vote as such at all important elections. He therefore regarded his old haunts by the Cam and the Isis with even more than the affection which educated men ordinarily feel for the place of their education. There was no corner of England in which both universities had not grateful and zealous sons. Any attack on the honor or interests of either Cambridge or Oxford was certain to excite the resentment of a powerful, active, and intelligent class, scattered over every county from Northumberland to Cornwall.

The resident graduates, as a body, were perhaps not superior positively to the resident graduates of our time, but they occupied a far higher position as compared with the rest of the community, for Cambridge and Oxford were then the only two provincial towns in the kingdom in which could be found a large number of men whose understandings had been highly cultivated. Even the capital felt great respect for the authority of the universities, not only on questions of divinity, of natural philosophy, and of classical antiquity, but also on points on which capitals generally claim the right of deciding in the last resort. From Will's coffee-house, and from the pit of the theater royal in Drury Lane, an appeal lay to the two great national seats of taste and learning. Plays which had been enthusiastically applauded in London were not thought out of danger till they had undergone the more severe judgment of audiences familiar with Sophocles and Terence.*

The great moral and intellectual influence of the English universities had been strenuously exerted on the side of the crown. The head-quarters of Charles the First had been at Oxford, and the silver tankards and salvers of all the colleges had been melted down to supply his military chest. Cambridge was not less loyally disposed. She had sent a large part of her plate to the royal

* Dryden's Prologues and Cibber's Memoirs contain abundant proofs of the estimation in which the taste of the Oxonians was held by the most admired poets and actors.

camp, and the rest would have followed had not the town been seized by the troops of the Parliament. Both universities had been treated with extreme severity by the victorious Puritans. Both had hailed the Restoration with delight. Both had steadily opposed the Exclusion Bill. Both had expressed the deepest horror at the Rye House Plot. Cambridge had not only deposed her chancellor Monmouth, but had marked her abhorrence of his treason in a manner unworthy of a seat of learning, by committing to the flames the canvas on which his pleas ing face and figure had been portrayed by the utmost skill of Kneller.* Oxford, which lay nearer to the western insurgents, had given still stronger proofs of loyalty. The students, under the sanction of their preceptors, had taken arms by hundreds in defense of hereditary right. Such were the bodies which James now determined to insult and plunder, in direct defiance of the laws and of his plighted faith.

Several acts of Parliament, as clear as any that were to be found in the statute-book, had provided that no person should be admitted to any degree in either university without taking the Oath of Supremacy, and another oath of similar character called the Oath of Obedience. Nevertheless, in February, 1687, a royal letter was sent to Cambridge directing that a Benedictine monk, named Alban Francis, should be admitted a master of arts.

The academical functionaries, divided between reverence for the king and reverence for the law, were in great distress. Messengers were dispatched in all haste to the Duke of Albemarle, who had succeeded Monmouth as chancellor of the university. He was requested to represent the matter properly to the king. Meanwhile, the registrar and beadles waited on Francis, and informed him that, if he would take the oaths according to law, he should instantly be admitted. He refused to be sworn,

See the poem called Advice to the Painter upon the Defeat of the Rebels in the West. See, also, another poem, a most detestable one, on the same subject, by Stepney, who was then studying at Trinity College.

remonstrated with the officers of the university on their disregard of the royal mandate, and, finding them resolute, took horse, and hastened to relate his grievances at Whitehall.

The heads of the colleges now assembled in council. The best legal opinions were taken, and were decidedly in favor of the course which had been pursued. But a second letter from Sunderland, in high and menacing terms, was already on the road. Albemarle informed the university, with many expressions of concern, that he had done his best, but that he had been coldly and ungraciously received by the king. The academical body, alarmed by the royal displeasure, and conscientiously desirous to meet the royal wishes, but determined not to violate the clear law of the land, submitted the humblest and most respectful explanations, but to no purpose. a short time came down a summons citing the vice-chancellor and the senate to appear before the new High Commission at Westminster on the twenty-first of April. The vice-chancellor was to attend in person; the senate, which consists of all the doctors and masters of the university, was to send deputies.

In

When the appointed day arrived, a great concourse filled the council chamber. Jeffreys sat at the head of the board. Rochester, since the white staff had been. ́taken from him, was no longer a member. In his stead appeared the lord chamberlain, John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave. The fate of this nobleman has, in one respect, resembled the fate of his colleague Sprat. Mulgrave wrote verses which scarcely ever rose above absolute mediocrity; but, as he was a man of high note in the political and fashionable world, these verses found admirers. Time dissolved the charm, but, unfortunately for him, not until his lines had acquired a prescriptive right to a place in all collections of the works of English poets. To this day, accordingly, his insipid essays in rhyme and his paltry songs to Amoretta and Gloriana are reprinted in company with Comus and Alexander's Feast. The conse

quence is, that our generation knows Mulgrave chiefly as a poetaster, and despises him as such. In truth, however, he was, by the acknowledgment of those who neither loved nor esteemed him, a man distinguished by fine parts, and in parliamentary eloquence inferior to scarcely any orator of his time. His moral character was entitled to no respect. He was a libertine without that openness of heart and hand which sometimes make libertinism amiable, and a haughty aristocrat without that elevation of sentiment which sometimes makes aristocratical haughtiness respectable. The satirists of the age nicknamed him Lord Allpride.

Yet was his pride compatible with all ignoble vices. Many wondered that a man who had so exalted a sense of his private dignity could be so hard and niggardly in all pecuniary dealings. He had given deep offense to the royal family by venturing to entertain the hope that he might win the heart and hand of the Princess Anne. Disappointed in this attempt, he had exerted himself to regain by meanness the favor which he had forfeited by presumption. His epitaph, written by himself, still informs all who pass through Westminster Abbey that he lived and died a skeptic in religion; and we learn from the memoirs which he wrote that one of his favorite subjects of mirth was the Romish superstition. Yet, as soon as James was on the throne, he began to express a strong inclination toward popery; and at length, in private, affected to be a convert. This abject hypocrisy had been rewarded by a place in the ecclesiastical commission.*

Before that formidable tribunal now appeared the vicechancellor of the University of Cambridge, Doctor John Pechell. He was a man of no great ability or vigor, but he was accompanied by eight distinguished academicians,

* Mackay's character of Sheffield, with Swift's note; the Satire on the Deponents, 1688; Life of John, Duke of Buckinghamshire, 1729; Barillon, Aug. 30, 1687. I have a manuscript lampoon on Mulgrave, dated 1690. It is not destitute of spirit. The most remarkable lines are these:

"Peters (Petre) to-day and Burnet to-morrow,

Knaves of all sides and religions he'll woo."

elected by the senate. One of these was Isaac Newton, fellow of Trinity College, and professor of mathematics. His genius was then in the fullest vigor. The great work which entitles him to the highest place among the geometricians and natural philosophers of all ages and of all nations had been some time printing at the expense of the Royal Society, and was almost ready for publication. He was the steady friend of civil liberty and of the Protestant religion; but his habits by no means fitted him for the conflicts of active life. He therefore stood modestly silent among the delegates, and left to men more versed in practical business the task of pleading the cause of his beloved university.

Never was there a clearer case. The law was express. The practice had been almost invariably in conformity with the law. It might, perhaps, have happened, that on a day of great solemnity, when many honorary degrees were conferred, a person who had not taken the oaths might have passed in the crowd; but such an irregularity, the effect of mere haste and inadvertence, could not be cited as a precedent. Foreign embassadors of various religions, and, in particular, one Mussulman, had been admitted without the oaths; but it might well be doubted whether such cases fell within the reason and spirit of the acts of Parliament. It was not even pretended that any person to whom the oaths had been tendered and who had refused them had ever taken a degree; and this was the situation in which Francis stood. The delegates offered to prove that, in the late reign, several royal mandates had been treated as nullities because the persons recommended had not chosen to qualify according to law, and that, on such occasions, the government had always acquiesced in the propriety of the course taken by the university. But Jeffreys would hear nothing. He soon found out that the vice-chancellor was weak, ignorant, and timid, and therefore gave a loose to all that insolence which had long been the terror of the Old Bailey. The unfortunate doctor, unaccustomed to such a presence and