Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/23

 Rh century later, acted as his tutor. While at Oxford a fellow collegian from the west, Joseph Taylor, afterwards member of parliament for Petersfield and Ashburton, introduced him to Edward Talbot of Oriel college, second son of the prelate who was successively bishop of Oxford, Salisbury and Durham. Through this friendship Rundle became intimate with Joseph Butler and Thomas Seeker, and, as the friends of bishop Talbot's son, all three of them obtained preferment from the father. Complaint was made that Rundle adopted his friends precipitately and dropped them abruptly, and some years later George Stubbes, an old fellow of Exeter college, who was numbered among the small poets of the period, ridiculed this propensity in a poem called "fickle friendship." A very sprightly lady, Mary Lepel, lady Hervey commented on another fault. She acknowledged that lord chancellor Talbot, the bishop's eldest son had parts, but asserted that "the flattery and indulgence of Rundle has been his ruin. …Rundle was the greatest flatterer and the greatest talker I ever met with in my life." But whatever his motives or his failings may have been, these great divines, Butler and Seeker, remained his fast friends all his life.

Towards the close of Rundle's college life the sincere but whimsical Whiston paid a visit to Oxford to further a scheme "for promoting primitive Christianity." Rundle and Rennell sought the acquaintance of the reformer and as they were "sensible of modern errors and corruptions" were ready to give their support to him, but doubted whether any more recruits would be enlisted at the university. Rundle, after leaving the university, became an inmate of the house of John Cater of Kempston, near Bedford, as the tutor of his only son, and Whiston was asked by the head of the family to visit them. The tutor proved "so ready in the fathers and ecclesiastical history and indeed, so learned in all science but … so strictly sober, serious, conscientious (what shall