Thompson therefore returned home in 1877, to the great disappointment of his parents. The indolence which proved his undoing was, says his biographer, Everard Meynell, only "one name of many for the abstractions of Thompson's mind and the inactivities of his body." Against this indolence he struggled nobly all his life. Not a lifetime of mornings spent in bed killed his desire to be up and doing. Even in the trembling hand of his last months he wrote out in big capitals on pages torn from exercise books such texts as were calculated to frighten him into his clothes. In the morning when he woke his eyes fell upon such words as these, "Thou wilt not he abed when the last trump blows," "Thy sleep with the worms will be long enough," and so on, but all in vain. Thompson's indolence was not a mental but a physical characteristic. His poor, disordered body refused exertion and was too sluggish for all Thompson's spiritual energy to rouse. Apparently, however, this indolence and absence of mind would have caused Thompson to fail in any regular profession, and perhaps his father is as much to be pitied as blamed for his next strenuous attempt to make Francis capable of earning his own livelihood. After Thompson's failure at Ushaw, his father decided to prepare his son for his own profession, and sent him to take a medical course at Owen's College, Manchester. For the following six years Thompson pretended to study medicine. He made the journey from home to lectures every morning under compulsion, but once out of sight of the parental eye his day was his own, and was spent anywhere rather than at the lecture or in the dissecting room. He wandered about Manchester, an untidy, abstracted figure with trailing shoe-laces and careless dress, indifferent to passers-by, and muttering a continual soliloquy. He haunted the libraries, museums, and galleries of the city, and while his father thought his son was preparing himself to earn a competence as a respectable practising physician, the son was really equipping himself all unconsciously for the career which was to win him, not indeed a competence, but an undying name in English poetry. It was at this time, in poring over our sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, that Thompson acquired his wonderful vocabulary, which contains so many forgotten words that the critics later accused him of wholesale coinage, and which gives his verse that rich flavour of antiquity which is no small part of its charm.