en at a private house; and when the society became too great to be
called a club, they assembled in "the parlour" of Gresham College, which
itself had been raised by the munificence of a citizen, who endowed it
liberally, and presented a noble example to the individuals now
assembled under its roof. The society afterwards derived its title from
a sort of accident. The warm loyalty of Evelyn in the first hopeful days
of the Restoration, in his dedicatory epistle of Naude's treatise on
libraries, called that philosophical meeting THE ROYAL SOCIETY. These
learned men immediately voted their thanks to Evelyn for the happy
designation, which was so grateful to Charles the Second, who was
himself a virtuoso of the day, that the charter was soon granted: the
king, declaring himself their founder, "sent them a mace of silver-gilt,
of the same fashion and bigness as those carried before his majesty, to
be borne before the president on meeting days." To the zeal of Evelyn
the Royal Society owes no inferior acquisition to its title and its
mace:[277] the noble Arundelian library, the rare literary accumulation
of the noble Howards; the last possessor of which had so little
inclination for books, that the treasures which his ancestors had
collected lay open at the mercy of any purloiner. This degenerate heir
to the literature and the name of Howard seemed perfectly relieved when
Evelyn sent his marbles, which were perishing in his gardens, to Oxford,
and his books, which were diminishing daily, to the Royal Society!

The SOCIETY of ANTIQUARIES might create a deeper interest, could we
penetrate to its secret history: it was interrupted, and suffered to
expire by some obscure cause of political jealousy. It long ceased to
exist, and was only reinstated almost in our own days. The revival of
learning under Edward the Sixth suffered a severe check from the
papistical government of Mary; but under Elizabeth a happier era opened
to our literary pursuits. At this period several students of the Inns of
Court, many of whose names are illustrious for their rank or their
genius, formed a weekly society, which they called "the Antiquaries'
College." From very opposite quarters we are furnished with many curious
particulars of their literary intercourse: it is delightful to discover
Rawleigh borrowing manuscripts from the library of Sir Robert Cotton,
and Selden deriving his studies from the collections of Rawleigh. Their
mode of proceeding has