and, in short, William Lilly
became the happy man; made happy within four months of the death of the
old master. 'During all the time of her life, which was till October,
1633, we lived very lovingly; I frequenting no company at all; my
exercises were angling, in which I ever delighted; my companions, two
aged men.' 'I frequented lectures, and leaned in judgment to Puritanism;
and in October, 1627, I was made free of the Salters' company of
London.'

Up to this time, therefore, the history of William Lilly, so far as he
has made it known, is briefly this: Born poor, the grandfather and
father having wasted the family estates, he was sent by his mother, who
intended him from his infancy for a scholar, to the school of
Ashby-de-la-Zouch; where, at one time, he was in trouble about his soul
and the souls of his parents; and he 'frequently wept, prayed, and
mourned, for fear his sins might offend God.' But the mother died, the
father got into prison for debt, and poor Lilly, who had made himself
the best scholar in the school, could not go up to the university as he
had hoped to do, but after a wretched year at his father's house, where
he was accounted useless and an encumbrance, he had to become the
servant of one who could neither read nor write, doing all kinds of
drudgery. Serving faithfully, the much-enduring young man won the love
and confidence of the old master and mistress, and at last married the
young widow, who was a wholesome-looking woman, of brown ruddy
complexion, and had property, which served, among other things, to make
Lilly 'free of the Salters' company.' Not a bad history, certainly, if
not one of the best: he was a thriving young man, not a complaining one;
but one who accepted the conditions under which he was placed, and made
the best of them; which is what all young men ought to do.

And now Lilly--being a man of some property and standing, without any
profession or regular business, but with an inclination to the occult
arts, begot in him probably by the folly of old Mistress Wright--tells
us how he 'came to study astrology.' 'It happened on one Sunday, 1632,
as myself and a justice of peace's clerk were, before service,
discoursing of many things, he chanced to say that such a person was a
great scholar; nay, so learned that he could make an almanac, which to
me was strange: one speech begot another, till at last he said he could
bring me acquainted with one Evans, who lived in Gunpowder alley