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Barrow his own duties, he also officiated for Dr. Pope, the professor of astronomy, during his absence abroad. In 1662 a valuable living was offered to Barrow; but as a condition was annexed that he should teach the patron's son, he refused the offer, ‘as too like a simoniacal contract.’ In 1663 he preached the consecration sermon at Westminster Abbey when his uncle Isaac was made bishop of St. Asaph; and in the same year, again through the influence of his good friend Dr. Williams, he was appointed the first mathematical professor at Cambridge under the will of Mr. Lucas. He was also invited to take charge of the Cottonian Library, but, having tried the post for a while, he preferred to settle in Cambridge, and therefore declined it. According to the ideas of the time, there was no incompatibility in combining the duties of the Lucasian with those of the Gresham professorship; but Barrow was far too conscientious to undertake more than he could thoroughly perform. He therefore resigned his post at Gresham College, and confined himself to his Cambridge duties. But even these were too distracting for his sensitive conscience. He was afraid, as a clergyman, of spending too much time upon mathematics; ‘for,’ as we are quaintly told, ‘he had vowed at his ordination to serve God in the Gospel of his Son, and he could not make a bible out of his Euclid, or a pulpit out of his mathematical chair—his only redress was to quit them both.’ He resigned the Lucasian professorship in 1669 in favour of his still more distinguished pupil, Isaac Newton. He had the acuteness to perceive, and the generosity to acknowledge, the superior qualifications of his great successor. Newton had revised his ‘Lectiones Opticæ’ for the press, and, as Barrow ingenuously confessed, corrected some things and added others. But other circumstances led him to abandon mathematical for theological studies. The college statutes bound him to compose some theological discourses, these being necessary in order that a fellow may become ‘college preacher,’ and in that capacity hold ecclesiastical preferment. Accordingly, in 1669, he wrote his very valuable ‘Exposition of the Creed, Decalogue, and Sacraments,’ which, as he said, ‘so took up his thoughts that he could not easily apply them to any other matter.’ But this was not all. Barrow was a very sensitive and a very modest man; and the reception of his mathematical works by the public was not altogether encouraging. He had published in 1669 his ‘Lectiones Opticæ,’ which he dedicated to the executors of Mr. Lucas, ‘as the firstfruits of his institution,’ and he had found, as we have seen, in the pupil who revised them a better man than himself. He also published his ‘Lectiones Geometricæ; ’ but ‘when they had been some time in the world, having heard of very few who had read and considered them thoroughly, the little relish that such things met with helped to loose him more from those speculations, and heighten his attention to the studies of morality and divinity.’

Barrow was now left with nothing but his fellowship. His uncle had given him a small sinecure in Wales, and his friend Seth Ward, now bishop of Sarum, a prebend in Salisbury Cathedral; but the small income derived from these sources he always devoted to charitable purposes. Possibly it was at this time, when he seemed to have fallen between two, or rather several, stools, that he wrote a neat couplet, which has been often quoted as a proof of Charles II's neglect of his friends:— Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole, nemo, Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus. Dr. Whewell's vindication of the king is unanswerable: ‘I do not,’ he writes, ‘know what his (Barrow's) sufferings were. Charles took the very best way of making himself acquainted with his merits, and of acknowledging them by appointing him his chaplain; and if he wanted to make him master of Trinity, which was certainly a most appropriate and valuable recognition of his merits, he must needs wait for a vacancy.’ That vacancy was not long in coming. In 1672–3 Dr. Pearson was appointed bishop of Chester, and Barrow succeeded him as master of Trinity. His patent to the mastership was with permission to marry, but this permission he caused to be erased, as contrary to the statutes. The appointment was the ‘king's own act,’ who said, when he made the appointment, that ‘he gave it to the best scholar in England.’ These were not words of course. Charles had frequently conversed with Barrow as his chaplain; and his comment upon his sermons is wonderfully apposite. He called him ‘an unfair preacher, because he exhausted every topic, and left no room for anything new to be said by any one who came after him.’ In the St. James's lectures on the ‘Classical Preachers in the English Church,’ where each preacher is ticketed with an epithet, Barrow is rightly termed ‘the exhaustive preacher.’ Charles had already shown his appreciation of Barrow by making him D.D. in 1670 by royal mandate.

Barrow enjoyed his new dignity for the brief space of five years, but he made his