the ordinary stage was still without any scenery, Inigo Jones,
the greatest architect in the land, joined Ben Jonson in making
his plays splendid by inventing scenery for them. This scenery
was beautiful and elaborate, and was sometimes changed two or
three times during the play. One of these plays called The
Masque of Blackness was acted by the Queen and her ladies in
1605, and when we read the description of the scenery it makes us
wonder and smile too at the remembrance of Wall and the Man in
the Moon of which Shakespeare made such fun a few years earlier,
and of which you will read in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Besides his Masques, Jonson wrote two tragedies, and a number of
comedies, as well as other poems. But for a great part of his
life, the part that must have been the easiest and brightest, he
wrote Masques for the King and court and not for the ordinary
stage. He knew his own power in this kind of writing well, and
he was not modest. "Next himself," he said, "only Fletcher and
Chapman could make a mask."* He found, too, good friends among
the nobles. With one he lived for five years, another gave him
money to buy books, and his library became his great joy and
pride.

*Conversation of Ben Jonson with Drummond of Hawthornden.

Ben Jonson traveled too. For a time he traveled in France with
Sir Walter Raleigh's son, while Sir Walter himself was shut up in
the Tower. But Jonson's most famous journey is his walk to
Scotland. He liked to believe that he belonged to a famous
Border family, and wished to visit the land of his forefathers.
So in the mid-summer of 1618 he set out. We do not know how long