Excerpt from Memoirs of the Rev. John Newton: Some Time a Slave in Africa; Afterwards Curate of Olney, Bucks and Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, London, in a Series of Letters Written by Himself, to the Rev. Dr. Haweis, Rector of Aldwinckle, Northamptonshire

My father was then at sea (he was a commander in the Mediterranean trade at that time). He came home the following year and soon after married again. This I passed into different hands. I was well treated in all other respects; but the loss of my mother' s instructions was not repair ed. I was now permitted to mingle with careless and profane children, abnd soon began to learn their ways Soon after my father' 5 marriage, I was sent to a board ing-schoolsn Essex, where the imprudent severity of the master almost broke my spirit, and relish for books. Lvith himi forgot the first principles and rulos of arithmetic, which my mother had taught me years befone. I staid there two years in the last of the two, a new usher coming, who' observed and suited my temper, I took to the Latin with great eagerness so that before I was ten years I reached and maintained the first post in the se cond class, which in that school read 'i ully and Virgil. I believe I was pushed forward too fast, and therefore not being grounded, I soon lost all I had learned (for I left school in my tenth year) and when I long afterwards undertook the Latin language from books, I think I had little, if any ad vantage from what I had learned before.

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