and less well off, if a trifle better born. But Jonson did not profit even
by this slight advantage. His mother married beneath her, a wright or
bricklayer, and Jonson was for a time apprenticed to the trade. As a youth
he attracted the attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then
usher at Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations
of his classical learning. Jonson always held Camden in veneration,
acknowledging that to him he owed,
"All that I am in arts, all that I know:"
and dedicating his first dramatic success, "Every Man in His Humour," to
him. It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though
Fuller says that he was "statutably admitted into St. John's College,
Cambridge." He tells us that he took no degree, but was later "Master of
Arts in both the universities, by their favour, not his study." When a
mere youth Jonson enlisted as a soldier trailing his pike in Flanders in
the protracted wars of William the Silent against the Spanish. Jonson was
a large and raw-boned lad; he became by his own account in time exceedingly
bulky. In chat with his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson
told how "in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both
the camps, killed an enemy, and taken 'opima spolia' from him;" and how
"since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed
his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten inches
longer than his." Jonson's reach may have made up for the lack of his
sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling. Obviously Jonson
was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings.

In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married,
almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond
curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest"; for some years he lived
apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs
among Jonson's 'Epigrams', "On my first daughter," and "On my first son,"