Rome -- History -- Tiberius, 14-37 -- Drama; Sejanus, Lucius Aelius, -31 -- Drama; Tragedies (Drama)
the earlier “Epode,” beginning “Not to know vice at all,” be matchedin
stately gravity and gnomic wisdom in its own wise and stately age.
But if Jonson had deserted the stage after the publication of his folio
and up to the end of the reign of King James, he was far from inactive;
for year after year his inexhaustible inventiveness continued to
contribute to the masquing and entertainment at court. In “The Golden
Age Restored,” Pallas turns from the Iron Age with its attendant evils
into statues which sink out of sight; in “Pleasure Reconciled to
Virtue,” Atlas figures represented as an old man, his shoulders covered
with snow, and Comus, “the god of cheer or the belly,” is one of the
characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John
Milton, was not to forget. “Pan’s Anniversary,” late in the reign of
James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write
exquisite lyrics, and “The Gipsies Metamorphosed” displayed the old
drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable.
These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the
Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute
monarch of English literary Bohemia. We hear of a room blazoned about
with Jonson’s own judicious ‘Leges Convivales’ in letters of gold, of a
company made up of the choicest spirits of the time, devotedly attached
to their veteran dictator, his reminiscences, opinions, affections, and
enmities. And we hear, too, of valorous potations; but in the words of
Herrick addressed to his master, Jonson, at the Devil Tavern, as at the
Dog, the Triple Tun, and at the Mermaid,
“We such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad,
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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