You will be pleased, as a lover of the fine arts, to hear that I am taking lessons in drawing. You will not be surprised that I receive in this study, as well as in music and dancing, full approbation from my masters for application and accuracy. At the same time they honestly tell me that ease is wanting, and you will also readily believe that I have the assurance not to be discouraged with this character, while they all assert that I may confidently expect sufficient advancement in due time....
I have not exhibited myself at a public dance. My master, who is a very sensible fellow, advising me against it, as he observed that a person seldom loses the character which he obtains from the first impressions; but we have agreed that I may venture at the next pique nique.
On the alternate Sundays we have a dance: either a tea dance or a supper dance; one from four to eight, and the other from five to one. This is called a pique nique, and in its constitution resembles a Scotch oyster dance.
Soon after, to his uncle, he says:
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.
From Berlin he wrote, December 12, to his uncle: ‘You say my Thesis (for his medical degree, on the conservative forces of the human body) is caviare to the general; but do not you think people have a greater respect for anything out of the common way? It seems a fatality that almost everything I do, or produce, should be termed stiff; in this case it may arise from my having been obliged to treat the subject in a short compass.’