OF all the dramatists who were Shakespeare's friends, of those
who wrote before him, with him, and just after him, we have
little room to tell. But there is one who stands almost as far
above them all as Shakespeare stands above him. This is Ben
Jonson, and of him we must speak.

Ben Jonson's life began in poverty, his father dying before he
was born, and leaving his widow poorly provided for. When Ben
was about two years old his mother married again, and this second
husband was a bricklayer. Ben, however, tells us that his own
father was a gentleman, belonging to a good old Scottish Border
family, and that he had lost all his estates in the reign of
Queen Mary. But about the truth of this we do not know, for Ben
was a bragger and a swaggerer. He may not have belonged to this
Scottish family, and he may have had no estates to lose. Ben
first went to a little school at St. Martin's-in-the-fields in
London. There, somehow, the second master of Westminster School
came to know of him, became his friend, and took him to
Westminster, where he paid for his schooling. But when Ben left
school he had to earn a living in some way, so he became a
bricklayer like his step-father, when "having a trowell in his
hand he had a book in his pocket."*

*Fuller.

He did not long remain a bricklayer, however, for he could not
endure the life, and next we find him a soldier in the
Netherlands. We know very little of what he did as a soldier,
and soon he was home again in England. Here he married. His