Biographkal Memoir of' Dr Thomas' Young. 215 



time if these notices of ours were to strengthen such prejudices. 

 Accordingly, without wishing to interfere with those pure and 

 lively emotions which are every year excited by the distribution 

 of prizes, we may nevertheless state, that the one party may not 

 abandon themselves to dreams which the future will never realize, 

 and that the other may fortify themselves against discourage- 

 ment, that Pic de la Mirandole, the phoenix of scholars in all 

 times and countries, when in ripe years, was an insignificant 

 author ; that Newton, when keeping his terms in college, did 

 not at all distinguish himself, and that at first, study had few 

 attractions for him ; that the first time he felt the necessity of 

 working was to take the place of a somewhat unruly scholar, 

 who, seated on a form superior to his own, used to kick and an- 

 noy him ; that at the age of twenty-two he contended for a fel- 

 lowship at Cambridge, and was beaten by a certain Robert 

 Uvedale, whose name, except for this circumstance, would now 

 have been completely forgotten ; and, finally, that Fontenelle 

 was more ingenious than accurate, when he applied to Newton 

 these remarkable words of Lucan, — " Men have never seen the 

 Nile, when small, and at its source/' 



At six years of age Young was placed under a teacher at 

 Bristol, whose mediocrity was very fortunate for him. There 

 is no paradox in this statement. The scholar could not accom- 

 modate himself to the slow and contracted paces of his master ; 

 he became his own instructor, and it was thus those brilliant fa- 

 culties developed themselves, which, urged to any extent, would 

 certainly have been enfeebled. 



Young was eight years of age, when accident, whose influ- 

 ence on the events of the life of all men is more considerable 

 than their vanity will always allow them to avow, threw him 

 in the way of studies which were exclusively literary, and re- 

 vealed to him his vocation. A respectable land-surveyor, who 

 lived hard by, conceived a great affection for him. He some« 

 times, on holidays, took him along with him to the scene of his 

 labours, and allowed him to amuse himself with his instruments. 

 The operations, by means of which the young scholar perceived 

 that distances of objects which were inaccessible were determined, 

 and their elevations measured, greatly struck his imagination ; 

 but speedily a few chapters in a mathematical dictionary caused 



p2 



