d long since provided a reward of ten pounds
for "the Junior Bachelor of Trinity College who wrote the best essay on
the Conduct and Character of William the Third." As the prize is annual,
it is appalling to reflect upon the searching analysis to which the
motives of that monarch must by this time have been subjected. The
event, however, may be counted as an encouragement to the founders
of endowments; for, amidst the succession of juvenile critics whose
attention was by his munificence turned in the direction of his
favourite hero, Mr. Greaves had at last fallen in with the right man. It
is more than probable that to this old Cambridgeshire Whig was due the
first idea of that History in whose pages William of Orange stands as
the central figure. The essay is still in existence, in a close
neat hand, which twenty years of Reviewing never rendered illegible.
Originally written as a fair copy, but so disfigured by repeated
corrections and additions as to be unfit for the eyes of the college
authorities, it bears evident marks of having been held to the flames,
and rescued on second, and in this case it will be allowed, on better
thoughts. The exercise, (which is headed by the very appropriate motto,

"Primus qui legibus urbem
Fundabit, Curibus parvis et paupere terra
Missus in imperium magnum,")

is just such as will very likely be produced in the course of next
Easter term by some young man of judgment and spirit, who knows
his Macaulay by heart, and will paraphrase him without scruple. The
characters of James, of Shaftesbury, of William himself; the Popish
plot; the struggle over the Exclusion bill; the reaction from Puritanic
rigour into the license of the Restoration, are drawn on the same lines
and painted in the same colours as those with which the world is now
familiar. The style only wants condensation, and a little of the humour
which he had not yet learned to transfer from his conversation to his
writings, in order to be worthy of his mature powers. He thus describes
William's lifelong enemy and rival, whose name he already spells after
his own fashion.

"Lewis was not a great general. He was not a great legislator. But he
was, in one sense of the words, a great king. He was a perfect master of
all the mysteries of the science of royalty,--of all the arts which at
once extend power and conciliate popularity,--which most advantageously
display the merits, or most dexterously conceal the defic