“Every account that I have read about him, in relation to that circumstance is incorrect. When he came to the school he was placed rather higher by the reputation of his abilities, than perhaps he ought to have been, in consequence of his actual attainments; and I can only say that many of the statements in the life of Porson are not founded in truth. With respect to prosody, he knew but little, and as to Greek he had made comparatively but little progress when he came to Eton. The very ingenious and learned editor of one account of him, has been misinformed in most particulars; and many of the incidents which he relates, I can venture from my own knowledge to assert, are distorted or exaggerated. Even Person’s compositions, at an early period, though eminently correct, fell far short of excellence; still we all looked up to him in consequence of his great abilities and variety of information, though much of that information was confined to the knowledge of his schoolfellows, and could not easily fall under the notice of his instructors. He always undervalued school exercises, and generally wrote his exercises fair at once, without study. I should be sorry to detract from the merit of an individual whom I loved, esteemed, and admired; but I speak of him when he had only given the promise of his future excellence; and in point of school exercises, I think he was very inferior to more than one of his contemporaries; I would name the present Marquis Wellesley as infinitely superior to him in composition. “On being asked whether he wrote the same beautiful hand as he did afterwards, Dr. Goodall replied he did, nor was there any doubt of his general scholarship. “To a question whether he made great progress during the time he was at Eton, or after he left? Dr. Goodall said he was advanced as far as he could be with propriety, but there were certainly some there who would not have been afraid to challenge Porson as a school-boy, though they would have shunned all idea of competition with him at Cambridge. The first book that Porson ever studied, as he often told me, was Chambers’s Cyclopædia; he read the whole of that dictionary through, and in a great degree made himself master of the algebraic part of that work entirely by the force of his understanding. “Dr. Goodall was then asked if he considered there was any ground for complaint on the part of Porson, in not having been sent to Cambridge, to which he answered no; he was placed as high in the school as he well could be; as a proof however of his merits, when he left Eton, contributions were readily supplied by Etonians in aid of Sir George Baker’s proposal, to secure the funds for his maintenance at the university.”