William Barnes was born at Rushay, near Pentridge, a village about four miles from Cranborne, in the north-east of the county, on the Wiltshire border, and in the heart of the Vale of Blackmore, the beauties of which he was never tired of extolling in his gentle poems enriched with his native dialect. His mother was a woman of good education and refined tastes, and he attended an endowed school at Struminster, where the classes were composed of boys and girls and conducted in the American way. On leaving school he entered a solicitor's office in the same town, but at the age of eighteen he removed to Dorchester. In 1823 he went to Mere, in Somerset, where he worked as a schoolmaster for four years in loneliness. At this time he married Miss Julia Miles, and after an additional eight years at Mere he returned to Dorchester, where teaching was still his profession. One might almost say that Dorchester was his spiritual birthplace, for here his genius began to attract more than local attention, and here he grew into the hearts of the people so deeply that when he passed away all wished to preserve his memory in the form of a public statue. Barnes was one of the secretaries of the Dorset Field Club. His most earnest wish was to enter the Church, and from St John's College, Cambridge, he was ordained by the Bishop of Salisbury in 1847, and became pastor of Whitcombe. He fell on troublous days and passed through a labyrinth of trials--sickness, death and sordid money embarrassments. Only once did he allow his pent-up humours of discouragement to break loose. One day he came in to his family with a sheaf of correspondence in which letters from duns were accompanied by others containing warm eulogy of the poet. "What a mockery is life!" he exclaimed; "they praise me and take away my bread! They might be putting up a statue to me some day when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live. I asked for bread and they gave me a stone," he added bitterly. At about this time he was awarded a Civil List pension of seventy pounds a year, while the gift of the living of Came relieved him of the anxiety over money matters. The happiest days of his life were spent at Came, and here he followed with great diligence his one hobby--the Anglicising of the Latinised English words in our vocabulary, which he called speech-lore. He wrote two books on this subject, called _Redecraft_ and _Speechcraft_. In his preface to _Speechcraft_ he announced it as "a small trial towards the upholding of our own strong old Anglo-Saxon speech and the ready teaching of it to purely English minds by their own tongue." It was his fancy to replace all foreign and derived words with words based on Saxon roots. The following are selected from his glossary of Latinised words, with their Saxon equivalents facing them:--