mentioned with eulogy, he voluntarily accompanied his brother poets to prison, where he remained until the kind offices of Camden and Selden secured the release of all. A report had been circulated that the comic triumvirate were to suffer a degrading punishment not uncommon in those ruder and fiercer times. It was merely this: Their ears were to be cropped and their noses slit. Escape from the threatened mutilation was fitting cause of ovation.
Jonson gave an entertainment to celebrate their deliverance, and to receive the congratulations of friends on the unscathed integrity of their features. Camden and Selden, who had saved the faces of Jonson and his brother bards, graced the banquet with their presence. An anecdote in connection with this, told of his mother, shows that that lady had in her character a tinge of romance, and something of Spartan heroism. She sat at the table with her son's guests, pledged him in a goblet of wine, and showed him a paper "of strong and lusty poison," which, had the expected sentence been pronounced, she designed to have mingled with his drink, and to have partaken of herself.
After his release from this second incarceration, he produced "The Masque of Blackness," written for some court festivities, but not as has been wilfully asserted, full of fulsome adulation to the King. He was also at this time employed upon his translation of Horace, and his version of Aristotle's "Poetics." The latter perished in the fire, which destroyed so many of his manuscripts, and which he has commemorated by his poem "The Execration of Vulcan."
In 1605, he gave to the world the comedy which ranks next in merit to "Every Man in his Humour." "Volpone; or, The Fox" was received with great applause. It is dedicated to the Universities in a long and eloquent
