The Mitre Inn, a common resort of hilarious Templars, still stands at the top of Mitre Court, a few yards back from the thoroughfare of Fleet Street.
[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON From the portrait by Paul Van Somer in the National Portrait Gallery, London]
The symposium to which I have referred is celebrated in a copy of macaronic Latin verses, entitled _Mr. Hoskins, his Convivium Philosophicum_;[96] and I may be pardoned if I quote from the contemporary translation by John Reynolds of New College, the opening stanzas, since one is set to wondering how many other of the jolly souls "convented," beside Brooke and Jones and Nevill, our Beaumont knew.--
Whosoever is contented That a number be convented, Enough but not too many; The _Miter_ is the place decreed, For witty jests and cleanly feed, The betterest of any.
There will come, though scarcely current, Christopherus surnamèd _Torrent_ And John yclepèd _Made_; And Arthur _Meadow-pigmies'-foe_ To sup, his dinner will forgoe-- Will come as soon as bade.
Sir Robert _Horse-lover_ the while, _Ne let_ Sir Henry _count it vile_ Will come with gentle speed; And _Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows_ And John surnamèd _Little-hose_ Will come if there be need.
And Richard _Pewter-Waster_ best And Henry _Twelve-month-good_ at least And John _Hesperian_ true. If any be desiderated He shall be amerciated Forty-pence in issue.
Hugh the _Inferior-Germayne_, Nor yet unlearnèd nor prophane Inego _Ionicke-pillar_. But yet the number is not righted: If Coriate bee not invited, The jeast will want a tiller.
In his edition of Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, Dr. Clark supplies the glossary to these punning names. _Torrent_ is, of course, Brooke. Johannes _Factus_, or _Made_, is Brooke's chamber-fellow of Lincoln's Inn, John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and correspondent in well known epistles of Henry _Twelve-month-good_, the Sir Henry Goodere, or Goodeere, who married Frances (Drayton's Panape), one of the daughters of "the first cherisher of Drayton's muse." _Ne-let_ Sir Henry _count it vile_ is the elder Nevill under cover of his family motto, _Ne vile velis_. Inigo Jones, _Ionicke-pillar_ is even more thinly disguised in the Latin original as Ignatius _architectus_, Hugh Holland (the _Inferior-Germayne_) was of Beaumont's Mermaid Club, the writer--beside other poems--of commendatory verses for Jonson's _Sejanus_ in 1605, and of the sonnet _Upon the Lines and Life_ of that other frequenter of the Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare." Holland's "great patronesse," by the way, was the wife of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, whose daughter married Beaumont's kinsman, Sir John Villiers; and it was by the great Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, that Holland was introduced to King James. Also, of the Mermaid in Beaumont's time was Tom Coryate, the "legge-stretcher of Odcombe" without whose presence this Convivium Philosophicum would "want its tiller." Of the Mermaid, too, was Richard Martin (the _Pewter-waster_). He was fond of the drama; had organized a masque at the Middle Temple at the time of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage; and it is to him that Ben Jonson dedicates the folio of _The Poetaster_ (1616). In 1618, as Recorder of London, he was the bosom friend of Brooke, Holland, and Hoskins: he died of just such a "symposiaque" as this, a few years later, and he lies in the Middle Temple. Last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic Latin verses of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself (surnamed _Little-hose_). He had been a freshman of the Middle Temple in the year when Beaumont was beginning at the Inner. He was an incomparable writer of drolleries, over which we may be sure that Beaumont many a time held his sides,--a wag whose "excellent witt gave him letters of commendacion to all ingeniose persons," a great friend of Beaumont's Jonson, and of Raleigh, Donne, Selden, Camden, and Daniel.