Note 471 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 4)

In Magna Britannia it is not only stated that this street was originally called Hartshorn Lane, but that Ben Jonson once lived in it (S.). The belief that Ben Jonson lived here as a boy rests on the statement of Fuller, who, in his Worthies, says: “Though I cannot with all my industrious inquiry find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, where his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband.”