At a very early age Robert was sent by his father to a country nurse, "who, by early inuring him, by slow degrees, to a coarse but cleanly diet, and to the usual passion of the air, gave him so vigorous a complexion that both hardships were made easy to him by custom, and the delights of conveniences and ease were endeared to him by their rarity." Making the acquaintance of some children who stuttered in their speech, he, by imitation, acquired the same habit, "so contagious and catching are men's faults, and so dangerous is the familiar commerce of those condemnable customs, that, being imitated but in jest, come to be learned and acquired in earnest." Before going to school he studied French and Latin, and showed considerable aptitude for scholarship. He was then sent to Eton, where his master took much notice of him, and "would sometimes give him unasked play-days, and oft bestow upon him such balls and tops and other implements of idleness as he had taken away from others that had unduly used them." While at school, in the early morning, a part of the wall of the bedroom, with the bed, chairs, books, and furniture of the room above, fell on him and his brother. "His brother had his band torn about his neck, and his coat upon his back, and his chair crushed and broken under him; but by a lusty youth, then accidentally in the room, was snatched from out the ruins, by which [Robert] had, in all probability, been immediately oppressed, had not his bed been curtained by a watchful Providence, which kept all heavy things from falling on it; but the dust of the crumbled rubbish raised was so thick that he might there have been stifled had not he remembered to wrap his head in the sheet, which served him as a strainer, through which none but the purer air could find a passage." At Eton he spent nearly four years, "in the last of which he forgot much of that Latin he had got, for he was so addicted to more solid parts of knowledge that he hated the study of bare words naturally, as something that relished too much of pedantry to consort with his disposition and designs." On leaving Eton he joined his father at Stalbridge, in Dorsetshire, and was sent to reside with "Mr. W. Douch, then parson of that place," who took the supervision of his studies. Here he renewed his acquaintance with Latin, and devoted some attention to English verse, spending some of his idle hours in composing verses, "most of which, the day he came of age, he sacrificed to Vulcan, with a design to make the rest perish by the same fate." A little later he returned to his father's house in Stalbridge, and was placed under the tutelage of a French gentleman, who had been tutor to two of his brothers.