Brave old Ben Jonson was the son of a Scotch gentleman in Henry VIII.’s service, who, impoverished by the persecutions of Queen Mary, took orders late in life. His mother married for the second time a small builder or master bricklayer. He went to Westminster school, where Camden, the great antiquary, was his master. A kind patron sent him to Cambridge.[688] He seems to have left college prematurely, and have come back to London to work with his father-in-law.[689] There is an old tradition that he worked at the garden-wall of Lincoln’s Inn next to Chancery Lane, and that a knight or bencher (Sutton, or Camden), walking by, hearing him repeat a passage of Homer, entered into conversation with him, and finding him to have extraordinary wit, sent him back to college; or, as Fuller quaintly puts it, “some gentlemen pitying that his parts should be buried under the rubbish of so mean a calling, did by their bounty manumise him freely to follow his own ingenious inclinations.”[690] Gifford sneers at the story, for the poet’s own words to Drummond of Hawthornden were simply these:--“He could not endure the occupation of a bricklayer,” and therefore joined Vere in Flanders, probably going with reinforcements to Ostend in 1591-2.[691] He there fought and slew an enemy, and stripped him in sight of both armies. On his return, he became an actor at a Shoreditch theatre. His enemies, the rival satirists, frequently sneer at the quondam profession of Ben Jonson, and describe him stamping on the stage as if he were treading mortar. For myself, I admire brave, truculent old Ben, and delight even in his most crabbed and pedantic verse, and therefore never pass Lincoln’s Inn garden without thinking of Shakspere’s honest but rugged friend--“a bear only in the coat.” On June 27, 1752, there was a dreadful fire in New Square, which destroyed countless historical treasures, including Lord Somers’s original letters and papers. At No. 2 and afterwards at No. 6 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, which is built on Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and forms no part of the Inn of court, lived Sir Samuel Romilly. This “great and amiable man,” as Tom Moore calls him, killed himself in a fit of melancholy produced by overwork joined to the loss of his wife, “a simple, gay, unlearned woman.” Sir Samuel was a stern, reserved man, and she was the only person in the world to whom he could unbosom himself. When he lost her, he said, “the very vent of his heart was stopped up.”[692] It was in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, that Benjamin Disraeli, born in December 1805, much too erratic for Plowden and Coke, used to come to study conveyancing at the chambers of Mr. Bassevi. He is described as often arriving with Spenser’s _Faerie Queen_ under his arm, stopping an hour or two to read, and then leaving. This led, as might be expected, not to the woolsack but to the authorship of _Coningsby_. His Premiership and his Patent of Peerage as Lord Beaconsfield, are due to other causes.