was cap and gown, "but the fashion was to wear hats, cloaks or coats, swords, rapiers, boots and spurs, large ruffs and long hair. Even Benchers were found to sit in Term Time with hats on."[16] Whether Beaumont gave promise or not we are ignorant. The routine of the Inn was impeccable; but students and benchers were not. There were not infrequently other exercises than "moots" after supper: cards and stage-plays, revels and sometimes riots. This much we know, that before young Frank could have fulfilled his seven or more years as student and "moot-man," he was already in the rank of poets and dramatists. But, that by no means precludes his continuance for several years, perhaps till 1608, in the juridical university, or his intimate association with and residence in the stately old quadrangles of what would be his college,--the Inner Temple. And for a young man of his temperament the atmosphere was as poetic as juridical. The young man's fancy was fired by the poetry and the drama that for centuries had enlivened the graver pursuits of the Gothic halls that rose between Fleet Street and the Thames, Whitefriars and Paget Place,--"the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom," as Ben Jonson calls them in his dedication[17] to the Inns of Court of _Every Man out of his Humour_, first published in the year when Beaumont entered. According to Aubrey, while the garden-wall of Lincoln's Inn, close by, was building, a Bencher of that society "walking thro' and hearing" a young bricklayer "repeat some Greek verses out of Homer, discoursed with him, and finding him to have a witt extraordinary gave him some exhibition to maintaine him at Trinity College, Cambridge." That young bricklayer was, later, Beaumont's friend and master, Ben Jonson. Lincoln's Inn had long been a nursing mother to dramatic effort. At the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign it was one of its members, Richard Edwardes, who, as Master of the Chapel Children, produced the "tragicall comedie" _Damon and Pythias_, and the tragedy of _Palamon and Arcite_, to the great edification of the Queen, and the permanent improvement of the Senecan style of drama by the fusion of the ideal and the commonplace, of the romantic, the serious, and the humorous in an appeal to popular interest. "He was highly valued," this Edwardes, "by those that knew him," says Anthony Wood, "especially his associates in Lincoln's Inn." And it was in the Middle Temple, just fourteen months after Beaumont joined the Inns of Court, that Manningham, one of the barristers, witnessed the performance for the Reader's Feast on Candlemas Day of Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_. If Beaumont of the Inner Temple, within a stone's throw, did not hear more than the applause, he was not our Frank Beaumont. We may be sure that he had sauntered through the Temple Gardens many an afternoon, and knew the spot immortalized by Marlowe and that same Shakespeare, as the scene of