Wallington, who writes of his mother: "She was very loving and
obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her husband, very
tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were godly, much
misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of sobriety
unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when
others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would
take her needle-work and say--'here is my recreation'.... God had
given her a very pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was
very ripe and perfect in all stories of the Bible, likewise in all
the stories of the Martyrs, and could readily turn to them; she
was also perfect and well seen in the English Chronicles, and in
the descents of the Kings of England. She lived in holy wedlock
with her husband twenty years, wanting but four days."

If the influence of the new thought was so potent with a class who
in the Tudor days had made up the London mob, and whose signature,
on the rare occasions when anybody wanted it, had been a mark, the
middle class, including professional men, felt it infinitely more.
In the early training with many, as with Milton's father, music
was a passion; there was nothing illiberal or narrow. In Milton's
case he writes: "My father destined me while yet a little boy to
the study of humane letters; which I seized with such eagerness
that from the twelth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my
lessons to my bed before midnight." "To the Greek, Latin and
Hebrew learned at school the scrivener advised him to add Italian
and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spencer gave the
earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war
between playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in
Milton's days avow his love of the stage, 'if Jonson's learned
sock be on, or sweetest Shakspeare Fancy's child, warble his