een the wall and that, with one bad cigar before him, another behind
him, and another in his mouth."

Dulwich valley, and cows and buttercups--it has still an uneasy echo of
the town. Somewhere, surely, there always broods over Dulwich the spirit
of the founder of its college. He is the Londoner of Londoners, and the
oddest combination of characters that ever left a name as pious
benefactor of a school. Edward Allen, or Alleyn as his college spells
him, was to begin with an Elizabethan actor. He was one of a company of
strolling players before he was twenty; he was twenty-two when he had
somehow made himself a "gentleman," to be so described on a deed of
gift; and when he was twenty-six, he was such an actor that Ben Jonson
compared him to Roscius and Cicero, and Thomas Nash wrote that "Not
Roscius or Aesope, those tragedians admired before Christ was borne,
could ever performe more in action than famous Ned Allen." Perhaps he
made his money as an actor-manager; perhaps he married money, for his
wife was the daughter of a pawnbroker (who was also a theatre-proprietor
and one of the grooms of the Queen's chamber); perhaps he began lending
money early in life himself. He and his father-in-law, when James
succeeded Elizabeth, were made chief masters of "his Majesty's games of
Beares, Bulls and doggs"; they had a menagerie in the Paris Gardens at
Southwark where they kept wolves and lions; they worried bulls and had
dog-fights, and showed "pleasant sport with the horse and ape and
whipping of the blind beare." Money rolled in, with the apes and the
bears and the loans, and in October, 1605, Allen, by this time full
esquire, bought the manor and lands of Dulwich for L4,900. Eight years
later he left Southwark for Dulwich, and set about founding his college.

Aubrey has a quaint legend of the foundation. How should an actor found
a college? The devil was in it somewhere. Tradition told "that Mr.
_Alleyne_, being a Tragedian, and one of the Original Actors in many of
the celebrated _Shakespear's_ Plays, in one of which he play'd a Daemon,
with six others, and was in the midst of the Play surpriz'd by an
_Apparition_ of the _Devil_, which so worked on his Fancy, that he made
a Vow which he perform'd at this Place." That was the beginning of
Dulwich College, according to one story; according to another, it was
only because Allen had begun so earnestly, and tied himself up by so
many legal contracts that he did not repent of his