"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."
He had his passionate days, which the boys described as the days he wore his Passy wig (passy abbreviated from passionate). "Sirrah! I'll flog you," were words so familiar to him, that on one occasion, some female relation or friend of one of the boys entered his room, when a class stood before him and inquired for Master — ; master was no school title with Bowyer. The errand of this lady being to ask a short leave of absence for some boy, on the sudden appearance in town of his country cousin, still lingering at the door, after having been abruptly told to go, Bowyer suddenly exclaimed, "Bring that woman here, and I'll flog her!"
themes in his fifteenth year
, in verse as well as prose, marked him as a boy of great talent, but of talent only according to his own definition of it (vide
Friend
, vol. iii. edit. 1818). His verse was good, his prose powerful, and language correct, and beyond his years in depth of thought, but as yet he had not manifested, according to the same test, anything of genius. I met among some of his notes, written at the age of fifty-one, the following critique on one of his schoolboy themes:
"This theme was written at the age of fifteen: it does not contain a line that any schoolboy might not have written, and like most school-poetry, there is a putting of thoughts into verse. Yet such verses as a striving of mind and struggles after the intense and vivid, are a fair promise of better things."
The same observation might be made in the intense application of his intellectual powers in search of truth, at the time he called himself an infidel; in this struggle of mind was the "fair promise of better things." It was the preparation necessary for such a mind; the breaking up and tilling of the soil for the successful germination of the seeds of truth.