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310 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. away before them, ripe in fame, but immature in years — "Nescia mens hominum fati," and happy are we in our ignorance. Before he removed from Mr. Borrett's, Gooch became acquainted with Mr. William Taylor, of Norwich, a man whose name is indissolubly con- nected with the literature of his age, and who has always delighted in assisting with his counsels, his library, and his purse, young men to whom Na- ture had been more bountiful than fortune, and in whom he thought he could discover promise of future excellence. If he was sometimes mistaken, he was not so in Gooch's case, and theirs was a life-long intimacy. Notwithstanding the limited circumstances of Gooch's family, aggravated by the detention of his father in a French prison, great sacrifices were made by his mother and an aunt, advanced in years, in order to send him to Edinburgh ; and with scanty means he arrived there, landing from a Leith smack in October, 1804. He was known only to one person in Edinburgh, Mr. Henry Southey, who was a year his senior at that university, and to him he came, as it were, consigned. They had been acquainted, as boys, at Yarmouth. At this time, Gooch was remarkably shy, and rather helpless in worldly matters ; it was in fact his first flight from home, and he felt that everything around him was new and strange. A few weeks reconciled him to his new situation, and no one ever entered upon his academical studies with a more fixed determination to profit by the advantages which the place afforded. During the first season he rarely, if ever, missed a lecture : he attended the