Durham, which left no more pleasant memories in his mind than the other,
although there he learned to blow the flute, and indulge his strong
musical taste. He writes of Durham school that it had fallen off
terribly, from the increasing infirmities of the head master, and Ramsay
was anxious to leave it, when that move came naturally by the death of
his father[2]. Writing in his journal some time afterwards, he says,
"What was I to do? I was determined to go into the Church, and must go
to college. How was the intermediate period to be spent?" His first
private tutor was the Rev. J.H. Browne, at Kegworth in Leicestershire,
afterwards Archdeacon of Ely. "Here," says Edward, "I did learn
something both of books and of the world. Browne was a scholar, and my
fellow-students were gentlemen and knew something of life." He next
lived for a time with Mr. Joynes, a clergyman, at Sandwich in Kent, and
went from thence, in October 1811, to Cambridge.

He entered as a pensioner at St. John's, and although professing to be a
reading man, he was not eminently satisfied with the effects of the
society into which he fell upon his habits and accomplishments. "Not,"
he says, "that I had not really good associates, but somehow it seems
not to have been the best and such as I might have had." Another defect
was his not having a skilful and effective private tutor at a time when
he felt that he stood specially in need of one. "I could not form my
reading habits alone, and I had not sufficient help. I did enough,
however, to show I was not an ass. I got a scholarship. I was twice in
goodish places in the first class. I had a name for flute-playing;" and
then, ending this retrospect, which he wrote with some disgust, he tells
how he left Cambridge in his third year, going out B.A. with no contest
for honours. His college vacations were spent either in London with
college friends, or with a reading party under Wilkinson, the tutor, at
Redcar. In gathering up his recollections, he says he saw a good deal of