Dr. Cardew, of the Truro Grammar School, where, by the kindness of the Tonkins, he spent the year preceding his father’s death, wrote of him that he did not at that time discover any extraordinary abilities, or, so far as could be observed, any propensity to those scientific pursuits which raised him to such eminence. “His best exercises were translations from the classics into English verse.” He had previously spent nine years in the Penzance Grammar School under the tyranny of the Rev. Mr. Coryton, a man of irregular habits and as deficient in good method as in scholarship. As Davy used to come up for the customary castigation, the worthy follower of Orbilius was wont to repeat—
“Now, Master Davy,
Now, sir! I have ’ee
No one shall save ’ee—
Good Master Davy!”
He had, too, an unpleasant habit of pulling the boys’ ears, on the supposition, apparently, that their receptivity for oral instruction was thereby stimulated. It is recorded that on one occasion Davy appeared before him with a large plaster on each ear, explaining, with a very grave face, that he had “put the plasters on to prevent mortification.” Whence it may be inferred that, in spite of all the caning and the ear-pulling, there was still much of the unregenerate Adam left in “good Master Davy.”
Mr. Coryton’s method of inculcating knowledge and the love of learning, happily, had no permanent ill-effect on the boy. Years afterwards, when reflecting on his school-life, he wrote, in a letter to his mother—
“After all, the way in which we are taught Latin and Greek does not much influence the important structure of our minds. I consider it fortunate that I was left much to myself when a child, and put upon no particular plan of study, and that I enjoyed much idleness at Mr. Coryton’s school. I perhaps owe to these circumstances the little talents that I have and their peculiar application.”
If Davy’s abilities were not perceived by his masters, they seemed to have been fully recognised by his school-fellows—to judge from the frequency with which they sought his aid in their Latin compositions, and from the fact that half the love-sick youths of Penzance employed him to write their valentines and letters. His lively imagination, strong dramatic power, and retentive memory combined to make him a good story-teller, and many an evening was spent by his comrades beneath the balcony of the Star Inn, in Market Jew Street, listening to his tales of wonder or horror, gathered from the “Arabian Nights” or from his grandmother Davy, a woman of fervid mind stored with traditions and ancient legends, from whom he seems to have derived much of his poetic instinct.
Those who would search in environment for the conditions which determine mental aptitudes, will find it very difficult to ascertain what there was in Davy’s boyish life in Penzance to mould him into a natural philosopher. At school he seems to have acquired nothing beyond a smattering of elementary mathematics and a certain facility in turning Latin into English verse. Most of what he obtained in the way of general knowledge he picked up for himself, from such books as he found in the library of his benefactor, Mr. John Tonkin. Dr. John Davy has left us a sketch of the state of society in the Mount’s Bay during the latter part of the eighteenth century, which serves to show how unfavourable was the soil for the stimulation and development of intellectual power. Cornwall at that time had but little commerce; and beyond the tidings carried by pedlars or ship-masters, or contained in the Sherborne Mercury—the only newspaper which then circulated in the west of England—it knew little or nothing of what was going on in the outer world. Its roads were mostly mere bridle-paths, and a carriage was as little known in Penzance as a camel. There was only one carpet in the town, the floors of the rooms being, as a rule, sprinkled with sea-sand:—
“All classes were very superstitious; even the belief in witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost unbounded credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous.... Amongst the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature and still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting, generally ending in drunkenness, were what they most delighted in. Smuggling was carried on to a great extent, and drunkenness and a low scale of morals were naturally associated with it.”
Davy, an ardent, impulsive youth of strong social instincts, fond of excitement, and not over studious, seems, now that he was released from the restraint of school-life, to have come under the influence of such surroundings. For nearly a year he was restless and unsettled, spending much of his time like his father in rambling about the country and in fishing and shooting, and passing from desultory study to occasional dissipation. The death of his father, however, made a profound impression on his mind, and suddenly changed the whole course of his conduct. As the eldest son, and approaching manhood, he seems at once to have realised what was due to his mother and to himself. The circumstances of the family supplied the stimulus to exertion, and he dried his mother’s tears with the assurance that he would do all in his power for his brothers and sisters. A few weeks after the decease of his father he was apprenticed to Mr. Bingham Borlase, an apothecary and surgeon practising in Penzance, and at once marked out for himself a course of study and self-tuition almost unparalleled in the annals of biography, and to which he adhered with a strength of mind and tenacity of purpose altogether unlooked for in one of his years and of his gay and careless disposition. That it was sufficiently ambitious will be evident from the following transcript from the opening pages of his earliest note-book—a small quarto, with parchment covers, dated 1795:—