We intend to throw together a few particulars relative to his life, which may be interesting to those whose leisure does not permit such retrospective studies, and to convey incidentally such a view of his character as those who are familiar with his works may compare with that which they have themselves formed.

Born in 1573, Jonson was the junior of Shakspeare by nine years. By birth he may be said to have been a Londoner; for Westminster, within whose precincts he first saw the light, was already linked to the city by the fast-filling Strand. He had Scotch blood in him, however, for his grandfather was a Johnstone of Annandale, who had come into England in the reign of Henry VIII. This Johnstone's son, Anglicized into a Jonson, had had misfortunes under Mary, and had become a minister of the English Reformed Church. He died a month before his son Benjamin was born; and his widow, two years afterwards, married a master-bricklayer, named Fowler. Ben's earliest recollec

tions, therefore, were those of the step-son of a bricklayer, living in a lane near Charing-Cross. There seems no reason to doubt that his step-father and mother did him all the justice they could, though in a poor way. They sent him to an ordinary school in the parish of St. Martin's-in-theFields, within which they resided; and, when he was older, some friend, who probably knew his father, got him admitted to Westminster School, of which the great Camden was then one of the masters. If it was not Camden himself who got him admitted to the school, he at least found a friend in this great scholar, to whom, in subsequent years, when both were better known, he was never tired of showing his attachment.

"Camden! most reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in arts, all that I know." These words, in one of his epigrams, are not a mere compliment. Schoolmasters were schoolmasters in those days; Camden was a king among schoolmasters, a training under whom was, probably, so far as classical instruction went, a pretty efficient education in itself; and vast as Jonson's learning in the classical depart

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