Early Life and Studies
In 1699, Secker went to Richard Brown's free school in Chesterfield, staying with his half-sister and her husband, Elizabeth and Richard Milnes. According to a story in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1768, Brown congratulated Secker for his successful studies by remarking, ‘If thou wouldst but come over to the Church, I am sure thou wouldst be a bishop’. Under Brown's teaching, Secker believed that he had attained a competency in Greek and Latin.
He attended Timothy Jollie's dissenting academy at Attercliffe from 1708, but was frustrated by Jollie's poor teaching, famously remarking that he lost his knowledge of languages and that 'only the old Philosophy of the Schools was taught there: and that neither ably nor diligently. The morals also of many of the young Men were bad. I spent my time there idly & ill'. He left after one and a half years.
In 1710, he moved to London, staying in the house of the father of John Bowes, who had been one of Jollie's students and would one day become Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Whilst here, he studied geometry, conic sections, algebra, French, and John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
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