“Conversations of Ben Jonson. His censure of the English poets was this: That Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as well as himself. Spencer’s stanzas pleased him not nor his matter. “Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children, but no poet, and was jealous of him; that Michael Drayton’s long verses pleased him not—Drayton feared him and he esteemed not of him; that Donne’s ‘Anniversary’ was profane and full of blasphemies ... that Donne, for not keeping of accent deserved hanging; that Shakespeare wanted art; that Day, Dekker and Minshew were all rogues; that Abram Francis, in his English hexameters, was a fool; that next to himself only Fletcher and Chapman could make a masque. “He esteemeth John Donne the first poet in the world in some things; that Donne, himself, for not being understood would perish. “Sir Henry Wotton’s verses of a ‘Happy Life’ he hath by heart, and a piece of Chapman’s translation of the thirteen of the ‘Iliads,’ which he thinketh well done. That Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verse. “He had many quarrels with Marston; that Markham was not of the number of the faithful, and but a base fellow; that such were Day and Middleton; that Chapman and Fletcher were loved of him; that Spencer died for lack of bread in King street; that the King said Sir P. Sidney was no poet. Neither did he see any verses in England to the Scullers, meaning that John Taylor was the best poet in England; that Shakespeare in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia where there is no sea near by some 100 miles. “Sundry times he (Jonson) hath devoured his books, sold them all for necessity; that he hath consumed a whole night in lying looking at his great toe, about which he hath seen Carthagenians and the Romans fighting; that the half of his comedies were not in print; he said to Prince Charles, of Inigo Jones, that when he wanted words to express the greatest villain in the world, he would call him an ‘Inigo,’ Jones having accused him for naming him, behind his back, a fool, he denied it; but, says he, I said he was an arrant knave, and I avouch it; of all his plays he never gained 200 pounds; he dissuaded me from poetry for that she had beggared him when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician, or merchant; that piece of the ‘Pucelle of the Court’ was stolen out of his pocket by a gentleman who drank him drowsy.” These occasional infractions of sobriety by Ben Jonson when he conversed with Drummond at Hawthornden in 1618-19 became habitual with him long before James Howell’s invitation to a Solem supper by B. J. 1636.