The obscurity which overshadowed all Massinger’s career has rendered any communication, as we have seen, between him and Buckingham, doubtful; but it was far otherwise in respect to Ben Jonson--whose works are so replete with allusions to the Villiers family, and to their attributes, amusements, and bounties, that no biography of George Villiers can be complete without a more copious reference to the works of this dramatist than can be conveyed in the passing notices which have been given of his masques, in the course of the preceding narrative.[197] Ben Jonson was ten years older than Massinger; and was born in 1574. Whether from his surname, or his Christian name, or from his after-life, it is not easy to say, but one generally looks upon Ben Jonson as a man of low birth. But such was not the fact. His grandfather, a man of some family and fortune, was a gentleman in the service of Henry VIII.; his father was in holy orders, “a grave minister of the Gospel.”[198] Footnote 197: From the State Papers, a new volume of which has lately been published, it appears that Jonson was accused of writing certain lines on Buckingham’s assassination.--See Appendix. Footnote 198: Gifford’s “Life of Ben Jonson,” p. 2; from Anthony Wood. The family had originally settled at Annandale, in Scotland; but Ben Jonson was born in Westminster. He had the misfortune to come into the world a month after his father’s death. It was, perhaps, a less adverse circumstance that his mother, two years afterwards, married again. Her views were not exalted, and she took for her second husband--tired, it might seem, of the genteel poverty of the cloth--a master-bricklayer. Not even has Fuller, not even has Gifford, been able to ascertain in what part of the suburb of Westminster “Ben” was born. Fuller, however, consoles us; he could not trace the poet in his _cradle_, but he could “fetch him,” as he observes, in his “short coats.” About two years old, Ben was _discovered_--that is to say, the haunts of his infancy were--“a little child in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross.” This neighbourhood was as poor as that of Westminster Abbey; and the parish of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, which then extended to Whitehall on the south, to Marylebone on the north, to the Savoy on the east, and to Chelsea and Kensington on the west, when first rated to the poor in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, contained only two hundred persons sufficiently wealthy to pay those rates.[199] It afterwards became the greatest cure in England, until several of its parishes were separated from the patron saint, St. Martin’s. Footnote 199: Cunningham’s London.