Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/539

 know the difficulty of making such a record impartial; but I should most imperfectly discharge this last duty to one who was the most sincere and candid of men, if I were to state anything unfaithfully. Few men had fewer faults requiring palliation, and few more of those sterling merits to which a laboured eulogy could add nothing. If his spirit, freed from its earthly bonds, is conscious of what is done on earth, I well know that it would not be soothed by flattery, or approve of any syllable of praise offered at the expense of truth.

Dr. John Darwall was the son of the Rev. John Darwall, who was the incumbent of St. John's Chapel, at Deritend, and one of the masters of the Free Grammar School, in Birmingham, until his death in 1828. His mother, who lives to deplore the loss of such a son, was the sister of ——— Whateley, Esq. of the same town. He was born in 1796, and, at the age of five, was sent to a preparatory school: when he was eight years of age, he was taken under his father's care in the Grammar-school; and, in 1808, he was placed under the immediate tuition of the Rev. John Cooke, then, as now, head master of the school. Of his habits and pursuits as a boy, I have been able to collect few particulars. He is said to have been fond of such exercises as required activity of mind, and to have taken more pleasure than boys usually do in his classical learning, and, consequently, to have excelled in it. The attachment that he ever retained for classical studies, the praise of which was not infrequently mixed with the professional information with which, in after years, his letters abounded, was among the