'Your in all humility and duty, 'FFRANCES GODOLPHIN.' What this poor gentleman had done to deserve the 'Justice's justice' thus summarily inflicted on him, observes the writer in the _Quarterly Review_, from whom I quote this letter, there and then, in the midst as it seems of divine service, and by the occupant of the next pew, we are left to conjecture. Pendeen[73] is a house of unusual interest in this part of Cornwall, where, indeed, primæval remains abound, but where are few examples--save small and (with one or two exceptions) not particularly interesting churches--of mediæval and later architecture. It is now occupied as a farmhouse, but was formerly a place of much more importance. Substantially built of native granite, the structure was evidently designed for the occupation of some prosperous man; and its ground-plot indicates that it was so traced as to be capable of some sort of defence against marauders. In one of the bedrooms--most probably that in which William Borlase first saw the light--are some curious figures on the wall, of which a sketch is preserved by the writer. But it is not so much to the house itself as to its surroundings that we must look for what were probably the determining circumstances of Borlase's career. He was in the very heart of the cromlehs, the cliff-castles, the weird stone-circles, and the huge monoliths of a forgotten race; and, close to the house, there was a long and mysterious double cave--a vau or ogou--which, we can but believe, must have excited an inquiring child's awe-struck interest. We are indebted chiefly to himself for the little that we know of his early days; and this information is derived from a modest autobiographical sketch which he drew up in 1772, when seventy-seven years old, for his friend Huddesford, the Curator of the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford, an institution to which Borlase contributed nearly the whole of his collections of natural history and antiquities. His first school seems to have been at the nearest town, Penzance; and of him his master said what so many a master has said of many another apt but dreamy and indolent scholar, who was nevertheless destined afterwards to distinguish himself, that 'he could learn, but would not.' Thence he went, in 1709, under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Bedford, at Plymouth, where he seems to have profited more by the instruction which he received. It has also been supposed that he was educated partly at Tiverton School. In March, 1712-13 he was entered, Cornish fashion, at Exeter College, Oxford, and here he took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in due course; was in 1719 ordained deacon; and in 1720, priest. Dr. Borlase gives the following picture of the Oxford of his days: