lection. Eight years later, we find him congratulating
himself in his journal on thus having escaped the "scenes of debauchery"
to which his "profligate acquaintances" might have introduced him. Was
Corpus very much changed, when, only eleven years after, John Keble
entered it at the same age? Was it that Martyn's Cornish schoolfellows
were a bad set, or does this thanksgiving proceed from the sort of pious
complacency which religious journalizing is apt to produce in the best of
men?

The failure sent Henry back to work for two years longer at the Truro
Grammar School, and when at sixteen he was entered at St. John's,
Cambridge (most peculiarly the college of future missionaries), he
immediately made proof of his remarkable talent. Strange to say,
although his father's rise in life had begun in his mathematical ability,
Henry's training in this branch had been so deficient, and the study
appeared so repugnant to him, that his first endeavour at Cambridge was
to learn the proportions of Euclid by heart, without trying to follow
their reasoning. This story is told of many persons, but perhaps of no
one else who in four years' time, while still a month under twenty, was
declared Senior Wrangler.

This was in 1801, and the intervening time had been spent in hard study
and regular habits, but neither his sister at home, nor a
seriously-minded college friend, were satisfied with his religious
feelings during the first part of the time, and he himself regarded it
afterwards as a period of darkness. Indeed, his temper was under so
little control that in a passion he threw a knife at a companion, but
happily missed his aim, so that it only pierced the wall. The shock of
horror no doubt was good for him. But the next step he recorded in his
life was his _surprise_ at hearing it maintained that the glory of God,
not the praise of man, should be the chief motive of study. After
thinking it over his mind assented, and he resolved to maintain this as a
noble saying, but did not perceive that it would affect his conduct.

However, the dearest, almost the only hallowed form of the praise of man,
was taken from him by the death of his father in 1799, immediately after
the delight of hearing of his standing first in the Christmas
examination. The expense of a return home was beyond his means, but he
took to reading the Bible, as a proper form to be complied with in the
days of mourning; and beginning with the Acts, as being