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At Broadstairs, Kent, in the March of 1867, Lionel Johnson was born into a family of Protestant faith and military predilection; a family, indeed, which had seen much service and owned to Irish affiliations. Perhaps it was the old Gaelic and Cymric strain in his blood which kept the boy so free from hostile influences and planted in his heart an early love of Nature and of the past, a certain mystic kinship with the Beautiful Unknown. Then it was his great good fortune to be educated at Winchester, where were passed six years of deep content and inspiration. The memory of Arnold was still redolent there; further back, the memories of Collins, of Otway, of Sir Thomas Browne, and dreams of "half a thousand years" of scholarship. There were the natural beauties, too, of that rich and rural England—Twyford Down, the near-by hills and woodlands, "walks and streets of ancient days," and that "fair, fern-grown Chauntry of the Lilies," white beneath the moonbeams.

Lionel later wrote; and there is scarcely a spire or cranny of the old place on which he has not dwelt in loving veneration. At Winchester, very largely, his character was formed and his future taste determined; there the bent toward scholarship, toward solitude and toward Catholicity became inalienable parts of his life.