raduates 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 theatre 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. [283]

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 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 scat of learning, by committing to the flames the
canvass on which his pleasing face and figure had been portrayed by the
utmost skill of Kneller. [284] 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 defence 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 chara