peculiar temptations and inconveniences attending the situation of school-master's son; strictly forbearing to question him on any occasion respecting the behaviour of his young companions, and strongly impressing him with the meanness of tale-bearing so completely, he added, was he regarded as one of the boys, that he was more than once appointed by the rest to stand sentinel while they were engaged in stripping his father's

fruit trees.

The merit of the Rev. Mr. Aikin was at length the means of recommending him to a situation more worthy of him. A dissenting academy on a liberal plan having been set up at Warrington in Lancashire, the trustees invited him to undertake the office of classical tutor; this he accepted, and in the year 1756 removed thither with his family.

His son, though only in his 12th year, was so forward in his learning that he was immediately entered among the students and attended the lectures of his father and the other tutors. Three diligent years past in this situation, enabled him to add a considerable superstructure of various knowledge to the firm grammatical foundation. previously laid at Kibworth, and, what was of still more importance, imbued him indelibly with that love of letters which became at once the ornament

and safeguard of his youth, and the occupation and solace of every succeeding period of his life. It was intended by this learned education to fit him for the study of divinity; but the weakness of his voice, and perhaps the native vivacity of his temper, caused a change in his destination; he made his option in favour of the medical profession, and was in consequence articled to Mr. Garthshore, a surgeon and apothecary in considerable practice at Uppingham, in Rutlandshire.

There was no portion of his time which, on the review of life, Dr. Aikin regarded with so little complacency as the three important years he was doomed to drag on in this irksome and uninstructive situation. To have placed him in it, he regarded as an error of judgment ascribable to a prepossession, frequent among parents of a serious turn and small acquaintance with the world, to which he observed that many young men within the sphere of his acquaintance had fallen lamentable victims. This prepossession consists in an undue preference of remote and obscure situations for youths during the period of apprenticeship, as sheltered from the temptations of great towns and cities, and comparatively favourable to innocence and virtue. "What," he would say, can you possibly do worse with a youth than send him, from the comforts of a lettered and civilized home,

to a master, probably of sordid habits, in a place where he can find none but gross and vulgar company if he seeks for any, and where sotting and low vice will be the only pastimes offered him for the amusement of his hours of leisure?" Such a situation nearly, was his own at Uppingham, where he did not form a single intimacy. An elder apprentice little congenial in manners or studies, was the only companion of his own class that the place afforded; the inn was the sole place of social recreation, and the landlord's daughter "the Cynosure of neighbouring eyes." Nothing but his strong love of literature, and the conscious superiority with which it already inspired him, could probably have saved him at this time from sinking into a state of melancholy listlessness, though the restraints of morality and religion should have withheld him from rushing to degradation and ruin. But this preservative proved, happily, effectual; he applied himself with diligence and remarkable success to the business of his profession, conciliated by his excellent qualities and pleasing manners the esteem and affection of the family in which he was domesticated, and fulfilled this period of his probation creditably if not happily.

The monotony of his residence at Uppingham was however occasionally broken by visits to the neighbouring town of Leicester, made under cir

cumstances peculiarly conducive both to his pleasure and improvement. Mr. Pulteney, a particular friend of his father's and through his introduction of Mr. Garthshore's, a man of a highly cultivated and philosophical mind and great sensibility of heart, was settled as an apothecary at this place; and on particular emergencies he sometimes requested to borrow the assistance of his friend's pupil, Mr. Aikin. This was always granted with alacrity; if Mr. Pulteney was at home, his conversation was rich in enjoyment to a youth who pined after the lettered intercourse of his father's house; if, as was more frequently the case, he was absent, Leicester was not destitute of a small circle of acquaintance capable of affording him high gratification, and in which he was received with distinguished kindness, at first for his father's sake, and afterwards for his own." It was here that he first tasted the charms of cultivated female society, which in after life formed so great a portion of his enjoyment; one lady in particular, who, exemplary in the relations of wife and mother, had yet a heart for friendship and talents for society, was long his standard of excellence for her sex; and it was perhaps somewhat owing to this early impression, that he always placed the qualities of the understanding unusually high in his estimate of female perfection.

Mr. Aikin had not completed the third year of his term at Uppingham, when Mr. Garthshore made over his business to a successor, having determined to take a doctor's degree at Edinburgh. He prevailed upon Mr. Pulteney to adopt a similar resolution; but as it was this gentleman's purpose to return to Leicester, it was agreed that Mr. Aikin should take charge of his patients during his absence; and he spent on this occasion two or three happy months in that town; afterwards, there was no adequate motive for his remaining at Uppingham, and he was thus freed from his indentures two or three years earlier than the usual period.

At the immature age, as he afterwards regarded it, of eighteen, he was now sent to pursue his medical studies at the university of Edinburgh, then in high repute, and boasting the distinguished names of Black, Monro and Cullen, among its professors. This was, on the whole, a happy period of his life; he rejoiced in his liberation from a state of irksome dependence; he was animated by the society of companions eager in the same occupations and the same amusements, and prone, like himself, to knit those bonds of friendships which double the pleasures of youth, and often survive to soothe the cares of maturer life; above all, he entered with ardor into the business of the