he First's
reign.

Camden recommended Jonson to Sir Walter Raleigh as a tutor to
his son, whose gay humours not brooking the severe studies of
Jonson, took advantage of his foible, to degrade him in the
eyes of his father, who, it seems, was remarkable for his
abstinence from wine: though, if another tale be true, he was
no common sinner in "the true Virginia." Young Raleigh
contrived to give Ben a surfeit, which threw the poet into a
deep slumber; and then the pupil maliciously procured a
buck-basket, and a couple of men, who carried our Ben to Sir
Walter, with a message that "their young master had sent home
his tutor." There is nothing improbable in the story; for the
circumstance of _carrying drunken men in baskets_ was a usual
practice. In the Harleian MS. quoted above, I find more than
one instance; I will give one. An alderman, carried in _a
porter's basket_, at his own door, is thrown out of it in a
_qualmish_ state. The man, to frighten away the passengers,
and enable the grave citizen to creep in unobserved, exclaims,
that the man had the _falling sickness_!

[389] These were Marston and Decker, but as is usual with these sort
of caricatures, the originals sometimes mistook their
likenesses. They were both town-wits, and cronies, of much the
same stamp; by a careful perusal of their works, the editor of
Jonson has decided that Marston was Crispinus. With him Jonson
had once lived on the most friendly terms: afterwards the
great poet quarrelled with both, or they with him.

Dryden, in the preface to his "Notes and Observations on the
Empress of Morocco," in his quarrel with Settle, which has
been sufficiently narrated by Dr. Johnson, felt, when poised
against this miserable rival, who had been merely set up by a
party to mortify the superior genius, as Jonson had felt when
pitched against _Crispinus_. It is thus that literary history
is so interesting to authors. How often, in recording the
fates of others, it reflects their own! "I knew indeed (says
Dryden) that to write against him was to do him too great an
honour; but I considered Ben Jonson had done it before to
Decker, our author's predecessor, whom he chastised in hi