter in prose, an uninspired method. The "Catiline and His Conspiracy," acted 1611, "did not please the populace," nor the Court much, as Ben admits in a quotation from Horace: in these "jig-given times" he asked Pembroke's patronage for "a legitimate poem". In fact Jonson with all his amazing energy, vigour, and appreciation of character--that of Cicero is excellent--was too pedantic, and the orations of his Cicero were too long for the stage. The odes of the Chorus were not apt to increase the pleasure of the audience.