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ship, and a bluff joviality of disposition, not by any means above gross flattery. His five years spent in the household of d'Aubigny, the King's cousin, may be considered a sign of this favor, as well as the pension of one hundred marks (100 after 1630) and the tierce of canary which he received from 1616 until his death. The story that the King would have knighted the poet, had the latter been willing,[1] has every mark of probability in its favor. Jonson's duties as deviser of masques must have required frequent attendance at court and on royal progresses ; and if the King retained as lively an interest in these entertainments as he had formerly shown in Scotland, he would have been eager to discuss and plan them with his poet laureate.
Casual remarks of the latter recorded in Drummond's Conversations suggest such intercourse, though no great respect on the part of the poet for the opinions of his sovereign. On one occasion, according to Jonson, the King expressed the view that "Sir P. Sidney was no poet. Neither did he see ever any verses in England equal to the scullor's [Taylor the Water Poet]."[2] The natural inference from this is that James was no critic, but it may well be rather that the remark was not intended seriously or that Jonson was a malicious reporter. There is abundant evidence that Sidney was the one English poet of the preceding generation to whom the King felt free to pay tribute. Spenser's treatment of Mary and her son in The Faërie Queene made him impossible, and who else was there to set over against Ronsard and Du Bartas and the long line of Italian poets? According to Henry Leigh's report of an interview with James, September, 1599, the latter "comended Sir Philip Sydney for the best and swetest wryter that ever he knewe surely it seemeth he loved him muche."[3] It is noteworthy in this connection that Drummond pronounced Spenser's Amoretti "childish," but con-
