East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical AssociationsRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
East Anglia (England)
Nor was it only piety that existed in this distant parish. If the reader
turns to the diary of John Evelyn, under the date of 1679, he will find
mention made of a child brought up to London, ‘son of one Mr. Wotton,
formerly amanuensis to Dr. Andrews, Bishop of Winton, who both read and
perfectly understood Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Syriac, and most of
the modern languages, disputed in divinity, law and all the sciences, was
skilful in history, both ecclesiastical and profane; in a word, so
universally and solidly learned at eleven years of age that he was looked
on as a miracle. Dr. Lloyd, one of the most deep-learned divines of this
nation in all sorts of literature, with Dr. Burnet, who had severely
examined him, came away astonished, and told me they did not believe
there had the like appeared in the world. He had only been instructed by
his father, who being himself a learned person, confessed that his son
knew all that he himself knew. But what was more admirable than his vast
memory was his judgment and invention, he being tried with divers hard
questions which required maturity of thought and experience. He was also
dexterous in chronology, antiquities, mathematics. In sum, an
_intellectus universalis_ beyond all that we reade of Picus Mirandula,
and other precoce witts, and yet withal a very humble child.’ This
prodigy was the son of the Rev. Henry Wotton, minister of Wrentham,
Suffolk. Sir William Skippon, a parishioner, in a letter yet extant,
describes the wonderful achievements of the little fellow when but five
years old. He was admitted at Katherine Hall, Cambridge, some months
before he was ten years old. In after-years he was the friend and
defender of Bentley and the antagonist of Sir William Temple in the great
controversy about ancient and modern learning. He died in 1726, and was
buried at Buxted, in Sussex. It is clear that there was no such
intellectual phenomenon in all London under the Stuarts as that little
Wrentham lad.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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