After such schooling as could be had in the country, he was sent up to
Westminster School, then under the headship of the celebrated Dr. Busby.
Here he made his first essays in verse, translating, among other school
exercises of the same kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he was
entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for seven
years. The only record of his college life is a discipline imposed, in
1652, for "disobedience to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in taking his
punishment, inflicted by him." Whether this punishment was corporeal, as
Johnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are ignorant. He
certainly retained no very fond recollection of his Alma Mater, for in
his "Prologue to the University of Oxford," he says:--
"Oxford to him a dearer name shall be
Than his own mother university;
Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age."
By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into possession of a small
estate of sixty pounds a year, from which, however, a third must be
deducted, for his mother's dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge, he
became secretary to his near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that
time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House.
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