h language and a plot, both pregnant with more than
Platonic morality. Some idea of the magnificence of these displays,
which beggared the royal privy-purse, drove household-treasurers mad,
and often left poet and machinist whistling for pay, may be gathered
from the fact that a masque sometimes cost as much as two thousand
pounds in the mechanical getting-up, a sum far more formidable in the
days of exclusively hard money than in these of paper currency. Scott
has described, for the benefit of the general reader, one such pageant
among the "princely pleasures of Kenilworth"; while Milton, in his
"Masque performed at Ludlow Castle," presents the libretto of another,
of the simpler and less expensive sort. During the reign of James, the
passion for masques kindled into a mania. The days and nights of
Inigo Jones were spent in inventing machinery and contriving
stage-effects. Daniel, Middleton, Fletcher, and Jonson were busied
with the composition of the text; and the court ladies and cavaliers
were all from morning till night in the hands of their dancing and
music masters, or at private study, or at rehearsal, preparing for the
pageant, the representation of which fell to their share and won them
enviable applause. Of course the burden of original invention fell
upon the poets; and of the poets, Daniel and Jonson were the most
heavily taxed. In 1616, James I., by patent, granted to Jonson an
annuity for life of one hundred marks, to him in hand not often well
and truly paid. He was not distinctly named as Laureate, but seems to
have been considered such; for Daniel, on his appointment, "withdrew
himself," according to Gifford, "entirely from court." The
strong-boxes of James and Charles seldom overflowed. Sir Robert Pye,
an ancestor of that Laureate Pye whom we shall discuss by-and-by, was
the paymaster, and often and again was the overwrought poet obliged to
raise

"A woful cry
To Sir Robert Pye,"

before some small instalment of long arrearages could be procured. And
when, rarely, very rarely, his Majesty condescended to remember the
necessities of "his and the Muses' servant," and send a present to the
Laureate's lodgings, its proportions were always so small as to excite
the ire of the insulted Ben, who would growl forth to the messenger,
"He would not have sent me this, (_scil._ wretched pittance,) did
I not live in an alley."

We now arrive at the true era of the Laureateship. Charles, in 1630,