At all events, Massinger imbibed from his father’s connection with the Herbert family, one taste--that for theatricals. Amongst the retinue of the great peer, was a company of itinerant performers, “the Earl of Pembroke’s players;” and though the childhood of Massinger is indeed a blank, it maybe inferred that the attractions of the theatre, or rather of the hall, in which that portion of the Earl’s household must have been frequently occupied, were such as to fascinate a boy of an imaginative turn of mind. He is stated to have been shy, melancholy, retiring, and studious; that he received a classical education, as a boy, is also stated; but when that education was received, who directed that thoughtful and dreamy mind to poetry, or how he, who was evidently designed for a scholastic career, should have devoted himself to the profession of a play-writer, does not appear to have been ascertained, even by the indefatigable Gilford. But it was an age of great mental energy, and there was sufficient in the rich harvest won by Shakspeare, or in the rare delights afforded by his works, to account for the direction of young Massinger’s genius. It has been conjectured, also, that he acted occasionally in those plays the parts of which were then usually sustained by boys: of this there remains not a single proof, and nothing is _certain_, in so far as the events of his youth are concerned, except that he was entered at St. Alban’s Hall, Oxford, in 1601-2. It must not be supposed that this fact at all implied what in the present day it might appear to indicate. It did not follow that Massinger was to enter one of the learned professions, because he became a commoner in that small, ancient society of St. Alban’s Hall; nor was it a proof that the young man had parents who were in affluent circumstances, as a University career now seems to imply. Oxford was then a place for cheap education, and many of the “poor scholars” at the various colleges underwent, as Strype shews us, great hardships. On the other hand, it was not uncommon for the profession of letters to be in those days a man’s only calling; and an academical training was his best commencement in that arduous course, since a certain display of erudition was undoubtedly one of the characteristics of the period. The exhibition to college was, according to Anthony Wood, given to Massinger by the Earl of Pembroke; but others allege that Massinger derived the means of subsistence at Oxford from his father.