The five years which succeeded his imprisonment carried Jonson to the height of his prosperity and glory. During this period he produced the three great comedies on which his fame as a dramatist rests,--"The Fox," "The Silent Woman," and "The Alchymist,"--and also many of the most beautiful of those Masques, performed at court, in which the ingenuity, delicacy, richness, and elevation of his fancy found fittest expression. His social position was probably superior to Shakespeare's. He was really the Court Poet long before 1616, when he received the office, with a pension of a hundred marks. We have Clarendon's testimony to the fact that "his conversation was very good, and with men of the best note." Among his friends occurs the great name of Bacon.
In 1618, when "Ben Jonson" had come to be familiar words on the lips of all educated men in the island, he made his celebrated journey on foot to Scotland, and was hospitably entertained by the nobility and gentry around Edinburgh. Taylor, the water poet, in his "Pennylesse Pilgrimage" to Scotland, has this amiable reference to him. "At Leith," he says, "I found my long approved and assured good friend, Master Benjamin Jonson, at one Master John Stuart's house. I thank him for his great kindness; for, at my taking leave of him, he gave me a piece of gold of two-and-twenty shillings' value, to drink his health in England." One object of Jonson's journey was to visit Drummond of Hawthornden. He passed three or four weeks with Drummond at Hawthornden, and poured out his mind to him without reserve or stint. The finical and fastidious poet was somewhat startled at this irruption of his burly guest into his dainty solitude; took notes of his free conversation, especially when he decried his contemporaries; and further carried out the rites of hospitality by adding a caustic, though keen, summary of his qualities of character. Thus, according to his dear friend's charitable analysis, Ben "was a great lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and scorner of others; given rather to losse a friend than a jest; jealous of every word and action of those about him (especiallie after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth); a dissembler of ill parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth; thinketh nothing well bot what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen have said or done; he is passionately kynde and angry; careless either to gaine or keep; vindictive, but, if he be well answered, at himself." It is not much to the credit of Jonson's insight, that, after flooding his pensively taciturn host with his boisterous and dogmatic talk, he parted with him under the impression that he was leaving an assured friend. Ah! your demure listeners to your unguarded conversation,--they are the ones that give the fatal stabs!