Dulwich valley, and cows and buttercups--it has still an uneasy echo of the town. Somewhere, surely, there always broods over Dulwich the spirit of the founder of its college. He is the Londoner of Londoners, and the oddest combination of characters that ever left a name as pious benefactor of a school. Edward Allen, or Alleyn as his college spells him, was to begin with an Elizabethan actor. He was one of a company of strolling players before he was twenty; he was twenty-two when he had somehow made himself a "gentleman," to be so described on a deed of gift; and when he was twenty-six, he was such an actor that Ben Jonson compared him to Roscius and Cicero, and Thomas Nash wrote that "Not Roscius or Aesope, those tragedians admired before Christ was borne, could ever performe more in action than famous Ned Allen." Perhaps he made his money as an actor-manager; perhaps he married money, for his wife was the daughter of a pawnbroker (who was also a theatre-proprietor and one of the grooms of the Queen's chamber); perhaps he began lending money early in life himself. He and his father-in-law, when James succeeded Elizabeth, were made chief masters of "his Majesty's games of Beares, Bulls and doggs"; they had a menagerie in the Paris Gardens at Southwark where they kept wolves and lions; they worried bulls and had dog-fights, and showed "pleasant sport with the horse and ape and whipping of the blind beare." Money rolled in, with the apes and the bears and the loans, and in October, 1605, Allen, by this time full esquire, bought the manor and lands of Dulwich for L4,900. Eight years later he left Southwark for Dulwich, and set about founding his college. Aubrey has a quaint legend of the foundation. How should an actor found a college? The devil was in it somewhere. Tradition told "that Mr. _Alleyne_, being a Tragedian, and one of the Original Actors in many of the celebrated _Shakespear's_ Plays, in one of which he play'd a Daemon, with six others, and was in the midst of the Play surpriz'd by an _Apparition_ of the _Devil_, which so worked on his Fancy, that he made a Vow which he perform'd at this Place." That was the beginning of Dulwich College, according to one story; according to another, it was only because Allen had begun so earnestly, and tied himself up by so many legal contracts that he did not repent of his vow and take back all he had given. That was when, a widower of fifty-seven, he wanted to marry a girl of twenty. She was John Donne's daughter Constance, and perhaps Donne felt bound to ask for liberal settlements. However, the settlements were arranged somehow, and the college was founded. The "colledge of God's gift" was his name for it, and as its founder he described himself as "chief master, ruler and overseer of all and singular over games of beares, bulls, mastive doggs and mastive bitches." His blood-relations were to be Master and Warden, if possible, and so, for many years, they were.