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into Scotland were rare. King James's visit of 1617 had the effect, it appears, of beginning a change in that respect. There was roused among the English, if not a kindlier feeling towards Scotland and the Scots, at least a more inquisitive curiosity respecting both the land and the people. Among Londoners who could afford a longish holiday it began to be a question whether it was necessary to go to France or Italy for the purpose, or whether there might not be a more economic, and perhaps as enjoyable, holiday in North Britain. This, at all events, is what occurred to Ben Jonson.

There were motives in Ben Jonson's case that must have aided the conclusion to which he came. He had Scottish blood in his veins. His father, an English Puritan minister, had died before Ben was born; but that father's father, Ben's grandfather, was a Johnston of Annandale, who had migrated into England in the reign of Henry VIII. Might not one, before one died, have a look at Annandale? Moreover, might not one see novelties in Scotland, and turn them, when one came back, to dramatic or other literary account? These motives co-operating, Ben Jonson did resolve on a journey to Scotland, resolving at the same time that he would make the journey thither and back wholly on foot.

When Ben Jonson came to this resolution he was in the forty-sixth year of his age, and, though not yet formally Poet-Laureate, virtually such already by the king's favour and the receipt of a provisional Court pension till the laureateship should be ready for him, and indubitably, on that account, and also in independent public regard, the most conspicuous figure in the London world of letters. This position he had attained by the merits of that long series of dramas for the regular theatres, masques for performance at Court or to private order, and satires, epigrams, epistles, and other poetical miscellanies, which he had begun while Elizabeth was on the throne, and he and Shakespeare were Londoners together, but had continued with ever-increasing industry after James had succeeded Elizabeth, and Shakespeare had gone into retirement in his native Stratford-on-Avon. He had won the position, however, after a hard contest, caused partly by the natural resistance of the popular taste to that poetry of rough and learned strength, that drama of incessant moral and social invective, which he sought to substitute for the more ideal poetry and the more romantic kind of drama that had been exemplified in Shakespeare and others of the Elizabethans, but in large measure also by the aggressiveness of his temper, the pugnacious opinionativeness with which he expounded and defended on all occasions his peculiar principles of literary and dramatic art, and his readiness to take offence and quarrel savagely with his contemporaries. But not only had the disadvantages of these personal characteristics been overcome by the real merits of his dramas and other writings, the weight and force of intellect they exhibited, backed as these were by the support eventually of the learned and University critics to whom he had always kept appealing on behalf of his principles when he failed with the theatre-goers; it so happened that by the exertion of these very characteristics in another form he had doubled his influence and notoriety. Afflicted, like his great namesake Dr Samuel afterwards, with a constitutional hypochondria,