The future Dean was not fortunate in schools.  On his father’s succeeding to the family estates he quitted Harlsey indeed, but only to move to 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 society:  one summer was very musical; of another which he spent at home he enumerates his occupations—­“botany,” “music,” “Deeside.”  Through all, his study was theology, but in “small doses” he says.  His brother Marmaduke joined him on the Christmas holiday of 1816, when they worked together at the cryptogamics, and then went up to Cambridge together—­Edward to renew his theological studies with the help of the formal lectures at the University.  He spent the remainder of that season at Bath with friends and relatives.  He speaks of the Bath society, its gaiety, theatricals, music—­some rich clergymen giving good dinners, and brother Marmaduke coming for his long vacation to a farm-house two miles from Bath, “where we had some good botanical fun.  Can it be that the finding a new plant put us in a state of ecstasy?  How we treasured up