dogmatic talk, he parted with him under the impression that he was leaving an assured friend. Ah! your demure listeners to your unguarded conversation,--they are the ones that give the fatal stabs! A literal transcript of Drummond's original notes of Jonson's conversations, made by Sir Robert Sibbald about the year 1710, has been published in the collections of the Shakespeare Society. This is a more extended report than that included in Drummond's works, though still not so full as the reader might desire. The stoutness of Ben's character is felt in every utterance. Thus he tells Drummond that "he never esteemed of a man for the name of a lord,"--a sentiment which he had expressed more impressively in his published epigram on Burleigh:-- "Cecil, the grave, the wise, the great, the good, What is there more that can ennoble blood?" He had, it seems, "a minde to be a churchman, and, so he might have favour to make one sermon to the King, he careth not what thereafter sould befall him; for he would not flatter though he saw Death." Queen Elizabeth is the mark of a most scandalous imputation, and the mildest of Ben's remarks respecting her is that she "never saw herself, after she became old, in a true glass; they painted her, _and sometymes would vermilion_ her nose." "Of all styles," he said, "he most loved to be named Honest, and hath of that one hundreth letters so naming him." His judgments on other poets were insolently magisterial. "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter"; Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, but no poet; Donne, though "the first poet in the world in some things," for "not keeping of accent, deserved hanging"; Abram Fraunce, "in his English hexameters, was a foole"; Sharpham, Day, and Dekkar were all rogues; Francis Beaumont "loved too much himself and his own verses." Some biographical items in the record of these conversations are of interest. It seems that the first day of every new year the Earl of Pembroke sent him twenty pounds "to buy bookes." By all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds. "Sundry tymes he hath devoured his bookes," that is, sold them to supply himself with necessaries. When he was imprisoned for killing his brother actor in a duel, in the Queen's time, "his judges could get nothing of him to all their demands but I and No. They placed two damn'd villains, to catch advantage of him, with him, but he was advertised by his keeper"; and he added, as if the revenge was as terrible as the offence, "of the spies he hath ane epigrame." He told a few personal stories to Drummond, calculated to moderate our wonder that Mrs. Jonson was a shrew; and, as they were boastingly told, we must suppose that his manners were not so austere as his verse. But perhaps the most characteristic image he has left of himself, through these conversations, is this: "He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars