Travellers' Tales of Scotland

The following is from Travellers' Tales of Scotland by R. H. Coats:

III - Ben Jonson

(1618)

THE best known literary man in London during the opening years of the seventeenth century was probably Ben Jonson. He was admired and liked by King James and the members of his court. He was the friend of Camden, Donne, Bacon, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, and all the most remarkable men of his time, for, as Lord Clarendon has testified concerning him, "his conversation was very good and with men of most note." The Earl of Pembroke loved him, and gave him 20 a year to buy books. To the general public, Jonson was known as the author of a number of masques and plays abounding in true poetry and lusty humour. But it was in the literary haunts and taverns of the city, "The Dog," "The Sun," "The Mermaid," "The Triple Tun," that his burly, jovial figure was most welcome and familiar. Here Jonson reigned supreme, the best talker, the wittiest jester, the most penetrating critic, and the heartiest drinker of any and every company that could be got together.

His most formidable rival in those scenes of revelry would be Shakespeare himself. Old Fuller has informed us that "many were the wit combats between him and Ben Jonson, which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man of war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." But such contests always were good humoured and remote from jealousy. Jonson could truly say of Shakespeare, "I loved the man, and honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any," and in the lines he prefixed to the First Folio edition of the plays in 1623 he could speak of his great contemporary as "Soul of the age! the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!" Jonson, if not the greatest poet of his time, was freely acknowledged to be its foremost literary oracle. His vast stores of erudition and his retentive memory enabled him to speak on all literary subjects as one having authority, and his masterful, quarrelsome, and dogmatic temper secured for his pronouncements on those topics a respectful and attentive hearing. In everything he said or did there was a strain of rough manliness. As he himself has told us, "of all styles he loved most to be named Honest, and hath of that ane hundred letters so naming him." Yes, Jonson was "Big Ben," and big every way. He was large in body and massive in mind, a man well meriting that pithiest of epitaphs which has been inscribed upon his tombstone in Westminster Abbey, "rare Ben Jonson."

We can well imagine, therefore, how startled London must have been when, in the year 1618, it was announced that Sir Oracle had taken it into his head to visit Scotland. Jonson was forty-five at the time, and it must have seemed a proposal of unexampled folly that he of all men should move his huge bulk and set out to walk, not the mere length of Fleet Street, or from the "Mermaid" tavern to the "Triple Tun," but from London to Edinburgh, a distance of 400 miles. Indeed, in all literary history there is no parallel to so unexpected and so strange a journey save that other, undertaken 150 years later, by his distinguished namesake, a lounger, a Londoner, and a Latinist like himself. But Jonson had reasons of his own, no doubt, for making this extraordinary expedition. A Scottish king had recently ascended the throne of England, and had brought with him a crowd of his own nobles to the English court, so that a lively curiosity was prevalent throughout the country about Scotland, the Scots, and everything Scottish. Shakespeare had taken advantage of this interest to produce, certainly not later than 1610, a tragedy on the subject of James's great ancestor, Macbeth. James himself, "having had these many years a great and natural longing to see our native soyle, and the place of our birth and breeding," had visited his ancestral home in 1617, and on his return he may have urged Jonson to do the same. For Jonson too, let it be remembered, boasted the distinction of having Scottish blood in his veins. The Johnstons of Annandale were his immediate forbears, and he may have been anxious to see for himself "the rock whence he was hewn and the hole of the pit whence he was digged." But apart from all this, what need a swashbuckler look for nice reasons to warrant an adventure? Enough if it provide him an opportunity to revel in new sensations, and write a book about them afterwards, or perhaps win a wager over some boon companions.

Jonson was not permitted to leave London without being made the butt of his friends' merriment. Bacon remarked drily on his departure that "he liked not to see poesy go on any other feet than poetical dactylus and spondaeus," and a fortnight after he left London, another poet, one Taylor, a whimsical Thames ferryman, set out to do the same journey without a penny in his pocket. Taylor averred loudly, "on the faith of a Christian," that his "shallow brained critics" were entirely misled in supposing that he had undertaken the tour "either in malice or mockage of Master Benjamin Jonson." But Jonson, who good humouredly gave Taylor a piece of gold at Leith "to drink his health with when he returned to England," could not get rid of the suspicion that the fellow had followed him "to scorn him."

What route Jonson mapped out for himself and what scenes impressed him on his journey we do not know. An account of the manners and customs of rural England and Scotland in those days by such a man as Jonson would now be priceless. All we are told of his travels is that he bought a new pair of shoes when he arrived at Darlington, and that he intended those shoes to serve him till he should reach Darlington again. Whether he even visited the burial grounds of Annandale or no we cannot tell. We do know that he saw Loch Lomond and stayed much in Edinburgh, becoming very friendly with "the beloved Fentons, the Nisbets, the Scotts, the Livingstones," during his six months' sojourn in the north. But his time was mainly spent with a brother poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden. Jonson had probably heard of Drummond from their mutual acquaintance, Sir William Alexander, who came from Scotland with King James to be gentleman-usher to the young Prince Charles, and he would be interested to verify the rumour that a poet had been found in Scotland who could write English. After a few meetings in Edinburgh, probably, Drummond invited Jonson to spend the Christmas season in his country home. Jonson accepted, and tradition says that when the two poets came together, they were in such excellent spirits and so pleased with one another that they must needs burgeon into rhyme, the host exclaiming, "Welcome, welcome, royal Ben!" and the guest as heartily replying "Thank ye, thank ye, Hawthornden!"

What happened during the cosy evenings that followed, when the frost was shut out, and the fire piled high, and the tankard was well filled and filled again, is not entirely a matter of conjecture. Doubtless some things must be imagined. We can fancy Drummond himself, for instance, then a young poet of thirty-three, modestly reciting a specimen of his recent verse, and Jonson perhaps capping it with "Drink to me only with thine eyes," or declaiming, as we know he did, Sir Henry Wotton's fine poem, "The Character of a Happy Life.'' Or we can picture them discoursing of London, and all the great men and women of the day, till the wine and talk were done, and it was time to light a taper and go to bed. But we are not left wholly to guesswork in those matters, for, by a happy inspiration, Drummond was led to jot down his recollections of Jonson's conversations, a copy of which has fortunately survived. There is very much that we miss in those reported talks. Not a word about Scotland or the impressions he had formed of it. Nothing at all about Shakespeare except that he "wanted art," and that a careless, absurd blunder occurs in The Winter's Tale. Had but those two talked to posterity instead of to one another, what might we not know about the life, the character, the opinions of him who is now the greatest mystery of our literature!

But if Jonson talked little about Shakespeare, he talked much and to good purpose about other things. He told Drummond that Sir Philip Sidney had "a long face, spoiled by pimples," and that Queen Elizabeth "never saw herself after she became old in a true glass; they painted her, and sometimes would vermilion her nose." He also informed his host that that distinguished lady "had always about Christmas evens set dice that threw sixes or fives, and she knew not they were other, to make her win and esteem herself fortunate," besides retailing some other pieces of scandal concerning her of a more private nature. As the friends warmed to one another, they would descend to more personal matters, and Jonson would confide to Drummond how "he had consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination," and even that once, when he had taken charge of Sir Walter Raleigh's son during a visit to France, the lad "was so knavishly inclined that he caused Ben to be drunken and dead drunk, so that he knew not where he was."

This reminiscence would be the signal for a fresh passing of the decanter, and the telling of stories would begin. Ben was a practised raconteur, and no fewer than a dozen of his favourite jests have been preserved in the Drummond MS. Here is one of them: "One who wore side hair being asked of ane other who was bald, why he suffered his hair to grow so long, answered, it was to see if his hair would grow to seed, that he might sow of it on bald pates." Another is after this fashion: "One who fired a tobacco pipe with a ballad, he the next day having a sore head, swore he had a great singing in his head, and that it was the ballad; a poet should detest a ballad maker." A third specimen is as follows: "A cook who was of an evil life, when a minister told him he would go to hell, asked, What torment was there? Being answered Fire, Fire (said he) that is my playfellow." Such was the humour of the seventeenth century, somewhat flat, perhaps, and stale to us to-day, after the lapse of three hundred years, but sparkling enough, no doubt, when it was first decanted by a couple of merry and facetious poets as they sat together over their cup of wine.

Even such banquetings as these, however, must come to an end at last, and by January 25th Jonson felt that it was time to go. His friends in London would be wondering what had become of him, and it was well that he should settle down to regular work again. Besides, if he were to delay much longer, his shoes might possibly not hold out so far as Darlington, and that would be a calamity indeed. So Jonson departed on his long return journey, and the darkness of unrecorded history envelopes him again till we come upon the following letter received some two months later by his friend Drummond. "Most loving and beloved Sir, Against which titles I should most knowingly offend if I made you not at length some account of myself, to come even with your friendship I am arrived safely; with a most catholic welcome, and my reports not unacceptable to His Majesty. He professed, I thank God, some joy to see me, and is pleased to hear of the purpose of my book; to which I most earnestly solicit you for your promise of the Inscription at Pinkie, some things concerning the Loch of Lomond, touching the government of Edinburgh to urge Mr. James Scot, and what else you can procure for me with all speed. Especially I make it my request that you will enquire for me whether the students' method at St. Andrews be the same with that at Edinburgh, and so to assure me, or wherein they differ. Though these requests be full of trouble, I hope they shall neither burden nor weary such a friendship whose commands to me I will ever interpret a pleasure."

The information desired was duly sent, and a poem embodying Jonson's impressions of Scotland, "sung with all the adventures," seems to have been written. But alas! it perished with other valuable MSS. in the fire which destroyed Jonson's lodgings some time about the year 1623. We must, therefore, do without the Loch Lomond Pastoral, and content ourselves instead with The Lady of the Lake, while inwardly execrating the rage of the pitiless flames which have deprived us of so many priceless literary treasures.

IV - Sir William Brereton (1635)