of his own fortune, appear to have prevented the consummation of their happiness.  Miss Storey was afterwards twice married, and under the name of Mrs. Vincent, Dr. Stukeley visited her at Grantham in 1727, at the age of eighty-two, and obtained from her many particulars respecting the early history of our author.  Newton’s esteem for her continued unabated during his life.  He regularly visited her when he went to Lincolnshire, and never failed to relieve her from little pecuniary difficulties which seem to have beset her family.”

The schoolboy at Grantham was only fourteen years of age when his mother became a widow for the second time.  She then returned to the old family home at Woolsthorpe, bringing with her the three children of her second marriage.  Her means appear to have been somewhat scanty, and it was consequently thought necessary to recall Isaac from the school.  His recently-born industry had been such that he had already made good progress in his studies, and his mother hoped that he would now lay aside his books, and those silent meditations to which, even at this early age, he had become addicted.  It was expected that, instead of such pursuits, which were deemed quite useless, the boy would enter busily into the duties of the farm and the details of a country life.  But before long it became manifest that the study of nature and the pursuit of knowledge had such a fascination for the youth that he could give little attention to aught else.  It was plain that he would make but an indifferent farmer.  He greatly preferred experimenting on his water-wheels to looking after labourers, while he found that working at mathematics behind a hedge was much more interesting than chaffering about the price of bullocks in the market place.  Fortunately for humanity his mother, like a wise woman, determined to let her boy’s genius have the scope which it required.  He was accordingly sent back to Grantham school, with the object of being trained in the knowledge which would fit him for entering the University of Cambridge.

[Plate:  Trinity college, Cambridge.  Showing Newton’s rooms; on the leads of the gateway he placed his telescope.]

It was the 5th of June, 1660, when Isaac Newton, a youth of eighteen, was enrolled as an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge.  Little did those who sent him there dream that this boy was destined to be the most illustrious student who ever entered the portals of that great seat of learning.  Little could the youth himself have foreseen that the rooms near the gateway which he occupied would acquire a celebrity from the fact that he dwelt in them, or that the ante-chapel of his college was in good time to be adorned by that noble statue, which is regarded as one of the chief art treasures of Cambridge University, both on account of its intrinsic beauty and the fact that it commemorates the fame of her most distinguished alumnus, Isaac Newton, the immortal astronomer.  Indeed, his advent at the University seemed to have been by no means auspicious or brilliant.  His birth was, as we have seen, comparatively obscure, and though he had already given indication of his capacity for reflecting on philosophical matters, yet he seems to have been but ill-equipped with the routine knowledge which youths are generally expected to take with them to the Universities.