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In the preceding letter it is observable, we are only told that the author of The Lover's Melancholy lived in the strictest intimacy with Shakspeare till he died, as appears by several of Ford's Sonnets and Verses (which unluckily, however, are no where to be found); that the piece is inferior to none written before or since, except those of Shakspeare; that as Ford was an intimate and professed admirer of Shakspeare, and had studied under him, it is not to be wondered at that it should be written in his manner, and that the author should have caught some portion of his divine excellence; but no hint is yet given, that The Lover's Melancholy had a still higher claim to the attention of the town than being written in Shakspeare's manner, namely, its being supposed to be compiled from the papers of that great poet, which, after his death, as we shall presently hear, fell into Ford's hands. And yet undoubtedly this valuable piece of information was on Monday the 21st day of April, (when this letter appears to have been written,) in Mr. Macklin's possession, if ever he was possessed of it; for so improbable a circumstance will not, I suppose, be urged, as that he found the uncommon pamphlet in which it is said to be contained, between that day and the following Friday.

Judiciously as the preceding letter was calculated to attain the end for which it was written, it appears not to have made a sufficient impression on the publick. All the boxes for Mrs. Macklin's benefit, it should seem, were not yet taken; and the town was not quite so anxious as might have been expected, to see this transcendent and incomparable secular tragedy; though it was announced in the bills as not having been performed for one hundred years; though its moral, fable, and action, were all perfect and entire; though the time consumed in the drama was as little as the most rigid French critick could exact and though the audience during the whole representation would enjoy the supreme felicity of beholding not a forest, an open plain, or a common room, but the inside of a palace. What then was to be done? An ordinary application having failed, Spanish flies are to be tried; for though the publick might not go to see a play written in the manner of Shakspeare, they could not be so insensible as not to have some curiosity about a piece, which, if the insinuations of the author's contemporaries were to be credited, was actually written by him; `a play,

which none of them had ever seen represented, and very few had read or even heard of. Mr. Barry, a principal performer in this revived tragedy, is very commodiously taken ill; and the representation, which had been announced for Friday the 22d, is deferred to Thursday the 28th, of April. Full of the new idea, the letter-writer takes up his pen; but fabricks of this kind are not easily constructed, so as to be secure on every side from assault. However, in three days the whole structure was raised; and on Saturday morning the 23d of April appeared in The General Advertiser a Second Eulogy on The Lover's Melancholy, which I am now to examine.

This letter of the 23d of April which we are now to consider, being printed in a foregoing page *, the reader can easily turn to it. Before, however, I enter upon an examination of its contents, I will just observe, that the attention of the publick had been drawn in a peculiar manner to our author's productions by the publication of Dr. Warburton's long expected edition of his plays in the preceding year, and was still more strongly fixed on the same object by Mr. Edwards's ingenious Canons of Criticism, which first appeared in the month of April, 1748.

Mr. Macklin begins his second letter with the mention of a pamphlet written in the reign of Charles the First, with this quaint_title-" Old Ben's Light Heart made heavy by young John's Melancholy Lover;" and as this curious pamphlet contains "some historical anecdotes and altercations concerning Ben Jonson, Ford, Shakspeare, and The Lover's Melancholy," he makes no doubt that a few extracts from it will "at this juncture” be acceptable to the publick.

He next observes, that Ben Jonson from great critical language, (learning, he should have said,) which was then the portion of but very few, from his merit as a poet, and his association with men of letters, for a considerable time gave laws to the stage. That old Ben was splenetick, sour, and envious; too proud of his own works, and too severe in his censure of those of his contemporaries. That this arrogance raised him many enemies, who were particularly offended by the slights and malignancies which the rigid Ben threw out against the lowly Shakspeare,

* See p. 402.

"whose fame, since his death, as appears by the pamphlet, was grown too great for Ben's envy either to bear with or wound."

To give the whole of these invectives, we are then told, would take up too much room; but among other instances of Jonson's ill-nature and ingratitude to Shakspeare, "who first introduced him to the theatre and to fame," it is stated, from the pamphlet, that Ben had asserted, that Shakspeare had indeed wit and imagination, but that they were not guided by judgment, being ever servile to raise the laughter of fools and the wonder of the ignorant; that he had little Latin, and less Greek and the writer of the pamphlet, as a further proof of Ben's malignity, quotes some lines from the prologue to Every Man in his Humour:

:

"To make a child new swaddled, to proceed

"Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
"Past threescore years," &c.

which were levelled at some of Shakspeare's plays. The first of the lines quoted, and above given, we are told in a note, was pointed at The Winter's Tale; but whether this note was furnished by the pamphlet, or by the writer of the letter, we are left to conjecture. Whichsoever of these we are to suppose, the fact is undoubtedly not true; for the new-born child introduced in The Winter's Tale never does in the course of the play shoot up man, being no other than the lovely Perdita. In the following lines, however, of that prologue, our poet is undoubtedly

sneered at.

So much for Shakspeare. We are now brought to The Lover's Melancholy; the extraordinary success of which, the pamphlet informs us, wounded Ben the more sensibly, as it was brought out on the same stage, and in the same week, with his New Inn, or Light Heart, which was damned; and as Ford, the writer of The Lover's Melancholy, was at the head of Shakspeare's partizans. The ill success of the Light Heart, we are next told, so incensed Jonson, that, when he printed his play, he described it in the title-page, as a comedy never acted, but most negligently played by some, the king's idle servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the king's foolish subjects; and immediately upon this, adds the letter-writer, he wrote his famous ode, "Come,

leave the loathed stage," &c. The revenge which he took on Ford, was, we are told, (from the pamphlet,) the writing an epigram upon him, in which there is an allusion, as we are informed in a note, to a character in a play of Ford's "which Ben says, Ford stole from him."

The next information which we derive from this curious pamphlet, is entirely new, no trace of it being found in the preface prefixed by the first editors to the folio edition of Shakspeare's plays in 1623, or in any other book of those times. This curious fact is, that John Ford, in conjunction with our poet's friends, Heminge and Condell, had the revisal of his papers after his death; and that Ben asserted, Ford's Lover's Melancholy, by the connivance of his associates in this trust, was stolen from those papers. This malicious charge gave birth, we are told, to many verses and epigrams, which are set forth in the pamphlet, but the letter-writer contents himself with producing two copies of these verses only*, to one of which is subscribed the name of Thomas May, and to the other these words: Endim. Porter, the supposed author of these verses."

Such is the substance of Mr. Macklin's second letter. Let us now separately examine the parts of which it is composed.

The quaint title which the writer of this letter has given to this creature of his own imagination, (for so I shall now take leave to call the pamphlet,) "Old Ben's Light Heart made heavy by young John's Melancholy Lover," is, it must be acknowledged, most happily invented, and is so much in the manner of those times, that it for a long time staggered my incredulity, and almost convinced me of the authenticity of the piece to which it is said to have been affixed; and not a little, without doubt, did the inventor plume himself on so fortunate a thought. But how short-sighted is man! This very title, which the writer thus probably exulted in, and supposed would serve him,

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as a charmed shield,

"And eke enchanted arms that none might pierce."

* Of all the ancient poems which Chatterton pretended to have found in the famous Bristol chest, he wisely produced, I think, but four, that he ventured to call originals.

is one of the most decisive circumstances to prove his forgery.

Nescia mens hominum fati, sortisque futuræ !
Turno tempus erit, magno cum optaverit emptum
Intactum Pallanta, et cum spolia ista, diemque
Oderit.-

Pallas te, hoc vulnere, Pallas

Immolat, et pœnam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.

66

after

Ben Jonson was in his own time frequently called the judicious Ben, the learned Ben, the immortal Ben, but had not, I believe, at the time this pamphlet is supposed to have been published, obtained the appellation of Old Ben. However, as this title was given him some years wards by Sir John Suckling, in his Session of the Poets, which appears to have been written in August, 1637, about the time of Jonson's death, (See Strafford's Lett. vol. ii. p. 114,) which celebrated poem, as well as the language of the present day, probably suggested the combination of Old Ben to Mr. Macklin, I shall lay no stress upon this objection. But the other part of the title of this pamphlet " Young John's Melancholy Lover," is very material in the present disquisition.-John Ford, in the Dedication to his Lover's Melancholy, says, that was the first play which he had printed; from which the letter-writer concluded that he must then have been a young man. In this particular, however, he was egregiously mistaken; for John Ford, who was the second son of Thomas Ford, Esq. was born at Ilsington in Devonshire, and baptized there April 17, 1586*. When he was not yet seventeen, he became a member of the Middle Temple, November 16, 1602, as I learn from the Register of that Society; and consequently in the year 1631, when this pamphlet is supposed to have been published, he had no title to the appellation of young John, being forty-five years old. And though The Lover's Melancholy was the first play that he published, he had produced the Masque of The Sun's Darling on the stage five years before, namely, in March, 1623-4; had exhibited one or more plays before that time; and so early as in the year 1606 had published a poem entitled Fame's Memorial, of which

*For this information I am indebted to the Reverend Mr. Palk, Vicar of Ilsington.

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