Page:Dean Aldrich A Commemoration Speech.djvu/28

 Hauteclere, Clement, Austyn, Gabriell, and Marie. These all figure in the catch, together with the little tinkler that always summoned to evening prayers, but always resigned his claims to mark the hour in favour of 'the mighty Tom.' These six bells, with four others added, have been silent lately, but are now hung once more in the new campanile. The 'Smoaking Catch' was 'diverting to sing or hear,' for Aldrich, as the 'History of Music' says, was full of mirth and pleasantry. To him Beloe ascribes the famous 'Causae Bibendi:'—

I have come to the end of Aldrich's character and works. He died on Thursday, the 14th of December, 1710, about seven o'clock in the evening. On Friday, Dec. 22, his body was brought to Oxford at four o'clock in the afternoon; it rested for a quarter of an hour before the door of his lodgings, and was then carried to the Cathedral, escorted by the whole College. He was laid by his father, who had died while visiting his son in 1683, in a grave in the north wing of the choir.

Such was Aldrich—a man in whom all things meet and all are reconciled—to whom nothing was strange, nothing hostile. Wherever his thought travelled, there it found its home. To his winning grace and gentle air no shore of knowledge was inhospitable, no door was barred. Nor is he left to tread the quiet ways of the scholar; the fierce energy of political life and religious strife plucks him out of the cloister and clamours to him to act—to deal with the dangers of Rome and the difficulties of science, to succeed the expelled Massey and to banish Locke. He acts