Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/67

Rh The friend who had so kindly sent him to Westminster School procured for him an exhibition at St. John's College, Cambridge, whither Jonson went in his sixteenth year. We do not know its value, but it was inadequate to his support even in an age of fewer wants and simpler habits than the present, when billiards and Newmarket were as yet no part of the University course.

He returned to his home after a stay of some months, though Fuller limits its duration to a few weeks? Numerous apocryphal stories, some of them injurious to Jonson's character, have been handed down on the subject of this interval spent at home between his leaving the University and volunteering in the army in Flanders. He appears for some time to have toiled at an humble and laborious trade, and at last to have given it up in disgust, because, as he tells us, "he could not endure the occupation of a bricklayer." We next find the scholar-artisan in arms, and daring heroic deeds. He went through one campaign in the Low Countries, and performed an exploit better fitted for description in the pages of Livy than in those of a literary biography. In the sight of both armies, he engaged in single combat with one of the enemy, slew him, stripped off his arms, and carried them away in triumph. This, at the age of eighteen, was a warlike achievement of no mean kind, and is enough to show, that whatever other faults his slanderers have attributed to him, he did not, at any rate, lack chivalrous courage.

A poet militant is not without precedent. Æschylus fought at Salamis, Horace ran away at Philippi, Jonson's immediate successor, Davenant, was knighted for his valour at the siege of Gloucester, and a later laureat, Colley Cibber, bore arms in the Revolution of 1688. If "silent leges inter arma" be true, the same remark will apply to letters. Though more congenial to his nature