To these verses Jonson, as I have said, alludes in the series of stanzas prefixed to the Shakespeare folio of 1623,--_To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us._ Ben Jonson intends, however, no slight to Beaumont and the other poets mentioned by Basse, when, in his rapturous eulogy, he declines to regard them as the peers of Shakespeare. On the contrary this lover at heart, and in his best moments, of Beaumont, bestows a meed of praise: they are "great Muses,"--Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont,--but merely "disproportioned," if one judge critically, in the present comparison, as are, indeed, Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Not these, but "thundering Aeschylus," Euripides, and Sophocles, Pacuvius, Accius, "him of Cordova dead," must be summoned To life againe to heare thy Buskin tread And shake a Stage. Therefore it is, that Jonson calls-- My Shakespeare rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further to make thee a roome: Thou art a Moniment without a toombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give. That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses; I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses. That Beaumont was regarded by his immediate contemporaries not as a professional, but literary, dramatist,--a poet, and a person of social eminence,--appears from Drayton's _Epistle to Henery Reynolds, Esq., Of Poets and Poesy_, published 1627, from which I have earlier quoted. Here the writer, appraising the poets "who have enrich'd our language with their rhymes" informs his "dearly loved friend" that he does not meane to run In quest of these that them applause have wonne Upon our Stages in these latter dayes, That are so many; let them have their bayes, That doe deserve it; let those wits that haunt Those publique circuits, let them freely chaunt Their fine Composures, and their praise pursue;