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Rh over against the high steeple; and 'tis likely it remains there still. 'Tis pity it is not redone." At Blandford he had Walter and Tom Raleigh, grand-nephews of Sir Walter, for schoolfellows—clever boys, proud and quarrelsome, with "excellent tunable voices, and played their parts well on the viol."

Perhaps the memento of Sidney's funeral and the talk of the Raleighs at Blandford turned him to a sense of the living past and dying present. But an old family, with a strong Welsh element, that had already been some generations in North Wiltshire, would of itself have provided much for the taste which we must suppose him born with. His mother's father had been born also at Easton Pierse, his mother in the neighbouring parish of Yatton Keynell. Thomas Danvers, one of his uncles, was at Bemerton when George Herbert was buried there "(according to his own desire) with the singing service for the burial of the dead, by the singing men of Sarum." Thomas Browne, his great-uncle, remembered Sir Philip Sidney, "and said that he was often wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plains, to take his table book out of his pocket, and write down his notions as they came into his head, when he was writing his Arcadia." When a boy, he says, "he did ever love to converse with old men as living histories," and began to draw, yet never became a painter. Thus he grew up a lover of the old days, when lords of manors kept good houses and ate at the high tables in the oriels of their "great Gothic halls," such as Draycot, when the halls of justices of the peace were "dreadful to behold, the screens were garnished with corslets and helmets, gaping with open