LECTURE VII
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
The little hamlet of Woolsthorpe lies close to the village of Colsterworth, about six miles south of Grantham, in the county of Lincoln. In the manor house of Woolsthorpe, on Christmas Day, 1642, was born to a widowed mother a sickly infant who seemed not long for this world. Two women who were sent to North Witham to get some medicine for him scarcely expected to find him alive on their return. However, the child lived, became fairly robust, and was named Isaac, after his father. What sort of a man this father was we do not know. He was what we may call a yeoman, that most wholesome and natural of all classes. He owned the soil he tilled, and his little estate had already been in the family for some hundred years. He was thirty-six when he died, and had only been married a few months.
Of the mother, unfortunately, we know almost as little. We hear that she was recommended by a parishioner to the Rev. Barnabas Smith, an old bachelor in search of a wife, as "the widow Newton—an extraordinary good woman:" and so I expect she was, a thoroughly sensible, practical, homely, industrious, middle-class, Mill-on-the-Floss sort of woman. However, on her second marriage she went to live at North Witham, and her mother, old Mrs. Ayscough, came to superintend the farm at Woolsthorpe, and take care of young Isaac.
By her second marriage his mother acquired another piece of land, which she settled on her first son; so Isaac found himself heir to two little properties, bringing in a rental of about £80 a year.
Fig. 56.—Manor-house of Woolsthorpe.
He had been sent to a couple of village schools to acquire the ordinary accomplishments taught at those places, and for three years to the grammar school at Grantham, then conducted by an old gentleman named Mr. Stokes. He had not been very industrious at school, nor did he feel keenly the fascinations of the Latin Grammar, for he tells us that he was the last boy in the lowest class but one. He used to pay much more attention to the construction of kites and windmills and waterwheels, all of which he made to work very well. He also used to tie paper lanterns to the tail of his kite, so as to make the country folk fancy they saw a comet, and in general to disport himself as a boy should.