bury mustard pills," containing a notable biting sauce. The king was to eat no more Christmas pies. If Charles would not turn R. C., he was no longer to be C. R. Among other doomed victims were Burnet, the historian, and the celebrated controversialist, Stillingfleet. Père la Chaise, the confessor of Louis the Fourteenth, had sent ten thousand pounds for the king's assassin, a Spaniard was ready with the same handsome reward, and a Benedictine prior had promised six thousand pounds. These detestable falsehoods were eagerly swallowed by a multitude whom Charles's French alliance had driven insane with suspicion. Two months later, on the 17th of October, the supposed murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, whose body was found in a ditch a little north of Primrose Hill, produced a fresh popular paroxysm. The justice had really committed suicide, but it was supposed that he had been murdered by two men of the Queen's Chapel at Somerset House. A Captain Bedloe, a man still more infamous, if possible, than even Oates, now presented himself. He was known to be a thief and swindler. This base rascal, careless whom he sent to Tyburn or to Tower Hill, swore point-blank to Godfrey's murder by the queen's Popish servants. Finding the populace eager for fresh lies, he asserted that ten thousand men from Flanders were to be landed in Bridlington Bay, and pushed on at once, in order to seize Hull. French forces from Brest were simultaneously to surprise Jersey and Guernsey. In Radnorshire, Lords Powis and Peters were also to form an army, aided by twenty thousand pilgrims sent from Spain to Milford Haven. Forty thousand Catholics, supplied with money by Lord Stafford, Lord Carrington, Lord Brudenel, and Coleman, the ex-secretary of the Duchess of York, were to be posted at the alehouse doors in London, in readiness, when the signal of rising was given, to murder the soldiers as they hurried out of their quarters. Bedloe himself, for various murders, had been promised four thousand pounds, a commission from Lord Bellasis, and a benediction from the pope. No wonder that the alarmed City instantly chained up its gates, and that the foolish City chamberlain declared that, but for these precautions, "all true Protestants would rise some morning with their throats cut." Shaftesbury and other plotters took good care to keep the popular frenzy up to blood heat. The dead body of Godfrey was car ried on a bier to its grave at St. Martin'sin-the-Fields, preceded by seventy-two Protestant divines, and followed by a thousand persons of distinction, while at the func ral sermon two stalwart rectors mounted the pulpit, and stood on either side of the preacher, lest he should be murdered by the Papists before the very eyes of the congregation. As for Oates, he was lodged in Whitehall, protected, guarded, and cheered by a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year. But the mob was too much alarmed not to be cruel. The myriad heads of the Hydra thirsted for blood. Coleman, Father Leland, Grove, and Pickering were all hung, and Poole, Green, and Berry, suspected of Godfrey's murder, followed them to death. The Duke of York retired to Brussels. The Duke of Monmouth grew more and more popular and dangerous, and his legitimacy was now asserted. In the full furnace-heat of this madness, Shaftesbury and his partisans brought in their famous bill for the total exclusion of the Duke of York from the crown of England and Ireland, and the Lower House passed this bill by a majority of seventy-nine. The street processions organised by Shaftesbury to drive away the Duke of York and scare Charles, were on a gigantic scale, and appealed strongly to the excited people. First came: 1. Six whifflers (men to clear the way) in pioneers' caps and red waistcoats. 2. A bellman ringing his bell and continually crying with "a dolesome voice," "Remember Justice Godfrey." 3. An effigy representing the unfortunate justice as he was found near Primrose Hill, in a decent black habit, white gloves, the cravat with which it was supposed he was strangled, white gloves, and large spots of blood on his wrists, breast, and shirt, rode upon a white horse, held up by a fictitious murderer who rode behind him, in the way it was presumed the corpse was carried from Somerset House. 4. A priest in a surplice and cope embroidered with skulls, cross-bones, and skeletons. He gave away pardons very lavishly to all who promised to murder Protestants, acts which he loudly proclaimed to be meritorious. 5. A priest bearing a great silver cross. 6. Four Carmelite friars in black and white robes. 7. Four Greyfriars. 8. Six Jesuits with bloody daggers. 9. "Four wind musicks," called the waits, playing all the way-loud and brazen enough, no doubt, were the four wind musicks. 10. Four bishops in purple, with lawn sleeves, golden crosses on their breasts, and crosses in their hands. 11. Four other bishops "in their pontificalibus;" that is, surplices, rich embroidered copes, and golden mitres. 12. Six flaunting cardinals in scarlet robes and broad red hats. 13. The pope's chief physician with Jesuits' powder (Peruvian bark), and many grotesque and unmentionable badges of his office. 14. Two more priests in surplices, bearing golden crosses. Then came the pope himself in a scarlet chair of state, embroidered with golden bells and crosses. His holiness's feet were on a cushion, and a boy in a surplice sat on each side of him, holding a white silk banner painted with red crosses and "bloody consecrated daggers." The pope was arrayed in a rich scarlet gown lined with ermine, and daubed with gold and silver lace. He wore his triple tiara and a triple gilt collar of sham jewels, beads, and Agnus Dei, and prominently above the rest Saint Peter's potent keys. At the pope's back tripped and whispered the devil, waving a blazing torch, urging his holiness aloud to murder the king, forge a pretended Presbyterian plot, and fire the City again. The pope was followed by a body-guard of one hundred and fifty torches, followed by several thousand volunteer flambeauxbearers, and a fellow whom Roger North describes, who, with a stentorophonic tube (a speaking-trumpet), kept remorselessly bellowing "Abhorrers! Abhorrers!" (the name given by the Whigs to the enemies of the Exclusion Bill). Last of all came an obsequious, time-serving, civil gentleman, who was meant to represent either Sir Roger l'Estrange (a Tory journalist and pamphleteer in the pay of Louis the Fourteenth) or the Duke of York. "Taking all in good part, he went on his way to the fire." The whole way, say contemporaneous writers, the balconies, windows, and roofs were covered with shouting multitudes, expressing their abhorrence of Popery, and the Whigs and Tories fought with volleys of squibs. The procession moved on in slow and solemn state, till after some hours it reached Temple Bar, where the houses were turned into actual mountains of clamorous human beings. After a great display of fireworks, a huge bonfire was built up at the Inner Temple Gate to entertain the spectators, and his holiness, after 'some compliments and reluctances," was toppled into the flames, the devil, who till then accompanied him as his faithful adviser, laughing as he shifted down from his chair, and left the pontiff to his fate. That same memorable evening there were boufires in most of the other chief streets of London, the people shouting round them, "Let Popery perish, and Papists, with their plots and counterplots, be for ever confounded." It was these processions that led the contemptuous and classical Tories to invent the word mob, "mobile vulgus," and it was about this time the nicknames Whig (sour whey) and Tory (Irish rebel) were first used in political warfare. Even in Swift's time the processions continued; and one especial one, in which Addison was supposed to be mixed up, was violently stopped by the Tory government, who caused the wax figures to be seized in Drury-lane. In Wilkes's time the mob again came trooping to Temple Bar to burn a jack-boot, in ridicule of the obnoxious Lord Bute. The celebrated Devil Tavern, in the reign of King James the First, stood in the close, now Child's-place, No. 2, Fleetstreet, built by Child the eminent banker next the Bar, in 1788. Ben Jonson's immortal Apollo Club, where the wittiest and wisest of England so often met, has consecrated this place for ever. The Apollo Club, established by the rugged friend of Shakespeare, held its merry meetings in a room of the Devil Tavern. The Apollo room, a large and handsome one, and furnished with a gallery for music, was in later times frequently used for balls, and here, in 1775, Doctor Kenrick gave his lectures on Shakespeare. Over the door of the room, where so much canary had been tossed off, and where so many wise and brilliant men had laughed away the midnight, was a slab, still preserved, with the following roystering verses, written in gold letters on a black ground. They were probably from the pen of Ben Jonson, or that jovial Devonshire parson, Herrick: Welcome all who lead or follow That sits watering with the muses; Those dull girls no good can mean us, Clears the brain, makes wit the quicker, Oh, rare Ben Jonson! The last four words (forming the epitaph which an Oxfordshire baronet had cut upon the paving-stone over the poet's grave in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey) we must presume to have been added to the verses after Jonson's death. On a slab of black marble, over the chimney-piece of this classic room, were inscribed the following lines, written, as Gifford thinks, in imitation of those rules of the Roman entertainments, so industriously collected by the learned Lipsius. We append the old translation, written by we know not whom, unworthy as it is of the crisp Latin of the original code: As the fund of our pleasure let each pay his shot, in, Far hence be the sad, the lewd fop and the sot, For such have the plagues of good company been. Let the learned and witty, the jovial and gay, The generous and honest compose our free state, And the more to exalt our delight whilst we stay, Let none be debarred from his choice female mate. Let no scent offensive the chamber infest, quently practised, for Ben was too ponderous for the brawl or the coranto. Clause fifteen guards against the importunities and pertinacities of those intrusive wandering musicians who, in the seventeenth century, haunted taverns, and levied contributions on the guests. When the talk was good, and men like Donne and Selden were exchanging learning, or Randolph and Broome wit, this rough music forced upon the company would have been especially disagreeable, and Ben did well to bar out such 'saucy fiddlers." These laws, says that genial critic, Leigh Hunt, for whom, however, Ben was far too muscular and robust, "are composed in his usual style of elaborate and compiled learning, not without a taste of that dictatorial self-sufficiency which forms an indelible part of his character." There is no doubt that the Apollo Club was one of the earliest associations of the kind known in London. Many of the elements of the modern club were comprehended in its constitution. The meetings were more formal than those earlier ones at the Mermaid. Its members had a room and rules of their own. The attendance was habitual though voluntary. No chance guest of the tavern could intrude on Ben and his tribe. Every man paid for himself, and probably also joined in the subscription for the use of the room, which was no doubt set apart for the use of the club at The thrifty Let fancy not cost prepare all our dishes, wishes. Let's have no disturbance about taking place, To show your nice breeding or out of vain pride; Let our wines without mixture or strum be all fine, To push on the drinking a moderate bottle. and simple age had not yet dreamed of such palaces as now adorn Pall Mall and Piccadilly; of liveried servants, libraries, and splendid furniture. The Apollo room, where men who had known Shakespeare talked of him and repeated his merry sayings, had no doubt a sanded or rush-strewn floor, with tree-boughs in the fireplace in summer, and a cheerful fire in winter. Plain stamped leather hangings or simple wains cot adorned the walls, and the meat was served on shining pewter. The drawers were such nimble creatures as the Francis Shakespeare sketched in Henry the Fourth, and Sir Simon himself, the landlord of the house, was no doubt a rosy-faced, portly personage, with much of Falstaff's promptness at banter, and a fondness for odd sayings stolen from plays, and quaint proverbs and snatches of old world songs, that were ready missiles against satirical guests. It is but waste castle-building even to attempt to picture one of those gatherings in the Apollo room, but we must perforce see one figure standing out above the rest and throned above all. That figure is Ben Jonson, the monarch, father, and despot of the company. Burly and massive as the subsequent sultan of London clubs, equally overbearing and equally irresistible, he has a face marked like Johnson's by disease, and has a malign melancholy equally tainting his blood, and driving him from the lonely study to the crowded tavern, from the dusty quiet of silent folios to the noise, mirth, and banter of taverns. Ben himself has sketched his own portrait, "his mountain belly and his rocky face." His features are massive and strongly marked, his mouth is grim and sour. Many chagrins, many vexations, have furrowed that massive, knotty brow. It has taken many hogsheads of good canary to fill out that great elephantine carcass, many intellectual victories in the wrestling ring Ben must have won before he gained that lordly, confident air, that rough readiness with which he tomahawks an antagonist. He rolls in the presidential chair the undisputed Grand Turk of the chief tavern club of London. "Let nobody repeat to us insipid poetry," he writes, as if all that he should read of his own must infallibly be otherwise. There would indeed have been humility in Jonson if he had thought his own poems insipid. Rough and knotty they might be, harsh and crabbed they sometimes were, but Ben was never insipid till the palsy seized him. Jonson's arrogance came from disappointment, as Doctor Johnson's came from success. With more sunshine Ben Jonson would have ripened and mellowed, with more east wind Doctor Johnson would have been less domineering. Every member of the Devil Club must have known the main facts of Ben Jonson's life. They had all heard that he was of Scotch descent, his father a clergyman, suffering imprisonment under Queen Mary, probably for his staunch Protestantism. His mother, soon after his father's death, married a small builder or master-bricklayer. The sturdy boy was sent by a friend to Westminster School, where Camden the historian was the second master. At sixteen probably Jonson was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, according to Fuller. Called home to work at his father's trade, he soon threw down hod and trowel and joined the army in Flanders (Gifford says probably at the time that Vere was recovering the spirit of the army by storming Daventer, and other acts of gallantry). Ben there fought and killed an enemy in single combat, and carried off his spoils in the sight of both armies. "I did not shame the profession of arms by my actions," he used to say afterwards. On his return home, Ben Jonson, then about nineteen, took to the stage; Wood says, to the Green Curtain, an obscure theatre in Shoreditch, with what success is uncertain. He fought a duel with a brother actor, and killing him, was thrown into prison for murder, and narrowly escaped the gallows. His antagonist, as he afterwards told Drummond, had come into the field with a sword ten inches longer than his own. In prison he turned Roman Catholic, and on his release married. Two years later, 1578, he wrote his admirable play, Every Man in his Humour. There is a groundless tradition that Shakespeare, ten years older than Jonson, read the play in the manuscript, and saved it from rejection. But Gifford has shown that it was really brought out at the Rose, a rival theatre to the Globe. Yet this is certain, that the play was afterwards altered for the Globe, and that Shakespeare appeared in one of the characters. At this time Ben, though poor, and living by altering plays for Henslowe and Alleyn, the managers, who advanced small sums upon the work, was yet friendly with Drayton and Chapman, Rowley, Middleton, and Fletcher, and had been writing for three years in conjunction with his subsequent enemies, Marston and Decker. His next play, Every Man out of his Humour, was honoured by the presence of Elizabeth. Soon after the accession of James, the poet fell into disgrace. For a satirical passage in Eastward Ho, against "the industrious Scots," written by Jonson, Chapman, and Marston, the three dramatists were thrown into prison. A report was at first spread that they would have their ears and noses slit in the pillory. On their release they gave an entertainment, at which Camden and Selden were present. At this feast Ben's mother drank to him, and showed him a paper containing a strong and lusty poison, which she had intended to have mixed with his drink had he been sentenced to such a degrading punishment. "To show she was no churl," Jonson adds, "she designed to have first drank of it herself." In 1605, two years after James's accession, Ben Jonson produced his fine play of the Fox, in which he was unjustly supposed to have ridiculed Sir Richard Sutton, the excellent founder of the Charter House; but Ben had many enemies, and he lashed them into incessant rages. About this time Ben Jonson left the Church of Rome, and, as Drummond perhaps maliciously reports, in the fervour of his zeal drank out the full cup of wine at his first communion. In 1606, for the unfortunate marriage of the Earl of Essex, Jonson began one of the earliest and most beautiful of his long series of masques. The poet, now a favourite with James, became laureate, receiving a pension for life of a hundred marks. Three years after this, Daniel, the previous court poet, died, and James would now have knighted Ben had not the poet been unwilling. The king, however, gave him a reversionary grant of the office of Master of the Revels, a post which he never filled. Soon after the accession of Charles the First, Jonson's health seems to have given way. Always scorbutic, he now became palsied and dropsical. His play of the New Inn was driven from the stage by his malignant enemies, who gained courage when the old lion grew sick. The kindly king instantly sent him a hundred pounds; he soon afterwards granted the poet's petition to make the pension of one hundred marks two hundred pounds, and added, moreover, an annual tierce of canary (Jonson's favourite wine). Evils now fell fast as snow-flakes on the dying man. Inigo Jones, jealous of his violent coadjutor, had him removed from the office of Writer of Court Masques, and the Court of Aldermen (1631) withdrew his City poet's annual pension of one hundred nobles. He died poor, in 1637. His wife and children died before him. Child's bank, the oldest in London, was founded in the reign of Charles the First, by Francis Child, an apprentice of William Wheeler, goldsmith, whose daughter he married. The banker's old street sign, the Marigold, still hangs in the front office, with the motto "Ainsi mon ame" gilt upon a green ground, and the marigold (often mistaken for a rising sun) still blooms pleasantly upon the cheques. With this trusty firm Charles the Second, Nell Gwynne, Prince Rupert, and, last not least, Samuel Pepys, banked, and in that dim ecclesiastical-looking room over the gateway are still kept the accounts of Alderman Backwell, a partner of the first Child, for the sale of Dunkirk to the French, a bargain that led to the fall of Lord Clarendon, who was supposed to have reared his great palace in Piccadilly (the site of Albemarlestreet) with the money. It was at Child and Blanchard's (next door to Temple Bar) that, in 1678, Dryden deposited the fifty pounds reward he offered for the detection of Rochester's bullies, who had fallen upon and beaten him one winter evening in Rosealley. In 1689, Sir Francis Child was saved from failure by fourteen hundred pounds lent his bank by the Duchess of Marlborough. Hogarth is said to have sketched the presentation of the timely aid. The late beautiful Countess of Jersey was a partner in the firm, and among the present partners is a descendant of Addison. THE FIRST SNOW. They pause as the beadle passes by, A cold ball strikes him behind the ears! Off goes his hat-his red face turns, All things around us, high or low, Are under the spell of the white, white snow; THE BLUEBOTTLE FLY. IN FOUR CHAPTERS. CHAPTER IV. I HAVE never been able to remember how the remainder of this dread holiday was spent. Memory can recal nothing but a sick and weary search after repose- -a yearning desire to lie down and forget all that had taken place since the morning; the scenes in which I had played such unwilling part; in short, my very self. But I walked on-on-on, for I could not rest, trying in vain to lay my aching head against a tree, or sitting down for a moment amid the grass and fern-leaves. But the endeavour was useless. No sooner were my limbs at case than the whirring |