If Jonson is to be believed, the prisoners had been threatened with mutilation of their ears and noses, and, "at the midst of the feast his old mother drank to him, and showed him a paper which she had intended (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prison among his drink, which was full of lusty strong poison ; and that she was no churl, she told him, she minded first to have drunk of it herself." This incident can hardly be the imprisonment during which Jonson sought the good offices of the earl of Salisbury in a letter endorsed 1605, in which he explains that since his "first error" he has so "attempered" his style as to have "given no cause to any good man of grief." Some authorities have surmised that there were two imprisonments, and that the play which occasioned the trouble, in which both Chapman and Jonson took part, was Sir Gyles Goosecappe, and that the last im prisonment of the two poets was shortly after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. In the mysterious history of the Gun powder Plot Jonson certainly had some obscure part. On Nov. 7, very soon after the discovery of the conspiracy, the council appears to have sent for him and to have asked him, as a loyal Roman Catholic, to use his good offices in inducing the priests to do something required by the council. Jonson tried, and failed; he declares, in a letter to Lord Salisbury, that "they (the priests) are all so enweaved in it that it will make 500 gentlemen less of the religion within this week, if they carry their understanding about them." Jonson did not himself return to the Church of England until five years later, however much it might have been to his advantage to do so.
was conferred upon him, and Jonson published the first volume of the folio collected edition of his works.
He had other patrons more bountiful than the Crown, and (in 1613) had travelled to France as governor to the eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh, then a State prisoner in the Tower, for whose society Jonson probably gained a liking at the Mermaid Tavern in Brest street, Cheapside. After 1616 Jonson continued to pro duce masques and entertainments when called upon ; but he was attracted by many other literary pursuits. He was already entitled to lord it at the Mermaid, where his quick antagonist in earlier wit-combats (if Fuller's famous description be authentic) no longer apeared even on a visit from his comfortable retreat at Stratford. That on the other hand Ben carried his wicked town habits into Warwickshire, and there, together with Drayton, made Shakespeare drink so hard with them as to bring upon himself the fatal fever which ended his days, is a scandal with which we may fairly refuse to load Jonson's memory. That he had a share in the preparing for the press of the first folio of Shakespeare, or in the composition of its preface, is of course a mere conjecture.
In the year 1618, like Samuel Johnson a century and a half afterwards, Ben resolved to have a real holiday for once, and about midsummer started for his ancestral country, Scotland. He had determined to make the journey on foot; and he was fol lowed by John Taylor, the water-poet, who proposed to accom plish his pilgrimage without a penny in his pocket. Jonson, who put money in his good friend's purse when he came up with him at Leith, spent more than a year and a half in Scotland, being elected a burgess in Edinburgh. The best-remembered hospitality which he enjoyed was that of the learned Scottish poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden, to which we owe the so-called Con versations. In these famous jottings, the work of no extenuating hand, Jonson lives for us to this day, delivering his censures, terse as they are, in an expansive mood whether of praise or of blame; he is ungenerously described in the postscript added by his fatigued and at times irritated host as "a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others." A poetical ac count of his journey, "with all the adventures," which Jonson had intended to entitle The Discoverie, was burnt with Jonson's library, a calamity which befell him probably in After his return to London early in May 1619, Jonson visited Oxford to receive the degree of M.A. Among his noble patrons and patronesses were the countess of Rutland (Sidney's daughter) and her cousin Lady Wroth. The extremely spirited Gipsies Meta morphosed (1621) was thrice presented before the king, who granted the poet the reversion of the office of master of the revels, besides proposing to confer upon him the honour of knighthood. This honour Jonson (hardly in deference to the memory of Sir Petronel Flash) declined; but there was no reason why he should not gratefully accept the increase of his pension in the same year (1621) to imp—a temporary increase only, inasmuch as it still stood at ioo marks when afterwards augmented by Charles I.