Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher
John Stuart Mill · en
There will come, though scarcely current,
Christopherus surnamed _Torrent_
And John ycleped _Made_;
And Arthur _Meadow-pigmies'-foe_
To sup, his dinner will forgoe--
Will come as soon as bade.
Sir Robert _Horse-lover_ the while,
_Ne let_ Sir Henry _count it vile_
Will come with gentle speed;
And _Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows_
And John surnamed _Little-hose_
Will come if there be need.
And Richard _Pewter-Waster_ best
And Henry _Twelve-month-good_ at least
And John _Hesperian_ true.
If any be desiderated
He shall be amerciated
Forty-pence in issue.
Hugh the _Inferior-Germayne_,
Nor yet unlearned nor prophane
Inego _Ionicke-pillar_.
But yet the number is not righted:
If Coriate bee not invited,
The jeast will want a tiller.
In his edition of Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, Dr. Clark supplies the
glossary to these punning names. _Torrent_ is, of course, Brooke.
Johannes _Factus_, or _Made_, is Brooke's chamber-fellow of Lincoln's
Inn, John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and correspondent in well
known epistles of Henry _Twelve-month-good_, the Sir Henry Goodere, or
Goodeere, who married Frances (Drayton's Panape), one of the daughters
of "the first cherisher of Drayton's muse." _Ne-let_ Sir Henry _count it
vile_ is the elder Nevill under cover of his family motto, _Ne vile
velis_. Inigo Jones, _Ionicke-pillar_ is even more thinly disguised in
the Latin original as Ignatius _architectus_, Hugh Holland (the
_Inferior-Germayne_) was of Beaumont's Mermaid Club, the writer--beside
other poems--of commendatory verses for Jonson's _Sejanus_ in 1605, and
of the sonnet _Upon the Lines and Life_ of that other frequenter of the
Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare." Holland's "great patronesse," by
the way, was the wife of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple,
whose daughter married Beaumont's kinsman, Sir John Villiers; and it was
by the great Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, that Holland was introduced
to King James. Also, of the Mermaid in Beaumont's time was Tom Coryate,
the "legge-stretcher of Odcombe" without whose presence this Convivium
Philosophicum would "want its tiller." Of the Mermaid, too, was Richard
Martin (the _Pewter-waster_). He was fond of the drama; had organized a
masque at the Middle Temple at the time of the Princess Elizabeth's
marriage; and it is to him that Ben Jonson dedicates the folio of _The
Poetaster_ (1616). In 1618, as Recorder of London, he was the bosom
friend of Brooke, Holland, and Hoskins: he died of just such a
"symposiaque" as this, a few years later, and he lies in the Middle
Temple. Last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic Latin verses
of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself (surnamed _Little-hose_). He had been
a freshman of the Middle Temple in the year when Beaumont was beginning
at the Inner. He was an incomparable writer of drolleries, over which we