At the Mermaid

The Mermaid Tavern, in Cheap side, was the favourite resort of the great Elizabeth an dramatists and poets. Raleigh’s Club at the Mermaid was the meeting-place of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, where he feasted with Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Mas singer, Donne, Drayton, Camden, Selden, and the rest. “At this meeting-place of the gods,” says Heywood, in his Hierarchy of Angels :— “Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill Commanded mirth or pa ion, was but Will , And famous Jonson, tho’ his learned pen Be dipt in Castaly, is still but Ben .” Mr. Browning introduces us to Shakespeare protesting that he makes no claim and has no desire to be the leader of a new school of poetry. In the person of Shakespeare Mr. Browning tells the world that if they want to know anything about him they must take his ideas as they are expre ed in his works, not seek to pry into his life and opinions behind them. His works are the world’s, his rest is his own. He protests, too, that when he utters opinions and expre es ideas dramatically they are not to be snatched at by leaders of sects and parties, and bottled as specimens for their museums, or used to give authority to their own pet principles. He does not set open the door of his bard’s breast: on the contrary, he bars his portal, and leaves his work and his inquisitive visitors alike “outside.” Notwithstanding this emphatic declaration, it is probable that few great poets have opened their hearts to the world more completely than Mr. Browning: it is as easy to construct his personality from his works as it is to reconstruct an old Greek temple from the sculptured stones which are scattered on its site. All Mr. Browning’s characters talk the Browning tongue, and are as little given to barring their portals as he to closing the door of his breast. This fact must not, of course, be unduly pre ed. The utterances of Caliban are not to be put on the same level as the thoughts, expre ed a hundred times, which justify the ways of God to man. Having declared himself as determined to let the public have no glimpse inside his breast, in Stanza 10 be proceeds to admit us to his innermost soul, in its joy of life and golden optimism. It is as perfect a picture of the poet’s healthy mind as he could po ibly have given us, and is an earnest deprecation of the idea that a poet must nece arily be more or le insane. Notes. — Oreichalch (7), a mixed metal resembling bra —bronze. “ Threw Venus ” (15): in dice the best cast (three sixes) was called “Venus.” Ben Jonson tells us that his own wife was “a shrew, yet honest.”