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HIS LETTERS WHILST AN APPRENTICE.
15

1812.

Æt. 20-21.

Banks, then President of the Royal Society. Naturally enough, 'no answer was the reply left with the porter.'

On Sunday, July 12, 1812, three months before his apprenticeship ended, he began to write to Benjamin Abbott, who was a year and a half younger than his friend; but Abbott had been at good schools and was well educated, and hence Faraday regarded him as the possessor of a knowledge far beyond his own. Throughout all his correspondence this deference to his friend's superior school knowledge is always to be seen. These letters Mr. Abbott has most fortunately kept, thinking that at some future time they would be invaluable records of his friend's youth. They show his thoughts when he was 'giving up trade and taking to science,' during the period when the greatest change in the course of his life took place. The first eight were written between July 12 and October 1 in this year, whilst he was still an apprentice in Blandford Street.

They possess an interest almost beyond any other letters which Faraday afterwards wrote. It is difficult to believe that they were written by one who had been a newspaper boy and who was still a bookbinder's apprentice, not yet twenty-one years of age, and whose only education had been the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Had they been written by a highly educated gentleman, they would have been remarkable for the energy, correctness, and fluency of their style, and for the courtesy, kindness, candour, deference, and even humility, of the thoughts they contain.

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