A lead to more solid information is furnished by the circumstance of Baker's having been educated at Oxford. We have seen (above) that he was barely twenty-one when _The Humour of the Age_ was printed in March of 1701. A Thomas Baker, son of John Baker of Ledbury, Hereford, was entered at Brasenose College, Oxford, on March 18, 1697, aged seventeen.[7] The ages falling so pat, this must be our dramatist. Upon taking his B.A. at Christ Church in 1700 he must immediately have set to scribbling his first play (the Dedication says that it was "writ in two months last summer"). Perhaps at this time he lived in London in some such boarding-house as furnishes the scene for the play. He may have been already studying law, for at least by 1709 (we cannot tell how much earlier) he was "by trade an Attorney."[8] It seems likely that various touches in the comedies reflect his training for this calling. In _The Humour of the Age_, Pun and Quibble, the principal fops, are a pair of articled law-clerks who detest green-bags and (it comes out at one point) are collaborating on a play. (Readers of the present reprint will note, also, that the money which Master Totty brings with him from the country is to recompense an attorney for training him in law). Perhaps Baker could never afford to study law as those well off did: there may be a tinge of sour grapes in the observation in _Tunbridge-Walks_ that "since the Lawyers are all turn'd Poets, and have taken the Garrets in Drury Lane, none but Beaus live in the Temple now, who have sold all their Books, burnt all their Writings, and furnish'd the Rooms with Looking-glass and China." But this is light-hearted, as becomes a man who has not yet had a setback as a stage-poet. Two years later, after the stopping of _An Act at Oxford_ had put him to much trouble, he is souring somewhat, for the poor Oxford scholar says in _Hampstead Heath_ that no profession nowadays offers much prospect of success for a man trained as he, and, as for poetry, one can only expect to be "two years writing a Play, and sollicit three more to get it acted; and for present Sustenance one's forc'd to scribble _The Diverting Post, A Dialogue between Charing-Cross and Bow Steeple_, and Elegies upon People that are hang'd." When in December 1708 _The Fine Lady's Airs_ gained only a moderate success Baker must have thought of a living in the Church as a _pis aller_, for he enrolled at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, March 8, 1709, and took an M.A. there the same year. In a final attempt to succeed with his pen he seems to have tried periodical journalism in the guise of "Mrs. Crackenthorpe" in _The Female Tatler. The British Apollo_, at least, pinned this on him. "The author poses as a woman," it says, in effect, "and some may thus be taken in,"