Page:Dean Aldrich A Commemoration Speech.djvu/9

 through the chief epochs of his life, just recalling at each its historical setting: for we must remember the forces that were in activity about and around him in order to appreciate the quiet that reigns in him.

In his early boyhood, at Westminster School, he must have heard that howling wind that roared round the Protector's deathbed at Whitehall in 1658. In 1660 he must have seen from the old Dormitory windows the Abbey reddened with the fires that blazed night after night for the return of the Free Parliament, and heard the shouts of the multitudes in Palace Yard who were welcoming back the old members of the famous House that had rebelled against the father and now met to restore the son. In 1662, when Vane, on the scaffold at Tower Hill, was setting the last seal of blood to the grim enthusiasm of the old Puritan faith, Aldrich, at the age of fifteen, left Westminster for Oxford.

The last year of his undergraduate life was startled by the sudden inroad of the Parliament at Oxford, fled from the plague; and we can picture the fearful news it must have told him of the city he knew so well, of the doors staring ghastly and ominous with the red cross of Death on the panels, of the naked wilderness of streets, of the deadly silence, broken only by the howls of the prophets of woe, or the dreary bell of the pest-cart. Well would he believe the tale that a flaming sword glared along the heavens from his own Westminster to the Tower.

That Oxford Parliament passed the Five Mile Act; and Aldrich would thus have witnessed the most stringent triumph of the Church.