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found its way, I know not how, to the King’s School at Canterbury, which he entered as a child of ten, and left as a lad of fifteen;[1] and he bequeathed to the College of Physicians such purely personal memorials as ‘my best Persian long carpet and my blue satin embroidered cushion.’[2]
For the last twenty years of his life Harvey had no settled home of his own, but lived about at his brother Eliab’s houses, either in town or country; and the gossip Aubrey, a sort of seventeenth century Boswell (but wanting Boswell’s reverence for what was higher and nobler than himself), tells us how Harvey ‘sat for hours on the leads of Cockaine House, where he was used to contemplate; or at Coombe, in Surrey, where he had caves made in the earth in which in summer he delighted to meditate.’
‘His heart and brain moved there, his feet staid here.’
- ↑ This diploma was afterwards presented to the College of Physicians, in whose archives it is preserved, by Dr. Osmond Beauvoir, Head-Master of the King’s School, Canterbury, through Sir W. Browne, President of the College, in 1764, as is set forth in a Latin memorandum by Sir W. Browne himself, written inside the cover of the diploma.
- ↑ See copy of Will in Willis’s ‘Harvey,’ p. lxxxix.
