x Sir William Jackson Hooker . 
of James Vincent, Esq., of Norwich, a worsted manufacturer, 
grandfather of George Vincent 1 , one of the best of the 
Norwich School of artists, and whose works are now much 
sought for. Thus my father presumably derived his love of 
plants from his father’s side, and his artistic powers from his 
mother’s. 
Of my father’s early childhood I know no more than that 
he went to the Norwich Grammar School, under the then 
well-known pedagogue, Dr. Foster, but the records of that 
school having been destroyed it is impossible to say what 
progress he made there ; at home he devoted himself to 
entomology, drawing, and reading books of travel and natural 
history. When only four years old he inherited the reversion 
to a fair competency in landed and personal property in Kent, 
through the death of his cousin and godfather, William Jackson, 
Esq. 2 , of Canterbury, a young man of great promise. After 
leaving school he was sent to reside with a Mr. Paul, of 
Starston (a village on the borders of Suffolk), a gentleman 
farmer, who instructed sons of the landed gentry in the 
management of estates. Early in life he devoted himself to 
ornithology, visiting the Broads and sea-coast of Norfolk, 
which abounded in rare birds, shooting, stuffing, and drawing 
them, besides learning their habits and songs. Sixty years 
later he knew the birds in Kew Gardens by the eye and the 
ear, and in a manner which surprised me. Though a keen 
ornithologist and as keen an entomologist, he was almost 
morbidly averse from taking life ; he never shot for sport or 
for the pot, and many years afterwards when instructing me 
in entomology he was ever urging me to kill with the least 
suffering, and never to take more specimens than were neces- 
sary. His was one of those temperaments that later in life 
1 George Vincent was well educated and brought up, but lost himself. My 
father, his cousin, vainly endeavoured to trace his end in London. 
2 He was killed in 1789, being thrown from his horse at his father’s door; see 
Hasted’s Kent, iv. 427, and, for a long eloge, the Gentleman’s Magazine, lxii 
(1790), 859. A sermon is to this day annually preached, in memory of him, in 
St. Mildred’s Church, Canterbury, where is also his monument by the sculptor 
Bacon. 
