corded,--evidences of the unrest of a time when greater questions than
the interpretation of a Statute or the disputed election of a College
officer were already in the air. The only dissension of any interest was
one which led to an appeal to the Visitor: the Visitor was Laud, the
Bishop of Bath and Wells, who showed great gentleness and patience in
dealing with a person even more provoking than he found the worst of
Scotch Presbyterians.

We have now reached, "longas per ambages," the times of Wilkins'
manhood: he was born a year later than the opening of the College which
he was to rule.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See Messrs Peel and Minchin's 'Oxford,' p. 130.

CHAPTER II.

WILKINS' LIFE TILL HIS APPOINTMENT TO THE WARDENSHIP.

In the Common Room of Wadham College hangs the portrait of John Wilkins,
Warden from 1648 to 1659. It is probably a faithful likeness, for
Wilkins is described by Aubrey as "a lustie, strong-grown, well-set,
broad-shouldered person, cheerful and hospitable; no great-read man, but
one of much and deepe thinking, and of a working head; and a prudent man
as well as ingeniose." In the portrait these characteristics, physical
and mental, are well displayed: sanity of mind--that is, clearness,
shrewdness, courage, kindliness, the contentment which makes the best of
good and evil fortune, are, to the imaginative mind, written in the
face, as presented in his picture, of this great man. His greatness fell
short of genius, for it was the effect of ordinary qualities, rarely
combined and tempered into one character; but more effective for useful
work in the world than genius without sanity.

He was born in 1614 at Fawsley in Northamptonshire. His father was
Walter Wilkins, a goldsmith in Oxford, like his son "ingeniose, and of a
very mechanicall head, which ran much upon the perpetuall motion,"--a
problem less hopeful than most, not all, of those which attracted his
more practical son, who inherited from him his "insatiable curiosity."

It is from Aubrey that we derive the fullest account of the facts of
Wilkins' life, as well as of his character. It is given in one of those
"Brief Lives" which might well serve as models to modern biographers;
lives compressed into two pages of nervous English, adorned here and
there, rather than disfigured, by quaint pedantic words and phrases,
relics of the euphuism of the sixteenth century. Aubrey is credulous,
appallingly frank, a strong partisan, a man of gr