CHARACTER AND ATTAINMENTS. 331 
knowledge which he had happily acquired of the theory 
of music. He carried out also to a great extent the tal- 
ent of executing it; and I believe it is certain that of all 
known instruments, even including the Scottish bagpipe, 
only one or two could be named on which he could not 
play. His taste for painting developed itself during a 
visit which he paid to Germany. There the magnificent 
collection of Dresden absorbed his attention entirely ; for 
he aspired not solely to the easy credit of connecting 
together, without mistake, the name of such or such an 
artist with such or such a painting; the defects and the 
characteristic qualities of the greatest masters, their fre- 
quent changes of manner, the material objects which 
they introduced into their works, the modifications which 
those objects and the colours underwent in progress of 
time, among other points, occupied him in succession. 
Young, in one word, studied painting in Saxony, as he 
had before studied languages in his own country, and as 
he afterwards studied the sciences. Every thing, in fact, 
was a subject of meditation and research. The univer- 
sity contemporaries of the illustrious physicist recalled a 
laughable instance of this trait of his mind. They re- 
lated that entering his room one day, when for the first 
time he had taken a lesson in daneing the minuet, at 
Edinburgh, they found him occupied in tracing out 
minutely with the rule and compasses, the route gone 
through by the two dancers, and the different improve- 
ments of which these figures seemed to him susceptible. 
Young borrowed with happy effect, from the sect of 
the Friends, to which he then belonged, the opinion that 
the intellectual faculties of children differ originally from 
each other much less than is commonly supposed. “ Any 
man can do what any other man has done,” became his 
