Since I have spoke to you of my father’s poverty, you will readily perceive that he could not send me to any great school, nor was he likely, in the dark days that then shadowed this poor realm of ours, to commit me to the tuition of the schismatical minister that had usurped the room of the vicar of our parish, wherefore he was constrained to send me by the day to the grammar-school of Puckle Acton, which town lieth in the vicinage of Ellswether. Here, in common with the sons of many gentlemen of the country round, I gained a slight acquaintance with Greek and Latin, and (for which my life hath made me far more grateful) such a knowledge of the art of fence, of boxing and shooting, as hath often stood me in good stead. When I was not at the school, the time did often hang heavy for me, for the gentlemen’s sons of whom I have spoken durst not admit me to their company more than rarely, for fear of the suspicions of our tyrants, that were wont to scent a conjuration or conspiracy whensoever any number of Malignants (for so they called us) was met together. The company of the boys of the town I neither sought nor would my father have permitted me so to do, and I came thus, almost of necessity, to use and enjoy that of my little cousin Dorothy Brandon, in all my holidays and times of rest. ’Twas with her I learned from Mrs Skipwith to read French, and we loved to pore together over the pages of the ‘Grand Cyrus,’ that magazine of brave thoughts and witty conceits, of the ‘Cleopâtre’ and of the ‘Clélie.’ Of English books we had no great store, but in Sir Philip Sidney his ‘Arcadia’ and in Mr Lyly’s ‘Euphues’ we found a rare delight. Add to this, that my little cousin taught herself Latin in order to the reading it with me, and (her youth remembered) was no mean scholar in the Greek, and you shall see that we had no lack of fantastic and heroical reading for to divert ourselves withal.