It is probably true to say that unless he were exceptionally endowed no boy, unhelped by anything but the official teaching in class, could perform these exercises and still have time for cricket, the river, fives, or bowling his hoop. But many boys came to Eton bringing their own tutors with them, while most of the assistant masters taught boys privately; and a great deal of the real learning took place outside Upper or Lower School. There was of course a large quantity of hack verse in the common domain, and exercises could also be bought or begged; but as far as real learning was concerned the tutor was generally of the first importance. This was certainly the case with Banks, who owed what classical acquirements he ever possessed to Edward Young, an assistant master, under whom he did at least learn to spell Latin a good deal better than ever he spelt English and to write a reasonably grammatical piece of Latin prose. Mr Young wrote a long letter6 to Joseph’s father at Revesby on 6 February 1757 beginning
Sir
I have received the Favour of your letter, and am very glad Master Banks was detained by nothing worse than the Badness of the Roads and weather. I began indeed to be afraid he was kept at home either by his own or your Illness; being well satisfied you would not suffer him to be absent from School so long without some very substantial Reason. I will take care to explain the Affair to Dr Barnard and Dr Dampier according to your desire.
It gives me great pleasure to find You think Master Banks improved. To be able to construe a Latin Author into English with Readiness and Propriety is undoubtedly no less necessary than to be able to turn an English one into Latin. They ought indeed to go hand in hand together. And I hope we shall by degrees bring Master Banks to a tolerable Perfection in the former; tho’ the Point, which I have hitherto been chiefly labouring, is to improve him in the latter, because of his great Deficiency in that Respect when He came to us.
Then, after a piece about the difficulty of parsing Greek without some knowledge of Greek grammar, the importance of the fourth form, and attention to one’s book, Mr Young asks Mr Banks to
take the Trouble to write to Him, to show the great Necessity there will be for Him to exert particular Diligence at that Time; and I will likewise take all Opportunities of inculcating the same to Him. For You can’t but be sensible that there is a great Inattention in Him, and an immoderate Love of Play … which we must endeavour to get the better of in some degree, or it will be a constant Obstacle to his Improvement. This sometimes occasions Quarrels between us; tho’ in other respects we agree extremely well together; as I really think Him a very good-tempered and well disposed Boy.
At just about this time an artist painted a portrait of Master Banks; it hung at Revesby for a great while, but when the Abbey was demolished it came down to the Hon. Mrs Clive Pearson and it is now at Parham Park, together with the splendid Reynolds. The picture is attributed to Lemuel Francis Abbott, though an eminent connoisseur once suggested to me that it might be one of Zoffany’s earliest works in England – the dates would just fit – and a connection of this kind would go some way to explaining Banks’s very surprising notion of taking Zoffany with him in the Resolution on Cook’s second great voyage. But whatever his name, the painter was evidently a most accomplished man, and the impression the work gives of being a big picture is by no means due only to its considerable size of some seven feet by four and a half. On the upper left-hand part of the canvas there is the base and the first three or four feet of one of those prodigious columns so usual in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pictures together with the inevitable curtain in great folds across the corner: the background is a fine cloud-swept sky. And in front of this high drama, on quite another plane of reality, sits a slim, thoughtful, very pleasant-looking boy in fawn-coloured breeches with one white-stockinged leg stretched out across the foreground, making a good diagonal, a fawn waistcoat, a frilled and ruffled shirt and a green coat with gilt buttons; his auburn hair falls over his shoulders on either side and it comes low over his forehead, but it does not look in the least affected. He is sitting rather sideways in a brass-studded leather chair with his left elbow on its back and his right hand resting on a print that in its turn lies upon a cloth-covered table which also holds some books and plants. Beneath it there are half a dozen dim folios, and to the boy’s left, on the floor, stands a fair-sized and most prophetic terrestrial globe. His face is turned almost to the spectator, but he is looking down, obviously in thought, deep thought.
The “good-tempered and well disposed” side of Mr Young’s pupil is certainly there, but there is no trace of the great inattention, nor yet of the immoderate love of play, for a great change had come over Joseph Banks. He had not suddenly acquired a taste for Virgil, Horace or Tully; he had not become a classical scholar; but he had become a botanist, and the print under his right hand in the picture is in fact a botanical print. The moment of his change – one might almost say of his vocation – was clearly marked and abrupt, and once it had occurred his strong natural intelligence at last had something to feed upon. Latin and Greek had not been a nourishment that his mind could assimilate, and Latin and Greek were virtually the only subjects taught at Eton – taught, furthermore, in a pronunciation that guaranteed incomprehensibility abroad, whereas an Irishman or even a Scot could prattle away from Poland to Peru. It is true that on holidays the younger boys had two hours of writing and arithmetic, while the fifth form learnt geography or algebra; and of course French, dancing, fencing and drawing could be taken as extras outside school hours, though it does not appear that Banks ever learnt them (he possessed no word of French at any time, nor could he draw), and had it not been for botany his mind might never have blossomed at all.
The story of his conversion is contained in a Hunterian Oration delivered to the College of Surgeons on 14 February 1822 by Sir Everard Home, a friend of Banks’s and a surgeon himself. The relevant passage runs:
When fourteen, his tutor had, for the first time, the satisfaction of finding him reading during his hours of leisure. This sudden turn, which his mind had taken, Sir Joseph explained to me in the following manner; one fine summer evening he had bathed in the river as usual with other boys, but having staid a long time in the water he found when he came to dress himself, that all his companions were gone; he was walking leisurely along a lane, the sides of which were richly enamelled with flowers; he stopped and looked round, involuntarily exclaimed, How beautiful! After some reflection, he said to himself, it is surely more natural that I should be taught to know all these productions of Nature, in preference to Greek and Latin; but the latter is my father’s command and it is my duty to obey him. I will however make myself acquainted with all these different plants for my own pleasure and gratification. He began immediately to teach himself Botany; and, for want of more able tutors, submitted to be instructed by the women, employed in culling simples, as it is termed, to supply the Druggists and Apothecaries shops, paying sixpence for every material piece of information. While at home for the ensuing holidays he found, to his inexpressible delight, in his mother’s dressing room, a book in which all the plants he had met with were not only described but represented by engravings. This, which proved to be Gerard’s Herbal, although one of the boards was lost and several of the leaves torn out, he carried with him to school in triumph; and it was probably this very book that he was poring over when detected by his tutor, for the first time, in the act of reading.
He now exulted over his former preceptors, being not only independent of them, but in his turn, whenever they met with a new plant, told them its name and the qualities ascribed to it.
In parenthesis I may say that I do not believe in the literal truth of Banks’s reflection nor in his exulting. Both are contradicted by everything one learns from his correspondence and his journals, but they may well be characteristic of Home, who left no pleasant reputation behind him: indeed, the DNB directly accuses him of having “destroyed Hunter’s manuscripts after utilizing them”.
From now on his life had an aim, and it was not botany alone, though that remained his chief love and delight, but the whole range of natural philosophy short of mathematics. Lord Brougham says, “My father described him as a remarkably fine-looking, strong and active boy, whom no fatigue could subdue, and no peril daunt; and his whole time out of school was given up to hunting after plants and insects, making a hortus siccus of the one, and forming a cabinet of the other.