plays, and make it his sport in conversation.  On his leaving the university he entered himself into an obscure playhouse, called the Green Curtain, somewhere about Shoreditch or Clerkenwell.  He was first an actor, and probably only a strolling one; for Decker in his Satyromastix, a play published in 1602, and designed as a reply to Johnson’s Poetaster, ’reproaches him with having left the occupation of a mortar trader to turn actor, and with having put up a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, in which he would have continued, but that he could not set a good face upon it, and so was cashiered.  Besides, if we admit that satire to be built on facts, we learn further, that he performed the part of Zuliman at the Paris Garden in Southwark, and ambled by a play-waggon on the high-way, and took mad Jeronymo’s part to get service amongst the mimicks[2].’  Shakespear is said to have first introduced him to the world, by recommending a play of his to the stage, at the time when one of the players had rejected his performance, and told him it would be of no service to their company[3].  His first printed dramatic performance was a Comedy, entitled Every Man in his Humour, acted in the year 1598, which being soon followed by several others, as his Sejanus, his Volpone, his Silent Woman, and his Alchymist, gained him so high a reputation, that in October 1619, upon the death of Mr. Samuel Daniel he was made Poet Laureat to King James I. and on the 19th of July, the same year, he was created (says Wood) Master of Arts at Oxford, having resided for some time at Christ Church in that university.  He once incurred his Majesty’s displeasure for being concerned with Chapman and Marston in writing a play called Eastward-Hoe, wherein they were accused of having reflected upon the Scotch nation.  Sir James Murray represented it to the King, who ordered them immediately to be imprisoned, and they were in great danger of losing their ears and noses, as a correction of their wantonness; nor could the most partial have blamed his Majesty, if the punishment had been inflicted; for surely to ridicule a country from which their Sovereign had just come, the place of his nativity, and the kingdom of his illustrious forefathers, was a most daring insult.  Upon their releasement from prison, our poet gave an entertainment to his friends, among whom were Camden and Selden; when his aged mother drank to him[4] and shewed him a paper of poison which she had designed, if the sentence of punishment had been inflicted, to have mixed with his drink after she had first taken a potion of it herself.

Upon the accession of Charles I. to the crown, he wrote a petition to that Prince, craving, that as his royal father had allowed him an annual pension of a hundred marks, he would make them pounds.  In the year 1629 Ben fell sick, and was then poor, and lodged in an obscure alley; his Majesty was supplicated in his favour, who sent him ten guineas.  When the messenger delivered the sum, Ben took it in his hand, and said, “His Majesty has sent me ten guineas because I am poor and live in an alley, go and tell him that his soul lives in an alley.”