may be no
less honourable than that of the ship's officer ascending the bridge
for his watch under a dark speckle of open sky.

[Illustration]

BY THE FIREPLACE

We were contemplating our fireplace, in which, some of the
hearth-bricks are rather irregularly disposed; and we said to
ourself, perhaps the brick-layer who built this noble fireplace
worked like Ben Jonson, with a trowel in one hand and a copy of
Horace in the other. That suggested to us that we had not read any
Ben Jonson for a very long time: so we turned to "Every Man in His
Humour" and "The Alchemist." Part of Jonson's notice "To the Reader"
preceding "The Alchemist" struck us as equally valid as regards
poetry to-day:

Thou wert never more fair in the way to be cozened, than in
this age, in poetry; wherein ... antics to run away from
nature, and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that
tickles the spectators ... For they commend writers, as they do
fencers or wrestlers; who if they come in robustuously, and put
for it with a great deal of violence, are received for the
braver fellows.... I deny not, but that these men, who always
seek to do more than enough, may some time happen on some thing
that is good, and great; but very seldom ... I give thee this
warning, that there is a great difference between those, that
utter all they can, however unfitly; and those that use
election and a mean. For it is only the disease of the
unskilful, to think rude things greater than polished; or
scattered more numerous than composed.

Ben Jonson's perpetual allusions to tobacco always remind one of the
odd circumstance that of two such cronies as he and Will
Shakespeare, one should have mentioned tobacco continually, the
other not at all. Undoubtedly Ben smoked a particularly foul old
pipe and was forever talking about it, spouting his rank strangling
"Cuban ebolition" across the table; and Will, probably rather nice
in his personal habits, grew disgusted with the habit.

At any rate, Shakespeare's silence on the subject has always been a
grief to smokers. At a time when we were interested in that famous
and innocent way of wasting time, trying to discover ciphers in
Shakespeare's sonnets, we spent long cryptogrammarian evenings
seeking to prove some anagram or rebus by which the Bard could be
supposed to have concealed a mention of tobacco. But the only
lurking secret w