THOMAS RICKMAN was born at Maidenhead on the 8th of June, 1776, and was the eldest son of Thomas and Sarah Packman, members of the Society of Friends. His father’s profession seems to have combined that of grocer, and chemist, and druggist, in which latter capacity he gave medical advice to his customers. Eventually he relinquished all but the medical department, and practiced as an apothecary, in which profession he wished to bring up his eldest son. Circumstances, and his son’s natural tendencies, determined otherwise. It appears that even the strict and unæsthetic notions of his father’s sect could not restrain the development of the son’s taste for order and beauty of arrangement, which manifested itself, in the first instance, in a passion for military display. As a boy, he was eager to attend every review and parade which he could possibly reach, and to make himself master of all the details of military evolutions. He employed his leisure moments at home in drawing figures of soldiers, cutting them out of pasteboard, and arranging them on tables in an upper room which he had appropriated to himself. He made several thousands of these pasteboard soldiers, both cavalry and infantry, and disposed them in order of battle, to illustrate some prints which he had procured of celebrated battles. He studied the history of the modern campaigns, and knew the services of all the officers in the Army List. He could tell the details of the uniform of every regiment, not only of his own country, but of most of the continental nations, and understood the strength and value of the various instruments of warfare better than most of those who used them. {5} It does not appear that this early tendency to military tactics ever led Rickman to take an active part in them, though it may have served to unsettle his views for some time with regard to the choice of a profession. His father removed to Lewes in Sussex, in 1797, and Thomas then went to London, first as assistant to Mr. Stringer, a chemist in the Strand, and afterwards to Mr. Atkinson, an apothecary in Jermyn street. But disliking the profession, or the town, he removed to Saffron Walden, and entered into the service of Messrs. Day and Greer, grocers, in that town. From thence he again went to London, and prepared himself, by walking the hospitals, to act as his father’s assistant at Lewes, whither he went in 1801. But he was still unsettled, and again repaired to London in 1803, to enter into partnership with a cornfactor. While there he married his cousin, Lucy Rickman.