vil," which even the royal touch of Queen Anne failed to cure), a persistent uncontrollable tic. But he grew up to be a strong, muscular man: his height of six feet was unusual in the eighteenth century, and, when he first sought employment in London as a writer, he was once advised rather to hire himself out as a public porter. He received the standard classical education in Latin and Greek at Lichfield grammar school, where he was regarded as something of a prodigy. He said that he caught his first enthusiasm for literature when, as a boy, searching for a cache of apples he thought Nathanael had hidden behind a shelf of books in their father's shop, he came across a volume of Petrarch (no doubt in Latin), and became so absorbed in it that he forgot about the apples. When he was sixteen, he transferred to the grammar school in nearby Stourbridge, where some of his Ford relations lived, and later paid tribute to the influence of his cousin Cornelius Ford, a polished intellectual, who encouraged the boy's love of books and ambition to write. While there, he began to compose boyish poetry--translations of Horace's odes, conventional love poems to young ladies, even one, the earliest that has survived, "On a Daffodil." When he was seventeen, he returned to Lichfield and put in two no doubt reluctant years working in the bookshop, where, however, he had the opportunity to devour much of its contents; he later said that he knew almost as much at eighteen as he did when he was in his fifties. The lad's learning and promise caused him to be taken up by the cultured Gilbert Walmesley, an official of the eccl...
