A Paradice on earth is found, Though farre from vulgar sight, Which, with those pleasures doth abound, That it Elizium hight,--
of its groves of stately trees, its merle and mavis, its daisies damasking the green, its spreading vines upon the "cleeves," its ripening fruits:
The Poets Paradice this is, To which but few can come; The Muses onely bower of blisse, Their Deare Elizium.
It was the widow of the third Earl, Anne (Clifford), Countess of Dorset and, afterwards, of Pembroke and Montgomery,[126] who erected the monument to Drayton in the Poets' Corner. That Beaumont was acquainted with this family of poets and patrons of art is, therefore, in every way more than probable; and there is a poetic pleasure in the reflection that the family still retains, in the house which Beaumont probably often visited, this noble presentment of the dramatist.
The portrait at Nuneham, which I have mentioned above, is not so life-like as that at Knole: it lacks the shading. But it is for us most expressive: it is that of an older man, spade-bearded, of broader brow, higher cheek-bones, and face falling away toward the chin; of the same magnanimity and grace, but with eyes more almond-shaped and sensitive, and eloquent of illness. It is the likeness of Beaumont approaching the portals of death.
[Illustration: By permission of Mr. Lewis Harcourt.
Of the personality of Beaumont we have already had glimpses through the window of his non-dramatic poems. His letter to Ben Jonson has revealed him chafing in enforced exile from London, amusedly tolerant of the "standing family-jests" of country gentlemen, tired of "water mixed with claret-lees," "with one draught" of which "man's invention fades," and yearning for the Mermaid wine of poetic converse, "nimble, and full of subtle flame." Other verses to Jonson and to Fletcher express his scorn of "the wild applause of common people," his confidence in sympathetic genius and Time as the only arbiters of literary worth. In still other poems, lyric, epistolary, and elegiac, we have savoured the tang of his humour,--unsophisticated, somewhat ammoniac; and from them have caught his habit of emotional utterance, frank and sincere, whether in admiration, love, or indignation. We have grown acquainted with his reverence for womanly purity; with his religion of suffering, his recognition of mortal pathos, irony, futility, and yet of inscrutable purpose and control, and of the countervailing serenity that awaits us in the grave. An amusing side-light is thrown upon his character by Jonson who told Drummond of Hawthornden, that "Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses." We are glad to know that a man of Jonson's well-attested self-esteem encountered in Beaumont an arrogance and a consciousness of poetic superiority; that even this "great lover and praiser of himself, contemner and scorner of others," for whom Spenser's stanzas were not pleasing, nor his matter, and "Shakespeare wanted art,"--that even this great brow-beater of his contemporaries in literature, recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even he could not bully out of him. But we must not be harsh in our judgment of Drummond's Ben Jonson, for though he "was given rather to lose a friend than a jest and was jealous of every word and action of those about him," this is not the Ben who some seven years earlier had written "How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse"; this is Ben as Drummond saw him in 1619--Ben talking "especially after drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth." That Beaumont's affection and geniality of intercourse were reciprocated not only by Jonson, but by others, we learn from lines written to, or of, him by men of worth.