Blumenbach has shown me many civilities, but I am most at home at Arnemann’s, under whose roof I live, and who has been long in Britain, and brought an English wife home with him. You need not be afraid of my following his example and marrying a German lady. I am not likely to lose my heart here, though there are some tolerably agreeable girls with whom I wish to be more acquainted for the sake of exercise in the language; for conversation with women gives both a fluency of expression and a delicacy of manners which are never to be learned from men. On April 30 he passed his examination before the Medical Faculty. I made [says he] no preparatory study, as is usual here, and also at Edinburgh not uncommon, under the name of grinding. The examination lasted between four and five hours. The four examiners were seated round a table, well furnished with cakes, sweetmeats, and wine, which helped to pass the time agreeably. The questions were well calculated to sound the depth of a student’s knowledge in practical physics, surgery, anatomy, chemistry, materia medica, and physiology; but the professors were not very severe in exacting accurate answers. Most of them were pleased to express their approbation of my replies. We were all previously obliged to give a summary account of the manner in which our lives had been spent. He wrote to his uncle towards the close of his residence in Göttingen thus: I have this morning been upon the back of the Springer. To mount this terrestrial Pegasus is considered here something like _Summos in re equestri honores_, and is seldom attained without long practice. I finish my lessons this week and look back with satisfaction on the health and amusement which have repaid my time and money. It might, perhaps, be more useful to me to take some instruction how to sit in a doctor’s chariot; but it is impossible to possess any qualification which one may not want, and capabilities are but light burdens. We have another fashionable exercise, which I think adequately corresponds to the athletic schools of the ancients--vaulting on a wooden horse in various positions--and I am much more known among the students for excelling in this than for writing Greek, of which they have little knowledge and not much more respect. After being nine months at Göttingen he returned by Brunswick, Gotha, Weimar, Jena, Dresden, and Berlin to England in February 1797. At Brunswick he had a favourable opportunity of exhibiting his personal agility at a court masquerade, where he made his appearance with great success in the character of Harlequin.