With waiting on his cup: these be favours,

Which do assure me that he cannot be short-liv'd. Isab. Sweet Hieronimo!

Hier. I wonder how this fellow got his clothes : Sirrah, sirrah, I'll know the truth of all: Jaques, run to the duke of Castile's presently, And bid my son Horatio to come home,

I and his mother have had strange dreams to-night; Do you hear me, sir?

Jaques. Ay, sir.

Hier. Well, sir, be gone. Pedro, come hither; Know'st thou who this is?

Pedro. Too well, sir.

Hier. Too well! Who, who is it? Peace, Isabella.

Nay, blush not, man.

Pedro. It is my lord Horatio.

Hier. Ha, ha, St. James; but this doth make me laugh.

That there are more deluded than myself.

Pedro. Deluded?

Hier. Ay, I would have sworn myself within this

hour,

That this had been my son Horatio,

His garments are so like: ha! are they not great persuasions?

Isab. O, would to God it were not so!

Hier. Were not, Isabella? dost thou dream it is?

Can thy soft bosom entertain a thought

That such a black deed of mischief should be done
On one so pure and spotless as our son?
Away! I am ashamed.

Isab. Dear Hieronimo,

Cast a more serious eye upon thy grief,
Weak apprehension gives but weak belief.

Hier. It was a man sure that was hang'd up here, A youth, as I remember: I cut him down.

If it should prove my son, now, after all,
Say you, say you! light, lend me a taper;
Let me look again.

O God! confusion, mischief, torment, death and hell,
Drop all your stings at once in my cold bosom,
That now is stiff with horror; kill me quickly :
Be gracious to me, thou infective night,
And drop this deed of murder down on me;
Gird in my waste of grief with thy large darkness,
And let me not survive to see the light,

May put me in the mind I had a son.

Isab. O sweet Horatio! O my dearest son! Hier. How strangely had I lost my way to grief!

[Enter two Portingals, and HIERONIMO meets them.]

Hier. 'Tis neither as you think, nor as you think, Nor as you think: you are wide all:

These slippers are not mine, they were my son Horatio's.

My son? And what's a son?

A thing begot within a pair of minutes-thereabout:
A lump bred up in darkness, and doth serve
To balance those light creatures we call women:
And, at nine months' end, creeps forth to light.
What is there yet in a son,

To make a father doat, rave, or run mad?
Being born it pouts, cries, raves, and breeds teeth.
What is there yet in a son?

He must be fed, be taught to go, and speak:

Ay, or yet: why might not a man love a calf as well? Or melt in passion o'er a striking kid, as for a son? Methinks, a young bacon,

Or a fine little smooth horse colt,

Should move a man as much as doth a son;

For one of these, in very little time,

Will grow to some good use; whereas a son,
The more he grows in stature and in years,
The more unsquared, unbevelled he appears,
Reckons his parents among the rank of fools,
Strikes care upon their heads with his mad riots :
Makes them look old before they meet with age.
This is a son; And what a loss were this considered
truly?

O, but my Horatio grew out of reach of those
Insatiate humours : he loved his loving parents;
He was my comfort and his mother's joy-
The very arm that did hold up our house :
Our hopes were stored up in him:

None but a damned murderer could hate him.
He had not seen the back of nineteen years,

When his strong arm unhorsed the proud Prince
Balthazar ;

And his great mind, too full of honour, took him to Mercy that valiant but ignoble Portingal.

Well, heaven is heaven still!

And there is Nemesis and Furies,

And things called whips;

And they sometimes do meet with murderers :
They do not always escape, that's some comfort.

Ay, ay, ay, and then time steals on, and steals, and

steals,

Till violence leaps forth, like thunder, wrapped

In a ball of fire,

And so doth bring confusion to them all.

BEN JONSON'S CONVERSATIONS

WITH WILLIAM DRUMMOND

OF HAWTHORNDEN.

[The recovery of these Notes is one of the innumerable services rendered to the literature of his country by Mr. David Laing, to regard whom with affection and respect is in my case an hereditary obligation. I extract the following from his introductory remarks to the Shakspeare Society reprint:

"While examining some of the manuscript collections of sir Robert Sibbald, a well-known antiquary and physician in Edinburgh, I was agreeably surprised to find in a volume of Adversaria what bears very evident marks of being a literal transcript of Drummond's original notes. The volume has no date, but was probably anterior to 1710, when Sibbald was in his seventieth year. It is transcribed with his own hand; and the volume containing it was purchased after his death, with the rest of his MSS., for the Faculty of Advocates, in 1723. He might either have been a personal acquaintance of sir William Drummond, or have obtained the use of the original papers through his friend, bishop Sage, who contributed to the publication of Drummond's Works in 1711. At all events, sir Robert Sibbald was merely an industrious antiquary, with considerable learning and unwearied assiduity, and no doubt copied these Notes on account of the literary information they contained; while his character is a sufficient warrant for the accuracy of the transcript. Conceiving it, therefore, to be a literary document of considerable interest, after communicating it to sir Walter Scott, and other gentlemen well qualified to judge of its genuineness—and no doubt has ever been expressed on this head -it was communicated to a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries and printed in the Archeologia Scotica as a sequel to the Account of the Hawthornden Manuscripts."

Jonson set out from London in the summer of 1618, when he was in his forty-sixth year. F. C.]