'Now, Master Davy, Now, sir! I have 'ee! No one shall save 'ee-- Good Master Davy!' But neither Mr. Coryton, nor Dr. Cardew, the excellent master of the Truro Grammar School, to which place Davy was for a short period removed, when fourteen years old, seems to have perceived any remarkable genius in the scholar--except that the latter discerned at least his taste and skill in poetry, and in his translations from the classics into English verse. One of the efforts of his muse was an epic poem, 'The Tydidiad,' written when he was twelve years old. In truth Davy, when a schoolboy, was generally composing either ballads or valentines (in Latin or English) for his school-fellows, in making fireworks, or in fishing or shooting, thus proving--what has been so often proved before--that 'the boy is father to the man.' His oratorical displays--sometimes addressed to a crowd of juveniles assembled in front of the Star Inn at Penzance, sometimes to a row of empty chairs in his own bedroom--and his turnip-lantern exhibitions (which afterwards developed into the wonderful mimic volcanoes with which he astonished and delighted his audience at the Royal Institution) were highly popular; the price of admission to the turnip-lantern shows is said to have been paid in an extremely low currency--pins. It would moreover appear from an entry of his in the blank page of his Schrevelius that Harlequin was his favourite part in a pantomime. Of his youth, which all accounts agree in representing as genial and amiable, little more remains to be said, but that he was very awkward with his hands (often blotting out an error in his MS. by dipping his fingers into the ink-bottle)--could never get out of the 'awkward squad' in the Volunteer Corps which he joined--that he was round-shouldered and clumsy--had no taste or ear for music, and possessed a singularly inharmonious voice. Clearly, the outward gifts of our hero were not such as were likely to help him forward on his way through life. To judge what a change the fire of genius, years of study, and the advantages of moving amongst cultured and refined society can accomplish, his portrait, when he was about thirty-three years old, by Lawrence,[103] prefixed to Dr. Paris's 'Life'--or perhaps rather that by Phillips, R.A., which will be found in Polwhele's now rare little volumes the 'Biographical Sketches,' and in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1829, should be examined.