The First Twenty-Five Years

BEN JONSON was born in 1573. Men lived quickly under Elizabeth. Jonson was a finished scholar at thirteen, a soldier at seventeen, married at nineteen, celebrated for his lost tragedies at twenty-three, convicted of homicide and the author of one of the most famous of English comedies at twenty-five. Incidentally, he had found time to collaborate and quarrel with a number of contemporary authors, to change his religion, to be suspected of a plot against the Government and, most notoriously of all, to be a bricklayer.