my infancy, seeing my father’s backslidings in the world, and no hopes by husbandry to recruit a decayed estate.’  Therefore, after some schooling at or near home, the boy, when eleven years old, was sent to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicester, to the school of Mr. John Brinsley, who ’was very severe in his life and conversation, and did breed up many scholars for the universities; in religion he was a strict Puritan.’  ’In the fourteenth year of my age, about Michaelmas, I got a surfeit, and thereupon a fever, by eating beechnuts.’  ’In the sixteenth year of my age I was exceedingly troubled in my dreams concerning my salvation and damnation, and also concerning the safety and destruction of my father and mother:  in the nights I frequently wept and prayed, and mourned, for fear my sins might offend God.’  ’In the seventeenth year of my age my mother died.’  The next year, ’by reason of my father’s poverty, I was enforced to leave school, and so came home to my father’s house, where I lived in much penury one year, and taught school one quarter of a year, until God’s providence provided better for me.  For the last two years of my being at school I was of the highest form of the school, and chiefest of that form.  I could then speak Latin as well as English; could make extempore verses upon any theme.’  ’If any scholars from remote schools came to dispute, I was ringleader to dispute with them.’  ’All and every of those scholars, who were of my form and standing, went to Cambridge, and proved excellent divines; only I, poor William Lilly, was not so happy, fortune then frowning on my father’s condition, he not in any capacity to maintain me at the university.’

So this poor scholar, first of his class, bright visions of the university, and of what might lie beyond, all fading into darkness, went down to his father’s house in the country, where his acquirements were useless.  He says:  ’I could not work, drive plough, or endure any country labor; my father oft would say, ‘I was good for nothing,’ and ’he was willing to be rid of me.’  A sorrowful time for the poor young fellow, without any outlook toward a better.  But at last, one Samuel Smatty, an attorney, living in the neighborhood, took pity on the lad, and gave him a letter to Gilbert Wright, of London, who wanted a youth who could read and write, to attend him.  Thereupon Lilly, in a suit of fustian, with this letter in his pocket, and ten shillings, given him by his friends, took leave of his father, who was then in Leicester jail for debt, and set off for London with ‘Bradshaw, the carrier.’  He ’footed it all along,’ and was six days on the way; spending for food two shillings and sixpence, and nothing for lodgings; but he was in good heart, I think, for almost the only joyous expression in his autobiography is this one, relating to this time:  ’Hark, how the wagons crack with their rich lading!’