It is only fair, however, to remark that he started with no disadvantages. There was no stain in the family history: he had no dead weight to carry, of a disgraced name, or of bad health, or deficient faculties, or hereditary tendencies to vice. It must be acknowledged, too, that he was endowed with a naturally clear understanding and an unusual power of looking below the surface of things. The first element of success that we meet with in his biography is the faithfulness with which he did his work. This led the bookseller to take his poor errand-boy as an apprentice; and this enabled his father to write, when he was 18: "Michael is bookbinder and stationer, and is very active at learning his business. He has been most part of four years of his time out of seven. He has a very good master and mistress, and likes his place well. He had a hard time for some while at first going; but, as the old saying goes, he has rather got the head above water, as there is two other boys under him." This faithful industry marked also his relations with Davy and Brande, and the whole of his subsequent life; and at last, when he found that he could no longer discharge his duties, it made him repeatedly press his resignation on the managers of the Royal Institution, and beg to be relieved of his eldership in the Church. His love of study, and hunger after knowledge, led him to the particular career which he pursued, and that power of imagination, which reveals itself in his early letters, grew and grew, till it gave him such a familiarity with the unseen forces of nature as has never been vouchsafed to any other mortal. As a source of success there stands out also his enthusiasm. A new fact seemed to charge him with an energy that gleamed from his eyes and quivered through his limbs, and, as by induction, charged for the time those in his presence with the same vigour of interest. Plücker, of Bonn, was showing him one day in the laboratory at Albemarle Street his experiments on the action of a magnet on the electric discharge in vacuum tubes. Faraday danced round them; and as he saw the moving arches of light, he cried, "Oh! to live in it!" Mr. James Heywood once met him in the thick of a tremendous storm at Eastbourne, rubbing his hands with delight because he had been fortunate enough to see the lightning strike the church tower, and displace a pinnacle. This enthusiasm led him to throw all his heart into his work. Nor was the energy spasmodic, or wasted on unworthy objects; for, in the words of Bence Jones, his was "a lifelong lasting strife to seek and say that which he thought was true, and to do that which he thought was kind."