The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

Westminster; few respectable Londoners would ever admit to venturing

“Happily,” proclaimed a smug editorial in Lambeth’s weekly newspaper, “we in

He was a precocious, very serious little boy; he turned steadily into an astonishingly learned teenager, tall, well built, with long hair and an early, bright red beard that added to his grave and forbidding appearance. “Knowledge is power,” he declared on the flyleaf of his school exercise book, and added—for as well as having a working knowledge by the time he was fifteen of French, Italian, German, and Greek, he, like all educated children then, knew Latin—“Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima” (Nothing is better than a most diligent life).

He left school at fourteen, as did most of the poorer children of the British Isles. There

James continued to amass more and more knowledge, if only (as he would admit) for the sake of knowledge itself, and often in the most eccentric of ways.

Frederick Furnivall.

Horace Walpole

serendipity,