and of the rest of the company in appropriate verses.

Afterwards

a number of clowns and country girls are introduced, and the gypsies pick their pockets, which have ludicrous contents; such as a jet ring to draw Jack Straw on holidays," a "bowed groat,” “an enchanted nutmeg gilded over," and a book called "the Practice of Piety." But the principal passage of personal flattery, is that wherein the captain of the gypsies, on taking the king's hand, says::

"With you, lucky bird, I begin, let me see,

I aim at the best, and I trow you are he.
Here's some luck already, if I understand

The grounds of mine art, here's a gentleman's hand,
I'll kiss it for luck sake. You should by this line
Love a horse and a hound, but no part of a swine.
To hunt the brave stag, not so much for the food
As the weal of your body and the health of your blood.
You're a man of good means, and have territories 'store
Both by sea and by land, and were born, Sir, to more,
Which you like a lord and a prince of your peace,
Content with your havings, despise to increase.
You are no great wencher, I see by your table,
Although your mons-veneris says you are able.
You live chaste and single and have buried your wife,
And mean not to marry, by the line of your life.

Whence he that conjectures your qualities, learns

You are an honest good man, and have care of your bearns.

Your Mercury's hill too, a wit doth betoken,

Some book-craft you have, and are pretty well spoken.

But stay--in your Jupiter's mount, what is here ?
A king! a monarch! what wonders appear!

High, beautiful, just, a Jove in your parts,

A master of men, and that reign in their hearts.
I'll tell it my train

And come to you again."

A song follows, the captain returns, and the gypsies address the king as James the Just." The piece ends with a blessing on the sovereign and his five senses; being a litany, in which the poet deprecates the use of various things enumerated which are offensive to each sense; and, in deference to his majesty's performance, "The Counterblast to Tobacco," this litany prays that the sovereign and his smelling may be preserved―

"From tobacco, with the type

Of the devil's glyster-pipe."

In Jonson's "Love freed from Ignorance," a Sphynx, attended by twelve dancing she-fools, holds Love in captivity till he can explain a riddle. The priests of the Muses come and rescue Love, by interpreting the riddle to signify England and King James.

The contraries are majesty and love, which Jonson, having on his courtly as well as learned sock, discovered to be united by James in England; but which, according to a classical authority, are not met together elsewhere.

"Non bene conveniunt, nec in una sede morantur
Majestas et amor."

Charles I. received several of Ben Jonson's literary compliments both when he was Prince of Wales, and after he came to the throne. In the Masque of Gypsies he is thus addressed:

"As my captain hath begun

With the sire, I take the son;

Your hand, Sir!

Of your fortune be secure

Love and she are both at your

Command, Sir !

See what states are here at strife

Who shall tender you a wife,

A brave one.

And a fitter for a man

Than is offer'd here, you can

Not have one.

She is sister of a star,

One the noblest now that are,

Bright Hesper;

Whom the Indians in the East

Phosphor call, and in the West

Hight Vesper.

Courses even with the sun
Doth her mighty brother run,
For splendour.

Till yourself shall come to see
What we wish yet far to be
Attending;

For it skills not when or where

That begins which cannot fear
An ending.

Since your name is peace or wars,
Nought shall bound, until the stars
Uptake you;

And to all succeeding view

Heaven a constellation new

Shall make you."

After Charles came to the throne, among the other masques performed at Court, the king exhibited one, in which the queen and her ladies performed. It was called "Chloridia, or the Rights of Chloris, the goddess of flowers. In return for this masque, the queen exhibited another called, "The Triumph of Love through Callipolis, or the City of Beauty," in which the king performed. There was an antemasque of depraved lovers, as the sordid lover, the sensual, boasting, bribing, and the like, of whom the chorus makes a lustration with censers. Afterwards fifteen personages are introduced, with a Cupid before each, holding a lighted torch; these characters represented the various species of honourable love. In the middle stood the king, exhibited as the type of heroic love. After much dancing and singing, and several changes of scene, the masque concludes with the shooting up of a palm-tree, allegorical of the nuptial felicity of the king and queen. It had an imperial crown on its top, and from it several roots issued, which were twined together, and after embracing the stem, flourished through the crown.

Cardan's character of Edward VI. may be thought in some degree more encomiastic than is consistent with probability.

"Aderant enim illi gratiæ. Linquas enim multas adhuc puer callebat Latinam. Anglicam patriam, Gallicam non sapevi, ut audeo, Græcæ, Italiæ, et Hispanæ et forsan alienam. Non illi Dialectica deerat nos naturalis philosophæ principia, non musicæ. Mortalitatis nostræ imago, gravitas Regiæ Majestatis, indoles tanto principe digna. In universum magno miraculo humanarum rerum tanto, ingenii et tantæ expectationis, puer educabatur. Non hæc

Rhetorice exornata ventatem excedunt, sed sunt minora." Afterwards he says, "Fuit in hoc monstrificus puellus."

A letter written to King Henry VII., and signed by ten ladies of his court, after visiting the king's new great ship at Portsmouth, contains this passage: "Your new great ship, and the rest of your ships at Portsmouth, are things so goodly to behold, that, in our lives, we have not seen (excepting your royal person, and my lord the prince your son) a more pleasant sight."

The following preamble of the statute of the 37 Henry VIII. e. 25, may be thought to express the language of the hearts of Henry VIII.'s subjects with as much sincerity as in another statute, the abbots are represented to have voluntarily surrendered to the king their monasteries:

"We the people of this realm, have for the most part of us so lived under his majesty's sure protection, and yet so live, out of all fear and danger, as if there were no war at all, even as the small fishes of the sea, in the most tempestuous and stormy weather do lie quietly under the rock, or bank side, and are not moved with the surges of the water, nor stirred out of their quiet place, howsoever the wind bloweth."

Waller, in his poem on King Charles II.'s improvements in St: James's park, says, that the king had made a new river in the park, which was a greater achievement than building a town. Like Orpheus or Amphion, he had suddenly planted trees round its banks. The ladies will there angle for fishes and men. A new well polished mall, continues the poet,

"Gives us the joy

To see our prince his matchless force employ ;
His manly posture, and his graceful mien,
Vigor and youth in all his motion seen.
His shape so lovely, and his limbs so strong,
Confirm our hopes we shall obey him long.
No sooner has he touch'd the flying ball
But 'tis already more than half the mall,
And such a fury from his arm has got,

As from a smoking culverin 'twere shot."

Dr. Johnson, in criticizing Prior's "Carmen Seculare" observes, that in this poem "he exhausts all his powers of celebration. I mean not to accuse him of flattery. He probably thought all that he writ, and retained as much veracity as can be properly exacted

from a poet professedly encomiastic." He observes, “The death-of Queen Mary produced a subject for all the writers; perhaps no funeral was ever so poetically attended. Dryden, indeed, as a man discountenanced and deprived, was silent; but scarcely any other maker of verses omitted to bring his tribute of tuneful sorrow. An emulation of elegy was universal. Maria's name was not confined to the English language, but fills a great part of the Muse Anglicanæ. Prior, who was both a poet and a courtier, was too diligent to miss this opportunity of respect. He wrote a long ode, which was presented to the king, by whom it was not likely to be ever read.” The sovereigns who have sat on the English throne since the Revolution, have not been by any means conspicuous for their patronage of the muses, nor have their ministers generally aspired after the fame of Mæcenas. Several of their "Poets Laureat" have excited contempt and ridicule by their poetical ability. The poet Gray, in a letter to Mason, expresses himself anxious to learn who was to be promoted to the vacant laureatship; he writes, I interest myself a little in the history of it, and rather wish somebody may accept it, who will retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be retrievable. Eusden (the deceased laureat) was a writer of great hopes in his youth, though, at last, he turned out a drunken parson."

66

The names of several modern encomiasts of English sovereigns have," at some unlucky time," acquired a sinister immortality by hitching in the rhymes" of the discontented and sarcastic muse of Pope. He is perpetually sliding into his own verses the word "king" for the illustration of every crime, vice, folly or foible, insomuch that his habit amounts to a kind of poetical monomania. This peculiar vein of Pope is happily imitated by Hawkins Browne in his verses on tobacco, in which he travesties the styles of the principal English poets. The lines which he supposes Pope to have indited in praise of tobacco, conclude

"Come to thy poet, come with healing wings;
And let me taste thee, unexcised by kings!"

Among numerous sarcasms on laureats and their praises of kings, Pope writes,

"And, when I flatter, let my dirty leaves,

(Like journals, odes, and such forgotten things
As Eusden, Philips, Settle writ of kings,)
Clothe spice, line trunks, or fluttering in a row,
Befringe the rails of Bedlam or Soho."