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somewhat enlarged the limited income upon which she had to support herself, and educate her child.

For three years Mrs. Newton continued to watch over her tender charge with parental anxiety; but in consequence of her marriage to the Reverend Barnabas Smith, rector of North Witham, about a mile south of Woolsthorpe, she left him under the care of her own mother. At the usual age he was sent to two day-schools at Skillington and Stoke, where he acquired the education which such seminaries afforded; but when he reached his twelfth year he went to the public school at Grantham, taught by Mr. Stokes, and was boarded at the house of Mr. Clark, an apothecary in that town. According to information which Sir Isaac himself gave to Mr. Conduit, he seems to have been very inattentive to his studies, and very low in the school. The boy, however, who was above him, having one day given him a severe kick upon his stomach, from which he suffered great pain, Isaac laboured incessantly till he got above him in the school, and from that time he continued to rise till he was the head boy. From the habits of application which this incident had led him to form, the peculiar character of his mind was speedily displayed. During the hours of play, when the other boys were occupied with their amusements, his mind was engrossed with mechanical contrivances, either in imitation of something which he had seen, or in execution of some original conception of his own. For this purpose he provided himself with little saws, hatchets, hammers, and all sorts of tools, which he acquired the art of using with singular dexterity. The principal pieces of mechanism which he thus constructed were a windmill, a waterclock, and a carriage put in motion by the person who sat in it. When a windmill was erecting near Grantham on the road to Gunnerby, Isaac frequently attended the operations of the workmen, and acquired such a thorough

knowledge of the machinery that he completed a working model of it, which excited universal admiration. This model was frequently placed on the top of the house in which he lodged at Grantham, and was put in motion by the action of the wind upon its sails. Not content with this exact imitation of the original machine, he conceived the idea of driving it by animal power, and for this purpose he enclosed in it a mouse which he called the miller, and which, by acting upon a sort of treadwheel, gave motion to the machine. According to some accounts, the mouse was made to advance by pulling a string attached to its tail, while others allege that the power of the little agent was called forth by its unavailing attempts to reach a portion of corn placed above the wheel.

The index

His waterclock was formed out of a box which he had solicited from Mrs. Clark's brother. It was about four feet high, and of a proportional breadth, somewhat like a common houseclock. of the dialplate was turned by a piece of wood, which either fell or rose by the action of dropping water. As it stood in his own bedroom he supplied it every morning with the requisite quantity of water, and it was used as a clock by Mr. Clark's family, and remained in the house long after its inventor had quitted Grantham.* His mechanical carriage was a vehicle with four wheels, which was put in motion with a handle wrought by the person who sat in it, but, like Merlin's chair, it seems to have been used only on the smooth surface of a floor, and not fitted to overcome the inequalities of a road. Although

* "I remember once," says Dr. Stukely, "when I was deputy to Dr. Halley, secretary at the Royal Society, Sir Isaac talked of these kind of instruments. That he observed the chief inconvenience in them was, that the hole through which the water is transmitted being necessarily very small, was subject to be furred up by impurities in the water, as those made with sand will wear bigger, which at length causes an inequality in time."-Stukely's Letter to Dr. Mead.-Turnor's ColLections, p. 177.

Newton was at this time "a sober, silent, thinking lad," who scarcely ever joined in the ordinary games of his schoolfellows, yet he took great pleasure in providing them with amusements of a scientific character. He introduced into the school the flying of paper kites; and he is said to have been at great pains in determining their best forms and proportions, and in ascertaining the position and number of the points by which the string should be attached. He made also paper lanterns, by the light of which he went to school in the winter mornings, and he frequently attached these lanterns to the tails of his kites in a dark night, so as to inspire the country people with the belief that they were comets.

In the house where he lodged there were some female inmates in whose company he appears to have taken much pleasure. One of these, a Miss Storey, sister to Dr. Storey, a physician at Buckminster, near Colsterworth, was two or three years younger than Newton, and to great personal attractions she seems to have added more than the usual allotment of female talent. The society of this young lady and her companions was always preferred to that of his own schoolfellows, and it was one of his most agreeable occupations to construct for them little tables and cupboards, and other utensils for holding their dolls and their trinkets. He had lived nearly six years in the same house with Miss Storey, and there is reason to believe that their youthful friendship gradually rose to a higher passion; but the smallness of her portion and the inadequacy of his own fortune appear to have prevented the consummation of their happiness. Miss Storey was afterward twice married, and under the name of Mrs. Vincent, Dr. Stukely visited her at Grantham in 1727, at the age of eighty-two, and obtained from her many particulars respecting the early history of our author. Newton's esteem for her continued unabated during his life. He regularly visited her when

he went to Lincolnshire, and never failed to relieve her from little pecuniary difficulties which seem to have beset her family.

Among the early passions of Newton we must recount his love of drawing; and even of writing verses. His own room was furnished with pictures drawn, coloured, and framed by himself, sometimes from copies, but often from life.* Among these were portraits of Dr. Donne, Mr. Stokes, the master of Grantham school, and King Charles I. under whose picture were the following verses.

A secret art my soul requires to try,

If prayers can give me what the wars deny.
Three crowns distinguished here, in order do
Present their objects to my knowing view.
Earth's crown, thus at my feet I can disdain,
Which heavy is, and at the best but vain.
But now a crown of thorns I gladly greet,
Sharp is this crown, but not so sharp as sweet;
The crown of glory that I yonder see
Is full of bliss and of eternity.

These verses were repeated to Dr. Stukely by Mrs. Vincent, who believed them to be written by Sir Isaac, a circumstance which is the more probable, as he himself assured Mr. Conduit, with some expression of pleasure, that he "excelled in making verses," although he had been heard to express a contempt for poetical composition.

But while the mind of our young philosopher was principally occupied with the pursuits which we have now detailed, it was not inattentive to the movements of the celestial bodies, on which he was destined to throw such a brilliant light. The imperfections of his water clock had probably directed his thoughts to the more accurate measure of time which the motion of the sun afforded. In the yard of the

* Mr. Clark informed Dr. Stukely that the walls of the room in which Sir Isaac lodged were covered with charcoal drawings of birds, beasts, men, ships, and mathematical figures, all of which were very well designed.

house where he lived, he traced the varying movements of that luminary upon the walls and roofs of the buildings, and by means of fixed pins he had marked out the hourly and half-hourly subdivisions. One of these dials, which went by the name of Isaac's dial, and was often referred to by the country people for the hour of the day, appears to have been drawn solely from the observations of several years; but we are not informed whether all the dials which he drew on the wall of his house at Woolsthorpe, and which existed after his death, were of the same description, or were projected from his knowledge of the doctrine of the sphere.

Upon the death of the Reverend Mr. Smith in the year 1656, his widow left the rectory of North Witham, and took up her residence at Woolsthorpe along with her three children, Mary, Benjamin, and Hannah Smith. Newton had now attained the fifteenth year of his age, and had made great progress in his studies; and as he was thought capable of being useful in the management of the farm and country business at Woolsthorpe, his mother, chiefly from a motive of economy, recalled him from the school at Grantham. In order to accustom him to the art of selling and buying, two of the most important branches of rural labour, he was frequently sent on Saturday to Grantham market to dispose of grain and other articles of farm produce, and to purchase such necessaries as the family required, As he had yet acquired no experience, an old trustworthy servant generally accompanied him on these errands. The inn which they patronised was the Saracen's Head at West Gate; but no sooner had they put up their horses than our young philosopher deserted his commercial concerns, and betook himself to his former lodging in the apothecary's garret, where a number of Mr. Clark's old books afforded him abundance of entertainment till his aged guardian had executed the family commissions, and an

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