Whatever might have been his habits in boyhood, in manhood he was
scrupulously
clean in his person, and especially took great care of his hands by frequent ablutions. In his dress also he was as cleanly as the liberal use of snuff would permit, though the clothes-brush was often in requisition to remove the wasted snuff. "Snuff," he would facetiously say, "was the final cause of the nose, though troublesome and expensive in its use.
"Jemmy Bowyer," as he was familiarly called by Coleridge and Lamb, might not inaptly be termed the "plagosus orbilius" of Christ's Hospital.
In his biographical sketch of his literary life, he informs us that he had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the Greek, into English Anacreontica, before his fifteenth year.