y much the same ground in 1868 with three
ladies. I made both these journeys as an ordinary sightseer.
I took few letters of introduction. I did not deliver those,
except in one or two cases to American gentlemen living abroad.
One experience in this latter journey, however, it may be
worth while to tell. I had a very pleasant friendship with
Henry T. Parker, a Boston man and a graduate of Harvard,
who had a comfortable property and had married an English
lady and had settled in London. He found an occupation,
congenial to his own taste, in buying books, as agent of some
of the great libraries in the United States, including the
Harvard Library and the Boston City Library. He was an intimate
friend of Mr. Cox, the accomplished Librarian of the Bodleian,
to whom he gave us letters.
Mr. Cox treated us with special courtesy and showed us many
treasures of the Library, especially some wonderful illuminated
manuscripts. One of them, the Duc de Monpensier, who had
been at Oxford shortly before and who was an authority in
such matters, felt confident was illustrated by Raphael. Mr.
Cox had discovered, just before I was there, in some crypt
where it had lain unknown for two hundred years, a touching
letter from Clarendon, who was Chancellor of the University,
which I think will move the heart of every man who loves the
college where he was educated. The letter was written by
Lord Clarendon just after he had landed at Calais, a hopeless
exile, on his last flight from the country to which he was
never again to return. The great orator, statesman, historian,
lawyer, judge,--counsellor, companion and ancestor of monarchs,--
flying for his life, in his old age, into a foreign land,
from the court of which, for a generation, he had been the
ornament and head, soon as his feet touch a place of safety,
thinks of his University. See the noble heart through the
simple and stately rhetoric:
GOOD MR. VICE-CHANCELLOR;
Having found it necessary to transport myselfe out of England,
and not knowing when it shall please God that I shall returne
againe, it becomes me to take care that the University may
not be without the service of a person better able to be of
use to them than I am like to be, and I doe therefore hereby
surrender the office of chancellor into the hand of said University,
to the end that they may make choyce of some other person
better qualified to assist and protect them, than I am. I
am sure he can nev
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