and was easily persuaded by King James's consort to remain in his own country and transfer his services as builder from her brother to herself. Ben Jonson's entertainments at Althorpe and elsewhere had commended him to the Queen's notice as a deviser of masques, and he had already produced at Court The Masque of Blackness in the year before Inigo Jones returned to England.

The chief composer of the music for Ben Jonson's Masques was Alfonso Ferrabosco, son of a famous Italian musician of like name, who had a pension granted to him by Queen Elizabeth in 1567, and who, twenty years later, went back to Italy and took service with the Duke of Savoy. Alfonso Ferrabosco, the younger, must have gone with his father to Italy, whence he returned to England. He was appointed under James I., on the 22nd of March 1605, extraordinary groom of the Privy Chamber and teacher of music to Prince Henry, with a pension of £50 a year. Other members of the Ferrabosco family were distinguished as professional musicians, and the son of Alfonso the second carried the credit of the Ferraboscos as Court musicians into the third generation, when he was appointed, on the 19th of March 1628, musician to His Majesty, Charles I., for the Viols and Wind Instruments, in place of his father, then lately deceased. The genius of the second Ferrabosco, who furnished music for Ben Jonson's Masques, is said to have been especially well suited to dramatic expression. He joined in a reaction against the more learned work, such as that on madrigals and motets, and was of a new school that cultivated rather a light, easy monody. He published "Airs" in 1609, many of them set to words from the Masques which he had illustrated with his music, chiefly arranged for the accompaniment of song with lute and viol. The viol was six stringed, with the position of the fingers marked on the finger board by frets; and it was used in different sizes, for treble, mean, counter-tenor, tenor, and base. Music of stringed instruments played without a bow was known as "broken music," because that manner of playing could not produce long and sustained notes.

The famous lutenist and composer, John Dowland,-who took

the degree of Bachelor of Music at Oxford together with Thomas Morley in 1588,-had been much abroad, and was lutenist to the King of Denmark at the beginning of King James's reign. In 1605 he dedicated to Anne of Denmark Lachrymæ, or Seven Teares figured in seaven passionate Pavans. In 1609 he had left Denmark, and was living in Fetter Lane. He became lutenist to Lord Walden, eldest son of the Earl of Suffolk, but found no encouragement at Court, for all his skill as a composer and his "heavenly touch upon the lute."

Fame is not

A chief inventor of the dances in Ben Jonson's Masques was Thomas Giles, aided by erome Herne. Thomas Giles may have been a kinsman of Nathaniel Giles, a religious and learned musician, who died in 1634. Nathaniel Giles wrote church music that was in very high esteem, and had a son who became canon of Windsor and prebendary of Worcester. to be won at the point of the toe, and the name of Thomas Giles the dance-master is no longer inscribed in the temple of Fame. But much thought was spent in his days upon the invention of concerted pieces of dance, apart from the lively movement of the galliarde and la volta that had come in from Italy by way of France, whither they had been brought by Catharine de' Medici. Sir John Davies, who was King James's Attorney-General for Ireland, and who died in 1626, inscribed to Prince Charles, in 1622, his Orchestra, an unfinished poem, "expressing the Antiquity and Excellency of Dancing in a Dialogue between Penelope and one of her Wooers." Sir John Davies had Court Masques in mind when he told the Prince that he gave his mind to all he did"And hence it is that all your youthful train In activeness and grace you do excel;

When you do courtly dancings entertain,

Then dancing's praise may be presented well."

The world, said Sir John

whirled round in a dance.

Davies, is called the world for being
The sun

"Doth dance his galliard in his leman's sight,

Both back, and forth, and sideways, passing light."

The moon dances thirteen measures every year; and

"What are breath, speech, echoes, music, winds,

But dancings of the air in sundry kinds."

Ben Jonson's first Masque, The Masque of Blackness, was pro duced on Twelfth Night in 1605, at the beginning of the old Carnival time, the usual date for the beginning of such Revels. The four year old Prince Charles, then a sickly child, who had been brought to England from Dunfermline in the preceding summer, was on that day formally installed as Duke of York. It was the time also of the marriage of Sir Philip Herbert to the Lady Susan Vere. It had pleased the Queen's fancy, by way of change from her fair ivory skin, to masquerade on that occasion with eleven of her ladies, as negresses. She danced, it is said, with the Spanish ambassador, who, when he kissed Her Majesty's hand, was not sure what might become the colour of his lips. The Princess Mary, who died in her childhood, was born on the 7th of the next following April. The masque of the preceding year had been furnished by Samuel Daniel as The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, when the Queen had appeared as Pallas, the Countess of Suffolk as Juno, Lady Rich as Venus, the Countess of Bedford as Diana, the Countess of Derby as Proserpine, Lady Walsingham as Astræa, Lady Elizabeth Howard as Thetis, and Lady Susan Vere as Flora. There were only four ladies in Ben Jonson's masque who had not been seen the year before in Daniel's. Among the Royal MSS. in the British Museum is a copy of The Masque of Blackness in Ben Jonson's handwriting. The machinery of the masque was thus described by Sir Dudley Carlton: "There was a great engine at the lower end of the room which had motion, and in it were the images of sea-horses, with other terrible fishes, which were ridden by the Moors. The indecorum was that there was all fish, and no water. At the farther end was a great shell, in the form of a scallop, wherein were four seats. On the lowest sat the Queen with my lady Bedford on the rest were placed the ladies Suffolk, Derby, &c. On St. John's Day we had the marriage of Sir Philip Herbert

and Lady Susan performed at Whitehall with all the honours that could be done a great favourite." Next year came Inigo Jones to London, who provided the machinery for Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, 1606, the Hymenai for the marriage of young Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, who, by desire and arrangement of the King's, was married at the age of fourteen to Frances Howard, younger daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. That was the unhappy marriage ended in 1613 by a divorce and the lady's marriage to the King's favourite, Robert Carr, who was created Earl of Somerset. The Barriers followed on the night

after The Masque of Hymen.

The Masque of Beauty, produced at Court in Christinas 1608, met the Queen's wish for a sequel to The Masque of Blackness, after which, therefore, it is placed.

The next masque in the series, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, was presented at Whitehall on Shrove Tuesday 1608, with especial pomp, upon the marriage of Sir John Ramsay, who was at the beginning of the reign the King's chief favourite. It was he who had, as the story went, being then his henchman, searched for King James in Gowrie House, found him in the clutch of Alexander Ruthven, rescued him, and stabbed the aggressor. For the aid then given, to which Ben Jonson refers in the masque (page 94 of this volume), the King made Ramsay Viscount Haddington, and he was now married, by the King's desire, to "the Maid of the Red Cliff”—Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Ratcliffe, Earl of Sussex. Towards the end of James's reign Ramsay was made an English peer as Earl of Holdernesse.

The Masque of Queens is, like The Masque of Blackness (which is there called only The Twelfth Night's Revells), to be found in Ben Jonson's own handwriting among the Royal MSS. in the British Museum, where it includes the Dedication to Prince Henry. This masque was presented at Court on the 2nd of February 1609 (New Style). In a brief official note of extraordinary payments at Court to the end of the year 1609, there is an entry of £4215 for the cost of masques. On the 4th of June 1610, Prince Henry, then in his sixteenth year (he was born on

the 19th of February 1595), was formally created Prince of Wales, and on the night of the following day there was a Court Masque on the occasion, of which Ben Jonson was not the author. It was the Tethys Festival of Samuel Daniel. Daniel, who, in 1600, became tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, then in her eleventh year, had some office at Court as a licenser of plays, and was in the Queen's service as Groom of the Privy Chamber. In verses to the Queen, he speaks of himself as I who

"By that most blesséd hand sustained,
In quietness do eat the bread of rest.”

Already he was living much at his farm, called Ridge, near Beckington, in Somerset, to which he finally retired, and where he died in 1619. Besides his Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, already mentioned, Daniel had produced for the Queen's pleasure a "pastoral tragi-comedy," The Queen's Arcadia, presented to Her Majesty and her Ladies by the University of Oxford at Christ Church in August 1605. Tethys Festival, or the Queen's Wake, produced in 1610, at the Creation of Prince Henry, Prince of Wales, was followed by only one more piece from Daniel,-not a masque, but another "pastoral tragi-comedy," in five acts,— Hymen's Triumph, acted at Court on occasion of the marriage of Lord Roxburgh.

Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon, preceded by The Barriers, was written for Prince Henry, and produced on the 1st of January 1611 (New Style). At the same Christmas time, Ben Jonson's masques of Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, and Love Restored, were produced for the Queen. John More, writing to Sir R. Winwood on the 15th of December 1610, records of the preparation of these pieces for the coming festivities: "Yet doth the Prince make but one masque, and the Queen but two, which doth cost Her Majesty but £600; neither do I see any likelihood of any further extraordinary expense that this Christmas will bring." In the course of the next year the Challenge at Tilt was produced at Court.

In October 1612 the Elector Palatine of the Rhine came to