Disease had weakened Jonson's strength, and the burning of his library and of his own mss., as his Execration upon Vulcan suffi ciently shows, must have been no mere transitory trouble to a poor poet and scholar. Moreover, from the time of the accession of Charles I. early in 1625 onwards, royal patronage would no longer be due in part to intellectual sympathy. Jonson therefore returned to writing for the stage, and in 1625 produced, with no faint heart, but with a very clear anticipation of the comments which would be made upon the reappearance of the "huge, over grown play-maker," The Staple of News (pr. 1631), a comedy excellent in some respects, but little calculated to become popular. Jonson, whose habit of body was not more conducive than were his ways of life to a healthy old age, had a paralytic stroke in 1626, and a second in 1628. In the latter year, on the death of Middleton, the appointment of city chronologer, with a salary of ioo nobles a year, was bestowed upon him. He appears to have considered the duties of his office as purely ornamental; but in 1631 his salary was suspended until he should have pre sented some fruits of his labours in his place, or—as he more succinctly phrased it—"yesterday the barbarous court of alder men have withdrawn their chandlerly pension for verjuice and mustard, /33, 6s. 8d." Arrested in 1628 by mistake on the false charge of having eulogized the assassin of Buckingham, he was soon released, and apology was made for the error. In 1629 he once more essayed the stage with the comedy of The New Inn, which was damned on the first performance. It was printed in 1631, "as it was never acted but most negligently played"; and Jonson defended himself against his critics in his spirited Ode to Himself. The epilogue to The New Inn having dwelt not without dignity upon the neglect which the poet had experienced, King Charles sent the unlucky author a gift of LI oo, and then increased his standing salary to the same sum, with the addition of an annual tierce of canary—the poet-laureate's customary royal gift, though this designation of an office, of which Jonson discharged some of what became the ordinary functions, is not mentioned in the warrant dated March 26, 1630. In 1634, by the king's desire,
Jonson's salary as chronologer to the city was again paid. To his later years belong the comedies, The Magnetic Lady (1632) and The Tale of a Tub (1633), both printed in 1640, and some masques. Jonson had quarrelled with Inigo Jones, and mocked him as Vitruvius Hoop in his last comedy.
The patronage of liberal-minded men, such as the earl, after wards duke, of Newcastle—by whom he must have been com missioned to write his last two masques Love's Welcome at Wel beck (1633) and Love's Welcome at Bolsover (1634)—and Vis count Falkland, was not wanting. Jonson was the acknowledged chief of the English world of letters, both at the festive meet ings where he ruled the roast among the younger authors whose pride it was to be "sealed of the tribe of Ben," and by the avowal of grave writers, old or young, not one of whom would have ventured to dispute his titular pre-eminence. Nor was he to the last unconscious of the claims upon him which his position brought with it. When, nearly two years after he had lost his surviving son, death came upon the sick old man on Aug. 6, 1637, he left behind him an unfinished work of great beauty, the pastoral drama of The Sad Shepherd (printed in 1641). For 4o years, he said in the prologue, he had feasted the public; at first he could scarce hit its taste, but patience had at last enabled it to identify itself with the working of his pen.
Jonson was buried on the north side of the nave in West minster Abbey, and the inscription, "0 Rare Ben Jonson," was cut in the slab over his grave. In the beginning of the 18th century a portrait bust was put up to his memory in the Poets' Corner by Harley, earl of Oxford. Of Honthorst's portrait of Jonson at knole Park there is a copy in the National Portrait Gallery ; another was engraved by W. Marshall for the 1640 edition of his Poems.