Recollections of past life / by Sir Henry Holland.

  • Holland, Henry, Sir, 1788-1873.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Recollections of past life / by Sir Henry Holland. 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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    long and intimate friendship with whom I have more pleasure in recording than any mere family tie. What- ever be the fate of his doctrines, he has given to the greatest problem of Natural History a new framework and direction of research, which will ever remain a monument of his genius and persevering labours. A year or two of this first period of life I passed at a private school at Knutsford, learning as much perhaps as such schools generally teach, but this very little. Like most boys of the same age, I had a transient fit of military ardour, fostered by attending the sword exercises of a troop of yeomanry, raised in the town at this time of threatened invasion. I have since seen much of actual military life and battle-fields in various countries, but always looking on them from without—spectator tanturn—as in these early days of boyhood. A more tranquil pleasure at this time was that ot frequent visits to my paternal grandfather at the old family house of Sandlebridge, between Knutsford and Alderley. His was an admirable example of old age rendered venerable by all the gentler qualities of human nature. He was the most perfect practical optimist I have ever known. Living on and farming his own land, he put to shame the many sayings, ancient and modern, as to the querulous nature of the agricultural mind. He never could be got to complain of the change or ‘ distemperature of the seasons.’ If a particular season was quoted to him as bad for one crop, he always vindi- cated it as good for another. I never visit this old and picturesque house of Sandlebridge, now belonging to