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 talent and industry were not without their reward. He was elected a scholar, and in 1845 he became a fellow of his college. Twelve years later, after the publication of several of his historical works, he was made examiner in law and modern history, and, in 1873, examiner in the school of modern history. Both universities have vied with each other in recognizing his vast attainments: Oxford conferring on him the honorary degree of D.C.L., and Cambridge that of LL.D. Like many other Oxford men who have subsequently arrived at a knowledge of the truth as it is in Radicalism, Mr. Freeman was brought up in the strictest bonds of political and ecclesiastical Toryism. His grandmother had sown seed at Northampton which the tractarians, then in the ascendant, watered at Oxford. Among his college friends was Patterson, now Monsiguor, and other incipient Romanists of distinction. About this period, likewise, he wrote verses, and very good verses too, as regard form, of an ultra-royalist or Jacobite character; Carlos, a maternal ascendant, who, tradition says, was the last man to strike a blow for the king at Worcester, being a favorite subject of his muse.

But so sound an intelligence as Freeman's could not long draw sustenance from such unrealities. In 1847 he married an estimable lady, the daughter of his former tutor, Mr. Gutch, and gradually put away the more childish things of political and ecclesiastical reaction. Slight, and it might be said almost whimsical, considerations at first weighed with him. Always an interested and critical student of history, church history at first more particularly, he was struck with the unsatisfactory bearings of two ecclesiastical facts or