air to
remember that the author's life was one very conducive to precocity,
inasmuch as he underwent at once the three stimulating influences of an
elaborate literary education, of endowed leisure to devote himself to what
literary occupations he pleased, and of the emulation caused by literary
society. Jonson's friendship seems to have acted as a forcing-house on the
literary faculties of his friends, and it is quite as possible that, if
Randolph had lived, he would have become a steady-going soaker or a
diligent but not originally productive scholar, as that he would have
produced anything of high substantive and permanent value. It is true that
many great writers had not at his age done such good work; but then it must
be remembered that they had also produced little or nothing in point of
bulk. It may be plausibly argued that, good as what Randolph's first thirty
years gave is, it ought to have been better still if it was ever going to
be of the best. Hut these excursions into possibilities are not very
profitable, and the chief excuse for indulging in them is that Randolph's
critics and editors have generally done the same, and have as a rule
perhaps pursued the indulgence in a rather too enthusiastic and sanguine
spirit. What is not disputable at all is the example given by Randolph of
the powerful influence of Ben on his "tribe."

Very little is known of another of that tribe, Richard Brome. He was once
servant to Ben Jonson, who, though in his own old age he was himself an
unsuccessful, and Brome a very successful, dramatist, seems always to have
regarded him with favour, and not to have been influenced by the rather
illiberal attempts of Randolph and others to stir up bad blood between
them. Brome deserved this favour, and spoke nobly of his old master even
after Ben's death. He himself was certainly dead in 1653, when some of his
plays were first collected by his namesake (but it would seem not
relation), Alexander Brome. The modern reprint of his dramas takes the
liberty, singular in the collection to which it belongs, of not attempting
any kind of critical or biographical introduction, and no book of reference
that I know is much more fertile, the latest authority--the _Dictionary of
National Biography_, in which Brome is dealt with by the very competent
hand of the Master of Peterhouse--having little enough to tell. Brome's
work, however, speaks for itself and pretty distinctly to all who care to
read it. It