seen more feeling gratitude than was shewn by him on those occasions."

At this school, under the same excellent tuition, Henry remained till he was between fourteen and fifteen years of age; at which period he was induced to offer himself as a candidate for a vacant scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Young as he was, he went there alone, without any interest in the University, and with only a single letter to one of the tutors: and, there, he acquitted himself so well, though strongly and ably opposed, that in the opinion of some of the examiners, he ought to have been elected. How often is the hand of God seen in frustrating our fondest designs! Had success attended him, the whole circumstances of his after-life would have been varied; and however his temporal interests might have been promoted, his spiritual interests would probably have sustained a propor

tionate loss.

It was with sensations of this kind that he himself many years afterwards reverted to this disappointment. "In the autumn of 1795," he says, in an account prefixed to his private Journal of the year 1803, "my father, at the persuasion of many of his friends, sent me to Oxford, to be a candidate for the vacant scholarship at Corpus Christi; I entered at no college, but had rooms at Exeter College, by the interest of Mr. Cole the Sub-Rector. I passed the examination, I believe,

tolerably well; but was unsuccessful, having every reason to think the decision was impartial. Had I remained, and become a member of the University at that time, as I should have done in case of success, the profligate acquaintance I had there, would have introduced me to a scene of debauchery, in which I must in all probability, from my extreme youth, have sunk forever."

After this repulse, Henry returned home, and continued to attend Dr. Cardew's school till June 1797. That he had made no inconsiderable progress, there, was evident from the very creditable examination he passed at Oxford; and, in the two years subsequent to this, he must have greatly augmented his fund of classical knowledge: but it seems not to have been till after he had commenced his academical career, that his superiority of talent was fully discovered. The signal success of that friend who had been his guide and protector at school, led him in the spring of this year to direct his views towards the University of Cambridge, which he probably preferred to that of Oxford, because he there hoped to profit by the advice and assistance to which he was already so much indebted. Whatever might be the cause of this preference, it certainly did not arise from any predilection for mathematics; for in the autumn before he went to Cambridge, instead of the study of Euclid and Algebra, he confesses that one part of the day was dedicated to his favorite employ

ment of shooting, and the other to reading, for the most part, Travels, and Lord Chesterfield's Letters,-"attributing to a want of taste for mathematics, what ought to have been ascribed to idleness, and having his mind in a roving, dissatisfied, restless condition, seeking his chief pleasure in reading, and human praise."

His residence at St. John's College, where his name had been previously entered in the summer, commenced in the month of October 1797; and,

it

may tend to shew how little can be determined from first attempts, to relate that Henry Martyn began his mathematical pursuits by attempting to commit the propositions of Euclid to memory. The endeavor may be considered as a proof of the confidence he himself entertained of the retentive powers of his mind; but it did not supply an auspicious omen of future excellence.

On his introduction to the University, happily for him, the friend of his "boyish days" became the counsellor of his riper years: nor was this most important act of friendship either lost upon him at the time, or obliterated from his memory in after life. "During the first term," he has recorded in his Journal, "I was kept a good deal in idleness by some of my new acquaintances, but the kind attention of * * * was a principal means of my preservation from excess." That his time was far from being wholly misemployed, between October and Christmas, is evident from the place

he obtained in the first class, at the public examination of his college in December; a circumstance which, joined to the extreme desire he had to gratify his Father, encouraged and excited him to study with increased alacrity; and as the fruit of this application, at the next public examination in the summer he reached the second station in the first class; a point of elevation, which "flattered his pride not a little."

The tenor of Henry Martyn's life during this and the succeeding year he passed at college, was to the eye of the world in the highest degree amiable and commendable. He was outwardly moral, with little exception was unwearied in application, and exhibited marks of no ordinary talent. But whatever may have been his external conduct, and whatever his capacity in literary pursuits, he seems to have been totally ignorant of spiritual things, and to have lived "without God in the world." The consideration, that God chiefly regards the motives of our actions, a consideration so momentous, and so essential to the character of a real christian, appears as yet never to have entered his mind: and even when it did, as was the case at this time, it rested there as a theoretic notion never to be reduced to practice. His own account of himself is very striking. Speaking of June 1799,, he says, * (the friend alluded to before) attempted to persuade me that I ought to attend to reading, not for the praise of

**

men, but for the glory of God. This seemed strange to me, but reasonable. I resolved, therefore, to maintain this opinion thenceforth; but never designed, that I remember, that it should affect my conduct." What a decisive mark this of an unrenewed mind!-What an affecting proof that light may break in on the understanding, whilst there is not so much as the dawn of it on the heart!

Providentially for Henry Martyn, he had not only the great blessing of possessing a religious friend at college, but the singular felicity likewise of having a sister in Cornwall, who was a christian of a meek, heavenly, and affectionate spirit; to whom, as well as to the rest of his relations there, he paid a visit in the summer of the year 1799, carrying with him no small degree of academical honor, though not all that he had fondly and ambitiously expected-for he had lost the prize for themes in his college, and was only second again in the first class at the public examination, when he had hoped to have been first;a "double disappointment," which, to use his own words, "nettled him to the quick." It may be well supposed, that to a sister, such as his, her brother's spiritual welfare would be a most serious and anxious concern: and that she often conversed with him on the subject of religion, we have his own declaration. "I went home this summer, and was frequently addressed by my