'speak for himself.' It was not possible that a biography, issued so soon after his untimely loss, could be a perfect one. And it may be added that Mr. Sargent saw things too nearly from Henry Martyn's own point of view to portray him quite as he deserved. The best biographers are those who, while deeply sympathizing with the life which they set forth, are yet sufficiently removed from it in their own aims and views to see its relation to other men's modes of thought and action. Too great an approximation in these matters is a worse fault than too little. John Wesley, for instance, has received more substantial justice from the defective sympathy and somewhat external admiration of Southey, than from such professed disciples as Mr. Tyerman on the one side, or Mr. Denny Urlin on the other.

Henry Martyn was born born on Septuagesima Sunday, February 18, 1781, at Truro, in the house where the Miners' Bank is now established, of a mining family which had honourably raised itself in the world. Nothing remarkable has been recorded of his childhood. Anyone who might at that time have inspected the ancient Grammar School of Truro (then under its famous old master, Dr. Cardew) might have guessed that some of the boys were destined to distinction. There was Kempthorne, senior wrangler five years before Martyn, already showing the industry which won him (before Martyn won it) the name of the 'undergraduate who never lost a day;' and Batten, who was third wrangler; and-a name still much revered at Truro, where he lived-good old Clement Carlyon, who obtained his fellowship at Pembroke; and there was Humphry Davy, from Penzance, chieży known by his schoolfellows as a pretty poet. But, unless perhaps the visitor chanced to see him bullied into a passion, Harry' Martyn would have attracted no observation. He was not brilliant, nor was he studious. He was only a little ugly, unhealthy boy, with red eyelids and no lashes to them, and hands so studded with warts that the master could not cane him as he wished. His schoolfellows found him goodhumoured enough if quietly treated; but it required all Kempthorne's monitorial care to secure him from boys who enjoyed seeing his fury when provoked. There is nothing to

6

1 The family originally came from Gwennap, where the famous 'Pit' is. There is no reason to suppose that John Martyn, Henry's father, had ever worked underground, as most of the accounts would give us to suppose. They occupied the position of 'Captains,' as they are called in Cornwall, and mine agents; and John began life as accountant to Wheal Virgin.

show that he was in any way a religious boy, or the reverse. But there were good influences at work in Truro, even without leaving the Church in search of them. Henry Martyn's uncle is said, indeed, to have been one of the first trustees of the Wesleyan meeting-house at Truro; but the family was a Church family. The sound work of Samuel Walker had not yet died out in the Church there; and, to judge from the few direct mentions of it in his journals, Henry Martyn seems never to have imbibed any other feeling towards the Methodist religion but one of shrinking and mistrust.'

At the age of fourteen Henry Martyn went up to Oxford to try for a scholarship at Corpus, just eleven years (as Miss Yonge points out) before John Keble entered that college at the same age. How strange an effect it might have had, if Martyn had obtained his object, and found, by-and-by, a Keble, instead of a Kirke White, among his pupils! But he failed; and he learned to thank God for his failure. Had I remained,' he wrote afterwards, and become a member of the University at that time, as I should have done in case of success, the profligate acquaintances I had there would have introduced me to scenes of debauchery in which I must in all probability, from my extreme youth, have sunk for ever.' He returned to the care of Dr. Cardew; and in the autumn of 1797 made a more hopeful start for S. John's College, Cambridge, where his friend Kempthorne, the year before, had taken his high degree.

The prevailing studies of the place were not those in which he took a spontaneous pleasure. At that time the only high road to honours in the University of Cambridge began with a course of mathematics. For this branch of science he had so little natural aptitude, and had received so little training in it at school, that (as is well known) he set out on his undergraduate career with learning Euclid by heart. His own tastes led him far more to classics and poetry, and subsequently to philology and metaphysics. In his later confessions, he accuses himself of having spent his days just before entering the University in shooting wild-fowl a touch which seems anything but unattractive amidst the general tenor of his life, and which reappears as we meet him, years afterwards, wandering along the bank of the Ganges, gun in hand, while his budgerow ascends the river. This occupation divided the day with the study of Chesterfield's

1 The references are: Journal, i. 155, 173; ii. 353, 383.

2 After having abandoned classics all through his undergraduate career, he won the first Members' Prize for Latin prose in 1802.

Letters to his Son, which (shade of Johnson forgive us!) may have contributed something to the grace of manner which was afterwards remarked in him, and for which Johnians' of old were proverbially famed. But he appears to have had a sense of duty, which was reinforced by a keen ambition, and the desire of pleasing his father. If (as he affirms) he was tempted to be an idle dilettante during the first term by some of his new acquaintances, he was soon called back to his mathematical books by the kind attention of Kempthorne. That worthy man, then Fellow of his College, took Martyn in hand. He had a wonderful gift (so Dr. Carlyon tells us) of making mathematics easy; and under his intellectual midwifery the undeveloped powers of Henry Martyn's mind sprang to birth. He became an ardent mathematician, and the high place which he obtained in the College examination in the winter of 1799 seemed to foretell the more exalted honours he was shortly to win in the Tripos.

Up to this time Martyn had not been a religious man. He had not cultivated the inward life by prayer or other exercises. Outwardly, indeed, his conduct was without reproach, save in one particular. His tendency to consumption rendered him liable to great irritability, and he had not striven much to conquer himself. The story is well known, how one day he was so angry with his friend Mr. Cotterill that he threw a knife at him. Fortunately he was too passionate to aim well, but the knife stuck fast in the opposite wall, quivering with the violence which had flung it. His good friend Kempthorne, himself a disciple of Charles Simeon, often tried to wake him to a higher sense of religion, but in vain: so did a sister of his own. Her admonitions only exasperated him: he was too proud to learn from a sister. Even his father came in for a share of his contempt, when their opinions clashed. It was not that he was wanting in natural love: no man had more, but it seems to have been one of those cases where fretfulness conceives itself chartered by the very confidence of familiar affection. He promised the good sister in the Long Vacation of 1799 that he would read the Bible; but when term began again, 'Newton,' he says, 'engaged all my thoughts.' He had been much struck, as by a novel idea, when Kempthorne suggested to him that his motive for thus reading should be the glory of God, and not the praise of 'This,' he writes, seemed strange to me, but reasonable. I resolved, therefore, to maintain this opinion thenceforth, but never designed, that I remember, that it should affect my conduct.' But in January, 1800, his father died.

men.

He was

It was a great shock to Henry's affectionate nature. unable to take the long journey into Cornwall to solace himself by intercourse with the rest of his family. Even his engrossing studies gave him no relief. Partly by the advice of friends, and partly because he felt it to be the proper thing to do, he took to reading the Scriptures. There was no imperious voice crying Tolle, lege; nor any instantaneous awakening. His own account of it runs thus: 'As I had no taste at this time for my usual studies, I took up my Bible thinking that the consideration of religion was rather suitable to this solemn time.' Who would have imagined so calm and cold a beginning to the conversion of the great enthusiast? The part of Holy Scripture to which he turned was hardly that where most mourners would seek their consolation, the Acts of the Apostles, but he chose it, he tells us, as being the most amusing.' It was, however, something to have begun. The doctrine approved itself as resembling the few notions he had picked up in childhood. One step leads to another. He prayed once more in a precomposed form, in which he thanked God in general for having sent Christ into the world. The next time he went to chapel, 'I saw, with some degree of surprise at my former inattention, that in the Magnificat there was a great degree of joy expressed at the coming of Christ, which I thought but reasonable!'

It is unnecessary to trace in detail the progress of this gradual and quiet awakening. There was no violent break anywhere between his old and his new life, nor could he ever have pointed back to the moment of his conversion. And yet the change was both a rapid and a radical one. Before the year 1800 was half out, he could write to the sister who had prayed for him so earnestly: 'I look back now upon that course of wickedness which, like a gulph of destruction, yawned to swallow me up, with a trembling delight, mixed with shame at having lived so long in ignorance, and error, and blindness.' He was still working hard for the Tripes, but, as he felt, not in so pure a spirit of detachment as he should have done. 'The eagerness,' he says, with which I looked forward to the approaching examination for degrees, too clearly betrayed a heart not dead to the world.' Let those carp at this confession whose own ideals fall short of Henry Martyn's. He was beginning to catch the spirit of the Imitation of Christ, into which afterwards he drank so deep, and at least to see that nothing whatever is to be desired save in and for God. If it be so that he had coveted high honours for their own sake, he was to receive the most perfect of cor

rective punishments. In January 1801, a month before he was twenty years old, he was declared senior wrangler, and soon after obtained the first Smith's Prize. 'I obtained my highest wishes,' he writes, 'but was surprised to find I had grasped a shadow.'

It seems strange that in all the struggles of the past year young Martyn had never come into personal contact with the man from whom the whole spiritual life of Cambridge appeared then to flow. He had, indeed, of late attended Holy Trinity Church with great benefit; but it was not until the long vacation of 1801 that he was actually introduced to Mr. Simeon. This introduction was far the most important event which thus far had happened in his life. He became heart and soul a disciple and son of that great man. If ever anyone could rightly be called a 'Simeonite,' that man was Henry Martyn. Those were the days of the first glory of the school of Simeon. Their earnest and searching personal religion startled alike the old official High Churchmanship of England, and the decaying Low Church or Puritan party. Men did not know what to make of them. They called them Methodists; but they differed from Methodism, as much by their staunch adherence to the Book of Common Prayer, as by their soberness, their plain common sense, and their dislike of what was then known as 'enthusiasm.' As Bishop Wilson of Calcutta well said of Simeon, 'The difference between his sentiments and those of others, whether ministers or people, in the same communion, lay in the strength with which he held them, and the holy spiritual use to which they were applied.' It is possible that he shared with most of his contemporaries a defective understanding of certain theological words. He may, like most of them, have attributed too great an efficacy to 'Establishment,' which to his mind so eked out the defects of the Scotch Kirk as to justify communion with it. But the early Simeonites were true Church of England men. The Church prayers were to Simeon (in his own words) 'as marrow and fatness' in the time of his greatest spiritual need. His defence of the Baptismal Office might have been penned by Mr. Sadler for his Church Doctrine-Bible Truth. The early Simeonites were students of Church history, and many a man owes his first taste for that branch of divinity to the pious labours of Mr. Milner. And they read and loved

2

1 Martyn's old schoolfellow, Dr. Carlyon, describes Simeon as 'the well-known founder of a party in the Church, in close alliance, if not identical, with the Evangelical or Low Church party.'

2 A the end of Carus's Memoirs of Simeon, p. 834.