Volume 1

George Harley, F.R.S. : the life of a London physician / edited by his daughter, Mrs. Alec Tweedie.

Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: George Harley, F.R.S. : the life of a London physician / edited by his daughter, Mrs. Alec Tweedie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    42/382 page 24
    [24 ] CHAPTER III. EDINBURGH—STUDENT LIFE. Up to the time of his mother’s death, I can find no mention among my father’s papers either of his success or failure at the Haddington Burgh Schools, where many previous Harleys had been educated, from which silence it may fairly be surmised he did not begin to show any great evidence of exceptional natural ability till after 1845, when Harley House, with its spacious old-fashioned rooms, fair lawns, and shady gardens, was let, and the orphan boy, in company with his maternal grandmother, removed to Edinburgh. At that period Haddington Burgh Schools, under the skil- ful management of Rev. N. Gunn—subsequently Dr. Gunn, Master of the High School, Edinburgh—were again in the zenith of their glory, so, in spite of the omission above stated, there can be no doubt he was well instructed during his early days, learning many things in the ancient town, which stood him in good stead when he grew to be a man. His grandmother was eighty-three years of age and he only sixteen when they went together to Edinburgh, where for a year George Harley entered the Hill Street Institu- tion, a school of some repute for boys in their teens. What a change that uprooting must have seemed to both the elderly lady and the young lad—that transplanting of the aged tree and the tender sapling, even though their home was in the house of a granddaughter and the boy’s married sister !
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