Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/20

 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; and he bequeathed to the College of Physicians such purely personal memorials as ‘my best Persian long carpet and my blue satin embroidered cushion.’

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.’