It should be remembered, that at the time of this sweeping condemnation of what he terms dramatic or stage-poetry, thirty-one of the thirty-six of the immortal Shakespearean plays were then written. All of the very greatest—“Hamlet,” “Lear,” “Macbeth”—were, in Ben Jonson’s estimation in 1607, “rotten and base rags.” While in 1623 in the “Memorial Verses” he tells us that their reputed author was the “soul of the age.” “It is a legal maxim that a witness who swears for both sides swears for neither, and a rule of common law no less than common sense that his evidence must be ruled out.” Ben Jonson’s egotism would, of course, preclude a just judgment of the work of his fellow craftsman. He felt that his own writings were immeasurably superior. Did he ever read the so-called Shakspere plays before he wrote the “Ode to the Memory of my Beloved The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us” for the syndicate of printers? For the affirmative of the proposition there is not the faintest presumption of probable evidence. Jonson often became the generous panegyrist of poets whose writings in all probability he never had read. He took pleasure in commending in verse the works of men not worthy of his notice, and in lauding and patronizing juvenile mediocrity and poeticules of the gutter-snipe order. In his prefatory remarks to the reader in “Sejanus” there is the same display of excess of commendation. Ben Jonson writes, “Lastly I would inform you that this book in all numbers is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage wherein a second pen had good share, in place of which I have rather chosen to put weaker and no doubt less pleasing of my own than to defraud so happy a genius of his right by my loathed usurpations.” According to Dryden, Ben Jonson’s compliments were left-handed. Nevertheless, the words “so happy a genius” have directed the thoughts of commentators to Shakespeare. Mr. Nicholson, however, has shown that the person alluded to is not Shakespeare, but a very inferior poet, Samuel Sheppard, who more than forty years later claimed for himself the honor of having collaborated in “Sejanus” with Ben Jonson. Compliments bestowed on inferior men of the elder time are in later times the reprisal of Shakespearean buccaneers; while many of Jonson’s versified panegyrics on cotemporary poets were retrieved by his withering contempt for many of them, orally expressed, or contained in his prose works, Shakespeare being included among these. Still, at the Apollo room of the Devil Tavern were numbered the most distinguished men of the day outside of literary circles, as well as within, who sought his fellowship and would gladly have sealed themselves of the tribe of Ben. Clarendon tells us that “his conversations were very good and with men of most note.” The following is, in part, from the notes recorded by William Drummond, Laird of Hawthornden.