"I lost the opportunity of supplying safeguards to the understandings of those, who perhaps will never thank me for what I am aiming to do in exercising their reason. "Against my will," says he, "I was chosen by my master as one of those destined for the university; and about this time my brother Luke, or 'the Doctor,' so called from his infancy, because being the seventh son, he had, from his infancy, been dedicated to the medical profession, came to town to walk the London Hospital, under the care of Sir William Blizard. Mr. Saumarez, brother of the Admiral Lord Saumarez, was his intimate friend. Every Saturday I could make or obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O the bliss if I was permitted to hold the plasters, or to attend the dressings. Thirty years afterwards, Mr. Saumarez retained the liveliest recollections of the extraordinary, enthusiastic blue-coat boy, and was exceedingly affected in identifying me with that boy. I became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon. English, Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's Latin Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, which gradually blending with, gradually gave way to a rage for metaphysics, occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's Letters, and more by theology. After I had read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel! but my infidel vanity never touched my heart:" nor ever with his lips did he for a few months only support the new light given him by Voltaire. "With my heart," says he, "I never did abandon the name of Christ." This reached Bowyer's ears, and he sent for him: not to reason with him, as teachers and parents do too often, and by this means as often increase the vanity of these tyro-would-be-philosophers; but he took the surest mode, if not of curing, at least of checking the disease. His argument was short and forcible. "So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you? then I'll flog your infidelity out of you;" and gave him the severest flogging he had ever received at his hands. This, as I have often heard Coleridge say, was the only just flogging he had ever given him: certainly, from all I ever heard of him, Bowyer was strictly a flogging master. Trollope, in his History of Christ's Hospital, page 137, says of him, "His discipline was exact in the extreme, and tinctured, perhaps, with more than due severity." [8] Coleridge, in his 'Biographia Literaria', after paying a just compliment to Bowyer as a teacher, says, "The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensation of distempered sleep, but neither lessen nor diminish the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations."