t
such a remark was "malevolent," and he delighted in seeking to
vindicate it to them on what seemed to him to be just critical
grounds.

The copious deliverances of Jonson in the tavern-parliaments of the
London wits, which were in almost continuous session during the first
four decades of the seventeenth century, set flowing much other oral
tradition of Shakespeare, whom Jonson said he loved and whose memory
he honoured "on this side idolatry as much as any." One of Jonson's
remarks which seems to have lived longest on the lips of
contemporaries was that Shakespeare "was indeed honest and [like his
own Othello] of an open and free nature,[11] had an excellent
phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with
that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."

[Footnote 11: Iago says of Othello, in _Othello_ I., iii. 405: "The
Moor is _of a free and open nature_."]

To the same category of oral tradition belongs the further piece which
Fuller enshrined in his slender biography with regard to Shakespeare's
alert skirmishes with Ben Jonson in dialectical battle. Jonson's
dialectical skill was for a long period undisputed, and for gossip to
credit Shakespeare with victory in such conflict was to pay his
memory even more enviable honour than Jonson paid it in his own
_obiter dicta_.

There is yet an additional scrap of oral tradition which, reduced to
writing about the time that Fuller was at work, confirms Shakespeare's
reputation for quickness of wit in everyday life, especially in
intercourse with the critical giant Jonson. Dr Donne, the Jacobean
poet and dean of St Paul's, told, apparently on Jonson's authority,
the story that Shakespeare, having consented to act as godfather to
one of Jonson's sons, solemnly promised to give the child a dozen good
"_Latin_ spoons" for the father to "translate." _Latin_ was a play
upon the word "latten," which was the name of a metal resembling
brass. The simple quip was a good-humoured hit at Jonson's pride in
his classical learning. Dr Donne related the anecdote to Sir Nicholas
L'Estrange, a country gentleman of literary tastes, who had no
interest in Shakespeare except from the literary point of view. He
entered it in his commonplace book within thirty years of
Shakespeare's death.

IV

Of the twenty-five actors who are enumerated in a preliminary page of
the great First Folio, as filling in Shakespeare's lifetime chief
roles in his