16 EAELY DAYS 
inheritance. She was an accomplished woman, who not only 
shared her husband's tastes, but by her well-cultivated gifts 
was able to enter into his pursuits. Their outlook on life was 
similar, for both had been bred in the evangelical tradition, 
which she perhaps preserved the more rigidly. Like him, 
she had a love for music and art, and a keen interest in the 
sciences affected by her father, especially botany. She was 
widely read, and wrote with a facile pen steeped in all the 
copious rotundity of the Johnsonian school. From the Turner 
side, no doubt, she transmitted something of the business 
faculty that was to stand her son in good stead when he came 
to deal with men and affairs. 
Similarity of tastes and interests had first drawn 
together Dawson Turner and W. J. Hooker. The younger 
man was speedily impressed by the great vigour and strong 
character of the elder, admiring his practicality the more for 
being himself careless of selfish interests in the enthusiasm 
of his pursuits. For the rest of his life Dawson Turner became 
his scientific friend, his intimate correspondent, his business 
mentor. Dawson Turner, indeed, won well-deserved success 
alike as banker, author, botanist, and archaeologist. His mother, 
Elizabeth Cotman, brought him an artistic heritage. On his 
father's side, business and scholarship had been grafted upon 
a solid yeoman stock of Norfolk. For nearly two and a half 
centuries since the first Tm'ner bought his modest acres at 
Kennington in 1570, these passed from father to son. 
At the end of the seventeenth century, a j^ounger son, 
Francis (1681-1719), was bred to the law, and settled in Yar- 
mouth, where he married the daughter of the Town Clerk, 
Thomas Godfrey, and with obvious propriety succeeded to 
his office in 1710. 
His only son was another Francis, who took Orders, married 
Sarah Dawson, and had four sons : (1) Francis, an eminent 
surgeon ; (2) Joseph, who was Senior Wrangler in 1768, then 
Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and ultimately Dean 
of Norwich; (3) Richard, who, through the influence of his 
brother the Dean, became incumbent of Great Yarmouth ; and 
(4) James, who became the resident partner in the firm of 
