Volume 1

Life of John Locke / by H. R. Fox Bourne.

  • Bourne, H. R. Fox (Henry Richard Fox), 1837-1909.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life of John Locke / by H. R. Fox Bourne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    ia32-ifi. i Alt. 1—14.J FATHER AND SON. 15 grown up, weary of you, and secretly to say within them- selves, ‘ When will you die, father ? ’ ” 1 The home duties of John Locke the elder were, as we have seen, seriously disturbed during his son’s early boy- hood. The disturbances, however, contributed in one respect at least to the lad’s education. “I no sooner perceived myself in the world,” he wrote in 1660, “ but I found myself in a storm which has lasted almost hitherto.”2 The storm began to show itself almost as soon as he could prattle. It raged fiercely all round Pensford, and swept past it more than once, during the years in which he was learning not only to write English and master the rudiments of Latin grammar, but also to begin thinking for himself, in boyish way, on some of the great questions of the time. Those questions must have been forced upon him, child as he was, by the fact that his father was now serving in the army that was setting Charles the First at defiance. In 1646 he became a Westminster boy. How much schoolboy lore he acquired while he was at home or near it we do not know. It would seem that, before being admitted to Westminster, he must have received a better education than his father, even had he not been so busily engaged elsewhere, could himself have been able to give him; and, under ordinary conditions, we might fairly expect that he would have been sent for a few years, after he was ten or eleven, to Bristol Grammar School; but the disturbed state of Bristol at that time, violently seized and violently ruled by royalists till it was violently wrested from them, rendered that almost impossible. 1 ‘ Some Thoughts concerning Education ’ (1G92), § 40. 2 Lord King, ‘ The Life of John Locke, with Extracts from his Corres-
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