ed, ready to enter the ring
against all comers. By degrees the stern man with the worn features,
darkened by prison cell and hardened by battle-fields, had mellowed into
a Falstaff. Long struggles with poverty had made Ben arrogant, for he
had worked as a bricklayer in early life and had served in Flanders as a
common soldier; he had killed a rival actor in a duel, and had been in
danger of having his nose slit in the pillory for a libel against King
James's Scotch courtiers. Intellectually, too, Ben had reason to claim a
sort of sovereignty over the minor poets. His _Every Man in his Humour_
had been a great success; Shakespeare had helped him forward, and been
his bosom friend. Parts of his _Sejanus_, such as the speech of Envy,
beginning,--

"Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness,"

are as sublime as his songs, such as

"Drink to me only with thine eyes,"

are graceful, serious, and lyrical. The great compass of his power and
the command he had of the lyre no one could deny; his learning Donne and
Camden could vouch for. He had written the most beautiful of court
masques; his Bobadil some men preferred to Falstaff. Alas! no Pepys or
Boswell has noted the talk of those evenings.

A few glimpses of the meetings we have, and but a few. One night at the
"Devil" a country gentleman was boastful of his property. It was all he
had to boast about among the poets; Ben, chafed out of all decency and
patience, at last roared, "What signify to us your dirt and your clods?
Where you have an acre of land I have ten acres of wit!" "Have you so,
good Mr. Wise-acre," retorted Master Shallow. "Why, now, Ben," cried out
a laughing friend, "you seem to be quite stung." "I' faith, I never was
so pricked by a hobnail before," growled Ben, with a surly smile.

Another story records the first visit to the "Devil" of Randolph, a
clever poet and dramatist, who became a clergyman, and died young. The
young poet, who had squandered all his money away in London pleasures,
on a certain night, before he returned to Cambridge, resolved to go and
see Ben and his associates at the "Devil," cost what it might. But there
were two great obstacles--he was poor, and he was not invited.
Nevertheless, drawn magnetically by the voices of the illustrious men in
the Apollo, Randolph at last peeped in at the door among the waiters.
Ben's quick eye soon detected the eager, pale face and the