pouring from their mouths and noses. In an old book called The English Hue and Crie (printed about 1610), it takes something like this form :

"A certain Welchman, coming newly to London, and beholding one to take Tobacco, never seeing the like before, and not knowing the manner of it, but perceiving him vent smoak so fast, and supposing his inward parts to be on fire, screamed an alarm, and dashed over him a big pot of Beer."

King James' Counterblaste to the Use of Tobacco, had about the same efficacy with the Welshman's beer-pot. But to show the King's method of arguing, I give one little whiff of it. Tobacco-lovers of that day alleged that it cleared the head and body of ugly rheums and distillations;

"But," says the King, "the fallacy of this argument may easily appeare, by my late preceding description of the skyey meteors. For even as the smoaky Vapors sucked up by the sunne and stay'd in the lowest and colde region of the Ayre, are there contracted into clouds, and turned into Raine, and such other watery meteors: so this nasty smoke sucked up by the Nose, and imprisoned in the cold and moist braines, is by their colde and wet faculty, turned and cast forth againe in watery distillations, and so are you made free and purged of nothing, but that where with you wilfully burdened yourselves."

Is it any wonder people kept on smoking? He reasoned in much the same way about church matters; is it any wonder the Scotch would not have Anglicanism thrust upon them?

The King died at last (1625), aged fifty-nine, at his palace of Theobalds, a little out of London, and very famous, as I have said, for its fine gardens; and these gardens this prematurely old and shattered man did greatly love; loved perhaps more than his children. I do not think Charles mourned for him very grievously; but, of a surety there was no warrant for the half-hinted allegation of Milton's (at a later day) that the royal son was concerned in some parricidal scheme. There was, however, nowhere great mourning for James.

A New King and some Literary Survivors.

The new King, his son, was a well-built young fellow of twenty-five, of fine appearance, well taught, and just on the eve of his marriage to Henrietta of France. He had a better taste than his father, and lived a more orderly life; indeed, he was every way decorous save in an obstinate temper and in absurd

notions about his kingly prerogative.

He loved play-going and he loved poetry, though not so accessible as his father had been to the buffoonery of the water-poet Taylor, or the tipsy obeisance of old Ben Jonson. For Ben Jonson was still living, not yet much over fifty, though with his great bulk and reeling gait seeming nearer seventy; now, too, since Shakespeare is gone, easily at the head of all the literary workers in London; indeed, in some sense always at the head by reason of his dogged self-insistence and his braggadocio. All the street world * knows him, as he swaggers along the Strand to his new jolly rendezvous at the Devil Tavern, near St. Dunstan's, in Fleet Street-not far off from the Temple Church-where he and his fellows meet in the Apollo Chamber, over whose door Ben has written:

"Welcome, all who lead or follow

To the oracle of Apollo!

Here he speaks out of his pottle

On the tripos-his tower-bottle," etc.

Of all we have named hitherto among the Elizabethan poets, the only ones who would be likely to

*London was not over-large at this day; its population counted about 175,000.

appear there in Charles L.'s time would be George Chapman, of the Homer translation; staid and very old now, with snowy hair; and Dekker- what time he was out of prison for debt; possibly, too, John Marston. Poor Ben Jonson wrote about this time his last play, which did not take either with courtiers or the public; whereupon the old grumbler was more rough than ever, and died a few years thereafter, wretchedly poor, and was put into the ground-upright, tradition says, as into a well-in Westminster Abbey. There one may walk over his name and his crown; and this is the last we shall see of him, whose swagger has belonged to three reigns.

Among other writers known to these times and who went somewhiles to these suppers at the Apollo was James Howell,* notable because he wrote so much; and I specially name him because he was the earliest and best type of what we should call a hackwriter; ready for anything; a shrewd salesman, too, of all he did write; travelling largely — having

* James Howell, b. 1594; d. 1666. He was son of a minister in Carmarthenshire, and took his degree at Oxford in

modern instincts, I think; making small capital whether of learning or money reach enormously. He was immensely popular, too, in his day; a Welshman by birth, and never wrote at all till past forty; but afterward he kept at it with a terrible pertinacity. He gives quaint advice about foreign travel, with some shrewdness cropping out in it. Thus of languages he says:

"Whereas, for other Tongues one may attaine to speak them to very good purpose, and get their good will at any age; the French tongue, by reason of the huge difference 'twixt their writing and speaking, will put one often into fits of despaire and passion; but the Learner must not be daunted a whit at that, but after a little intermission hee must come on more strongly, and with a pertinacity of resolution set upon her againe and againe, and woo her as one would do a coy mistress, with a kind of importunity, until he over-master her: She will be very plyable at last."

Then he says, for improvement, it is well to have the acquaintance of some ancient nun, with whom one may talk through the grated windows-for they have all the news, and "they will entertain discourse till one be weary, if one bestow on them now and then some small bagatells-as English Gloves, or Knives, or Ribands and before hee go over,