Note 12 — Chapter II · YOUNG HUMPHRY’S RESOLVES.

Dr. John Davy says, “The greater part of the year following” (the period of his quitting Dr. Cardew’s school at Truro, which Humphry did at the age of fifteen, when his school education was considered as complete) “he was, I believe, in an unsettled state, studying in a desultory manner, by fits and starts, and yielding to the allurements of occasional dissipation, and the amusements which constitute the delight of active youth—as fishing, shooting, swimming, and solitary rambles. This was perhaps the most dangerous period of his life, and in conversation with me he has so spoken of it. Amusement threatened for a time to obtain the mastery, and keep him down to the common level; but his good genius triumphed, and, after a few months’ vacillation, he applied himself in earnest to the cultivation of his mind and to the acquisition of knowledge; and the flame once kindled burnt on till it expired in death.” Speaking of the circumstances which induced Humphry to relinquish all his boyish habits about the period of his father’s death, his brother says: “This event, probably, had a powerful effect in giving steadfastness to his resolution, and I am quite certain that the circumstances of his family became with him an additional and powerful motive to exertion.”

“Like most young persons, Humphry when a boy,” says Dr. John Davy, “was fond of declaiming, and indulged in it in his solitary walks and rambles. On one occasion it is recorded of him, that, on his way to visit a poor patient in the country” (during his apprenticeship), “in the fervour of declamation, he threw out of his hand a phial of medicine which he had to administer, and that when he arrived at the bed-side of the poor woman he was surprised at the loss of it. The potion was found the next day in a hay-field adjoining the path” (p. 55).