The qualities of this bold, racy, and brawny egotist can be best conveyed in a biographical form. He was born in 1574, the grandson of a gentleman who, for his religion, lost his estate, and for a time his liberty, in Queen Mary's time, and the son of a clergyman in humble circumstances, who died about a month before his "rare" offspring was born. His mother, shortly after the death of her husband, married a master-bricklayer. Ben, who as a boy doubtless exhibited brightness of intellect and audacity of spirit, seems to have attracted the attention of Camden, who placed him in Westminster School, of which he was master. Ben there displayed so warm a love of learning, and so much capacity in rapidly acquiring it, that, at the age of sixteen, he is said to have been removed to the University of Cambridge, though he stated to Drummond, long afterwards, that he was "master of arts in both the Universities, by their favor, not his studie." His ambition at this time, if we may believe some of his biographers, was to be a clergyman; and had it been gratified, he would probably have blustered his way to a bishopric, and proved himself one of the most arrogant, learned, and pugnacious disputants of the English Church Militant,--perhaps have furnished the type of that peculiar religionist compounded of bully, pedant, and bigot which Warburton was afterwards, from the lack of models, compelled to originate. But after residing a few months at the University, Ben, deserted by his friends and destitute of money, found it impossible to carry out his design; and he returned disappointed to his mother's house. As she could not support him in idleness, the stout-hearted student adopted the most obvious means of earning his daily bread, and for a short time followed the occupation of his father-in-law, going to the work of bricklaying, according to the tradition, with a trowel in one hand, but with a Horace in the other. His enemies among the dramatists did not forget this when he became famous, but meanly sneered at him as "the lime-and-mortar poet." When we reflect that in the aristocratic age of good Queen Bess, play-writing, even the writing of Hamlets and Alchymists, was, if we may trust Dr. Farmer, hardly considered "a creditable employ," we may form some judgment of the position of the working classes, when a mechanic was thus deemed to have no rights which a playwright "was bound to respect."