After this instruction at home, I was delivered at the age of seven into the hands of Mr. John Kirkby, who exercised for about eighteen months the office of my domestic tutor, enlarged my knowledge of arithmetic, and left me a clear impression of the English and Latin rudiments.  In my ninth year, in a lucid interval of comparative health, I was sent to a school of about seventy boys at Kingston-upon-Thames, and there, by the common methods of discipline, at the expense of many tears and some blood, purchased a knowledge of the Latin syntax.  After a nominal residence at Kingston of nearly two years, I was finally recalled by my mother’s death.  My poor father was inconsolable, and he renounced the tumult of London, and buried himself in the rustic solitude of Buriton; but as far back as I can remember, the house of my maternal grandfather, near Putney Bridge, appears in the light of my proper and native home, and that excellent woman, Mrs. Catherine Porten, was the true mother of my mind, as well as of my health.

At this time my father was too easily content with such teachers as the different places of my residence could supply, and it might now be apprehended that I should continue for life an illiterate cripple; but as I approached my sixteenth year, nature displayed in my favour her mysterious energies:  my constitution was fortified and fixed, and my disorders most wonderfully vanished.

Without preparation or delay, my father carried me to Oxford, and I was matriculated in the university as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen College before I had accomplished the fifteenth year of my age.  As often as I was tolerably exempt from danger and pain, reading, free desultory reading, had been the employment and comfort of my solitary hours, and I was allowed, without control or advice, to gratify the wanderings of an unripe taste.  My indiscriminate appetite subsided by degrees into the historic line; and I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.

The happiness of boyish years I have never known, and that time I have never regretted.  To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation.  I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College, and they proved the fourteen months the most idle and profitless of my whole life.  The sum of my improvement there is confined to three or four Latin plays.  It might at least be expected that an ecclesiastical school should inculcate the orthodox principles of religion.  But our venerable mother had contrived to unite the opposite extremes of bigotry and indifference.  The blind activity of idleness urged me to advance without armour into the dangerous mazes of controversy, and at the age of sixteen I bewildered myself in the errors of the church of Rome.  Translations of two famous works of Bossuet achieved my conversion, and surely I fell by a noble hand.