Lincoln's Inn, upon the side of Chancery Lane, presents a long, old front of brick, more simple than clean. It is saturated with the London smoke. Within is a handsome row of buildings, and a garden, in which Bickerstaff describes himself as walking, by favour of the Benchers, who had grown old with him.[194] It will be recollected that Bickerstaff lived in Shire Lane, which leads into this inn from Temple-bar. The garden-wall on the side next Chancery Lane is said by Aubrey to have been the scene of Ben Jonson's performance as a bricklayer. We have spoken of it in our remarks on that lane; but shall now add the particulars. "His mother, after his father's death," says Aubrey, "married a bricklayer; and 'tis generally said that he wrought for some time with his father-in-law, and particularly on the garden-wall of Lincoln's Inn, next to Chancery Lane." Aubrey's report adds, that "a knight, or bencher, walking through and hearing him repeat some Greek names out of Homer, discoursing with him, and finding him to have a wit extraordinary, gave him some exhibition to maintain him at Trinity College in Cambridge."[195] Fuller says, that he had been there before at St. John's, and that he was obliged by the family poverty to return to the bricklaying.[196] "And let them not blush," says this good-hearted writer, "that have, but those who have not a lawful calling. He helped in the building of the new structure of Lincoln's Inn, where, having a trowell in his hand, he had a book in his pocket." A late editor of Ben Jonson rejects these literary accounts of the poet's bricklaying as "figments."[197] And he brings his author's own representations to prove that he left the business, not for the University, but the continent. As this writer has nothing, however, to oppose to what Aubrey and Fuller believed respecting the rest, the reports, so far, are worth as much as they were before. Nobody was more likely than Ben Jonson to carry a Greek or Latin book with him on such occasions: nor, as far as that matter goes, to let others become aware of it. Pennant's sketch of Lincoln's Inn continues to be the best, notwithstanding all that has been said of it since his time. He begins with observing, that "the gate is of brick, but of no small ornament to the street." This is the gate in Chancery Lane.