Another of the young lawyers whose genius irradiated the drama in the time of Villiers--was John Ford, a great genius, and a prudent man, as far as we can judge by the close of his career. Like Fletcher and Beaumont, Ford was well-born, and had a great advantage in being descended, on his mother’s side, from the Chief Justice Popham. He came to London and entered at Gray’s Inn, then, as Stowe tells us, “a goodly house,” now the very _acmé_ of dismal and decaying dinginess. It was illumined by the presence of Lord Bacon, as it had recently been by that of Lord Burleigh; and when Ford took chambers in the Inn, there were pleasant gardens for the gay young students, in which they could walk and ruminate at their leisure; whilst Gray’s Inn Lane, furnished with fair buildings and many tenements, as Stowe also tells us, opened on the north with a view of the fields leading to Highgate and Hampstead; and there, too, dwelt Hampden and Pym, the vicinity of whom must have stirred up the spirits of the young disputants, whose ardour for liberty was excited during the days of the Remonstrance--the time of Buckingham’s impeachment--and in those when the first tax for the navy was levied. Ford, however, cared little, it appears, for those stormy questions, but much for the drama, and more for the law, to which he was brought up, and in the practice of which he was wise enough to continue. A young man of a dramatic turn had many temptations, in those days, to sacrifice the hopes of a slow advancement for the brilliant success of a poet’s career. Ford, however, had a staid cousin at Gray’s Inn, at the time when he became a member of the Middle Temple, in 1602. This relative, also a John Ford, persuaded him “to stick to the law;” and Ford, in after-life, recorded the obligation with gratitude. Ford’s first production was not dramatic. When only seventeen years of age, he wrote “Fame’s Memorial,” a tribute to one of the most popular, and at the same time one of the most unfortunate, noblemen of the day. The fate of the ill-starred Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy--afterwards Earl of Devonshire--impressed the young poet so forcibly as to impel him, without any personal knowledge of this hero, to write this _In Memoriam_. “The life of Lord Mountjoy,” remarks Hartley Coleridge, “is the finest subject of biography unoccupied.” He was the generous rival of Essex, with whom, nevertheless, he had in early life fought a duel. Blount being “a very comely man,” attracted the attention of Queen Elizabeth. He distinguished himself at a tilt, and she sent him a chess-queen of gold, enamelled, which he tied on his arm with a crimson ribbon. Essex, on seeing this, laughed scornfully, and said, “Now I perceive every fool must have a favour!” Blount challenged him, and they fought at Marylebone, where the Earl was disarmed and wounded. Nevertheless, the combatants became firm friends even in early life, and, in their later days, generous rivals.