He appears to have frequented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza of Covent Garden, and he showed the common taste of his time for the theatre.
He was much of a wanderer, partly from the natural desire of restless youth to see the world, and partly because his health was weak.

In after life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of bearing the strain of prolonged application to books and papers in the solitude of his library, but of bearing it at the same time with the distracting combination of active business among men.

At the date of which we are speaking, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in Monmouthshire, or Wiltshire.

He passed the summer in retired country villages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in company with William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman.

It would be interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies.