Thus, with the poet, Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos Ducit, et im' emores non sinit esse sui!' This is a very good specimen of Evelyn's style, for it shews the optimistic quality which, along with refinement and a love of classical quotations, is ever present in his writings.

Lythe Hill, from the summit of which the 'prodigious prospect' is so eminently belauded, attains a height of less than a thousand feet above the sea-level.
At the early age of four John Evelyn was initiated into the rudiments of education by one Frier, who taught children at the church porch of Wotton; but soon after that he was sent to Lewes in Sussex, to be with his grandfather Standsfield, while a plague was raging in London.

There he remained, after Standsfield's death in 1627, till 1630, when he was sent to the free school at Southover near Lewes and kept there until he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, as a fellow-commoner in 1637, being then 16 years of age.

It was his father's intention to have placed him at Eton 'but I was so terrefied at the report of the severe discipline there that I was sent back to Lewes, which perverseness of mine I have since a thousand times deplored.' In that same year (1637) Evelyn had the misfortune to lose his mother, then only in the 37th year of her age.

Having been 'extremely remisse' in his studies at school, he made no great mark during his University career.