he literature-loving public, and his son George, whom
he brought up to the stage, carried on the family repute to a later
generation.

William Beeston had no liking for dissolute society, and the open vice
of Charles the Second's Court pained him. He lived in old age much in
seclusion, but by a congenial circle he was always warmly welcomed for
the freshness and enthusiasm of his talk about the poets who
flourished in his youth. "Divers times (in my hearing)," one of his
auditors, Francis Kirkman, an ardent collector, reader, and publisher
of old plays, wrote to him in 1652--"Divers times (in my hearing), to
the admiration of the whole company you have most judiciously
discoursed of Poesie." In the judgment of Kirkman, his friend, the old
actor, was "the happiest interpreter and judg of our English
stage-Playes this Nation ever produced; which the Poets and Actors
these times cannot (without ingratitude) deny; for I have heard the
chief, and most ingenious of them, acknowledg their Fames and Profits
essentially sprung from your instructions, judgment, and fancy." Few
who heard Beeston talk failed, Kirkman continues, to subscribe "to his
opinion that no Nation could glory in such Playes" as those that came
from the pens of the great Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and
Ben Jonson. "Glorious John Dryden" shared in the general enthusiasm
for the veteran Beeston, and bestowed on him the title of "the
chronicle of the stage"; while John Aubrey, the honest antiquary and
gossip, who had in his disorderly brain the makings of a Boswell,
sought Beeston's personal acquaintance about 1660, in order to "take
from him the lives of the old English Poets."

It is Aubrey who has recorded most of such sparse fragments of
Beeston's talk as survive--how Edmund "Spenser was a little man, wore
short hair, little bands, and short cuffs," and how Sir John Suckling
came to invent the game of cribbage. Naturally, of Shakespeare Beeston
has much to relate. In the shrewd old gossip's language, he "did act
exceedingly well," far better than Jonson; "he understood Latin pretty
well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the
country;" "he was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and
of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit;" he and Ben Jonson gathered
"humours of men daily wherever they came." The ample testimony to the
excellent influence which Beeston exercised over "the poets and actors
of these times" leaves litt