"Once I 'll say,-- To strike the ears of Time in these fresh strains, As shall, beside the cunning of their ground, Give cause to some of wonder, some despite, And more despair to imitate their sound. I that spend half my nights and all my days Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face, To come forth with the ivy and the bays, And in this age can hope no better grace,-- Leave me! There 's something come into my thought, That must and shall be sung high and aloof, Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof!" Accordingly, in 1603, he produced his weighty tragedy of "Sejanus," at Shakespeare's theatre, The Globe,--Shakespeare himself acting one of the inferior parts. Think of Shakespeare laboriously committing to memory the blank verse of Jonson! Though "Sejanus" failed of theatrical success, its wealth of classic knowledge and solid thought made it the best of all answers to his opponents. It was as if they had questioned his capacity to build a ship, and he had confuted them with a man-of-war. To be sure, they might reiterate their old charge of "filching by translation," for the text of "Sejanus" is a mosaic; but it was one of Jonson's maxims that he deserved as much honor for what he made his own by _Jonsonizing_ the classics as for what he originated. Indeed, in his dealings with the great poets and historians of Rome, whose language and whose spirit he had patiently mastered, he acted the part, not of the pickpocket, but of the conqueror. He did not meanly crib and pilfer in the territories of the ancients: he rather pillaged, or, in our American phrase, "annexed" them. "He has done his robberies so openly," says Dryden, "that one sees he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in any other poet is only victory in him." One incident connected with the bringing out of "Sejanus" should not be omitted. Jonson told Drummond that the Earl of Northampton had a mortal enmity to him "for beating, on a St. George's day, one of his attenders"; and he adds, that Northampton had him "called before the Councell for his Sejanus," and accused him there both of "Poperie and treason." Jonson's relations with Shakespeare seem always to have been friendly; and about this time we hear of them as associate members of the greatest of literary and the greatest of convivial clubs,--the club instituted by Sir Walter Raleigh, and known to all times as the "Mermaid," so called from the tavern in which the meetings were held. Various, however, as were the genius and accomplishments it included, it lacked one phase of ability which has deprived us of all participation in its wit and wisdom. It could boast of Shakespeare, and Jonson, and Raleigh, and Camden, and Beaumont, and Selden, but, alas! it had no Boswell to record its words, "So nimble, and so full of subtile flame."