d Charles must have read it over their cups. The verses run,--

"Welcome all who lead or follow
To the oracle of Apollo," &c.

Beneath these verses some enthusiastic disciple of the author has added
the brief epitaph inscribed by an admirer on the crabbed old poet's
tombstone in Westminster Abbey,--

"O, rare Ben Jonson."

The rules of the club (said to have been originally cut on a slab of
black marble) were placed above the fire-place. They were devised by Ben
Jonson, in imitation of the rules of the Roman entertainments, collected
by the learned Lipsius; and, as Leigh Hunt says, they display the
author's usual style of elaborate and compiled learning, not without a
taste of that dictatorial self-sufficiency that made him so many
enemies. They were translated by Alexander Brome, a poetical attorney of
the day, who was one of Ben Jonson's twelve adopted poetical sons. We
have room only for the first few, to show the poetical character of the
club:--

"Let none but guests or clubbers hither come;
Let dunces, fools, and sordid men keep home;
Let learned, civil, merry men b' invited,
And modest, too; nor be choice liquor slighted.
Let nothing in the treat offend the guest:
More for delight than cost prepare the feast."

The later rules forbid the discussion of serious and sacred subjects. No
itinerant fiddlers (who then, as now, frequented taverns) were to be
allowed to obtrude themselves. The feasts were to be celebrated with
laughing, leaping, dancing, jests, and songs, and the jests were to be
"without reflection." No man (and this smacks of Ben's arrogance) was to
recite "insipid" poems, and no person was to be pressed to write verse.
There were to be in this little Elysium of an evening no vain disputes,
and no lovers were to mope about unsocially in corners. No fighting or
brawling was to be tolerated, and no glasses or windows broken, or was
tapestry to be torn down in wantonness. The rooms were to be kept warm;
and, above all, any one who betrayed what the club chose to do or say
was to be, _nolens volens_, banished. Over the clock in the kitchen some
wit had inscribed in neat Latin the merry motto, "If the wine of last
night hurts you, drink more to-day, and it will cure you"--a happy
version of the dangerous axiom of "Take a hair of the dog that bit you."

At these club feasts the old poet with "the mountain belly and the rocky
face," as he has painted himself, presid