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Aubrey tells us that "he has sayd often times that the first rise, or hint of his rising, was from goeing accidentally a courseing of a hare, when an ingeniose gentleman of good quality falling into discourse with him, and finding him to have a very good witt, told him that he would never gett any considerable preferment by continuing in the University, and that his best way was to betake himself to some lord's or great person's house that had good benefices to conferre.
His father was Walter Wilkins, a goldsmith in Oxford, like his son "ingeniose, and of a very mechanicall head, which ran much upon the perpetuall motion," a problem less hopeful than most, not all, of those which attracted his more practical son, who inherited from him his "insatiable curiosity."
It is probably a faithful likeness, for Wilkins is described by Aubrey as "a lustie, strong-grown, well-set, broad-shouldered person, cheerful and hospitable; no great-read man, but one of much and deepe thinking, and of a working head; and a prudent man as well as ingeniose."
Nearly fifty years ago, in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, we saw him, an "ingeniose man" from Oxfordshire, detached from his Roman Catholic kindred there, and setting up in London in the business of scrivenership, with music for his private taste, and a name of some distinction already among the musicians and composers of the time.
He treated women as his intellectual equals, but as equals who had to be splendidly entertained and amused. His conversation was "ingeniose and innocent." Lloyd speaks of "the grace wherewith he could relate magnarum rerum minutias, the little circumstances of great matters."
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