Jonson was born probably in the west of London--and born poor; but through the favor of some friends went to Westminster School, near to which his step-father, who was a bricklayer, lived: afterward, through similar favor, he went to Cambridge[113]--not staying very long, because called home to help that step-father at his bricklaying. But he did stay long enough to get a thorough taste for learning, and a thorough grounding in it. So he fretted at the bricks, and ran off and enlisted--serving a while in the Low Countries, where poor Philip Sidney met his death, and coming back, a swaggerer, apt with his sword and his speech, into which he had grafted continentalisms; apt at a quarrel, too, and comes to fight a duel, and to kill his man.[114] For this he went to prison, getting material this way--by hard rubs with the world--for the new work which was ripening in the mind of this actor-author. So, full of all experiences, full of Latin, full of logic, full of history, full of quarrel, full of wine (most whiles) this great, beefy man turned poet. I do not know if you will read--do not think the average reader of to-day will care to study--his dramas. The stories of them are involved, but nicely adjusted as the parts of an intricate machine: you will grow tired, I dare say, of matching part to part; tired of their involutions and evolutions; tired of the puppets in them that keep the machinery going; tired of the passion torn to tatters; tired of the unrest and lack of all repose. Yet there are abounding evidences of wit--of more learning than in Shakespeare, and a great deal drearier; aptnesses of expression, too, which show a keen knowledge of word-meanings and of etymologies; real and deep acquirement manifest, but worn like stiff brocade, or jingling at his pace, like bells upon the heels of a savage. You wonder to find such occasional sense of music with such heavy step--such delicate poise of such gross corporosity. He helped some hack-writer to put Bacon’s essays into Latin--not that Bacon did not know his Latin; but the great chancellor had not time for the graces of scholastics. Ben wrote an English Grammar, too, which--for its syntax, so far as one may judge from that compend of it which alone remains--is as good as almost any man could invent now. Such learning weighed him down when he put on the buskins, and made the stage tremble with his heaviness. But when he was at play with letters--when he had no plot to contrive and fabricate and foster, and no character to file and finish, and file again, and to fit in with precise order and methodic juxtaposition--when a mad holiday masque--wild as the “Pirates of Penzance”--tempted him to break out into song, his verse is rampant, joyous, exuberant--blithe and dewy as the breath of May-day mornings: See how a little damsel in the dance of his verse sways and pirouettes-- “As if the wind, not she did walk; Nor pressed a flower, nor bowed a stalk!”