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 even looked upon ill-health as an advantage rather than the reverse, because with health he says he might have been fond of sports, and occupied his time in other ways than in studies. Anybody reading Priestley's memoirs will see that he was no believer in the old adage "mens sana in corpore sano."

In the year 1752, or when he was nineteen, he went to the Dissenting Academy at Daventry, and at this institution developed the power of free discussion on most subjects, especially theology: and as Priestley tells us in his Autobiography, he was generally on "the heterodox side of almost every question."

After three years at the Academy, namely, in 1755, Priestley became a Calvinistic minister at Needham Market in Suffolk; but whether it was due to his heterodoxy or to his stuttering, the congregation left him, and he was obliged to seek fresh pastures. Too great to be fettered by rules, too original to condescend to imitation, he consulted his own inspiration only, and, like other workers, had to pay dearly for living apart from the general weal of mankind. After other vicissitudes, he removed in 1761, one year after the succession of George III. to the throne of his ancestors, to Warrington, having been appointed tutor of languages in a dissenting academy. Here he gave instruction in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian, and lectured on logic, on elocution, on the theory of language and universal grammar, on oratory