He began early in Wiltshire, as a boy at Easton Pierse, in the parish of Kington St. Michael, at Leigh Delamere, where the Vicar taught him, and at Blandford Grammar School in Dorset. For example, he remembered that "our old Vicar of Kington St. Michael, Mr. Hynd, did sing his sermons rather than read them," and how "when I was a boy, before the late civil wars, the tabor and pipe were commonly used, especially Sundays and Holydays, and at Christenings and Feasts, in the Marches of Wales, Hereford, Gloucestershire, and in all Wales," and "how the water in the ditches below Devizes looks bluish" at the fall of the leaf. When a boy, too, he heard from the old men how "in one of the great fields at Warminster in Wiltshire, in the harvest, at the very time of the fight at Bosworth field, between King Richard III. and Henry VII., there was one of the parish took two sheaves, crying (with some intervals) now for Richard, now for Henry; at last lett fall the sheaf that did represent Richard and cried now for King Henry, Richard is slain." Coming to write of Sir Philip Sidney, he recalled: "When I was a boy nine years old, I was with my father at one Mr. Singleton's, an alderman and woollen-draper in Gloucester, who had in his parlour, over the chimney, the whole description of the funeral, engraved and printed on papers pasted together, and which, at length, was, I believe, the length of the room at least; but he had contrived it to be turned upon two pins, that turning one of them made the figures march all in order. It did make such a strong impression on my young phantasy, that I remember it as if it were but yesterday. I could never see it elsewhere. The house is in the great long street,
