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 from those strained exercises of royal prerogative in which the last two Stuart kings occasionally indulged. Certainly the seventeenth century was not one in which it could be expected that the average level of academic life should be a high one. And yet, throughout that century, the two old seats of learning were producing a long series of men whose intellectual achievements in various fields are among the chief glories of England. It may be hard to say what exact share of credit is due, in any of these cases, to the Alma Mater; but it is reasonable to believe that in no instance can her influence have been wholly sterile. Cambridge can point to such names as those of Bacon, William Harvey, Milton, Barrow, Newton, Bentley; then there are the Oxford and Cambridge divines who bore part in the Authorised Version of the Bible, or helped to build up the standard Anglican theology; the Oxford group who founded the Royal Society; the Cambridge Platonists, who sought, in a spirit very different from that of the schoolmen, to reconcile religion with philosophy and science, to soften the strife of sects, and to bring out the essential things of Christianity. When one looks back on that century as a whole,—on the turmoils and contrasts of its outer life, and on the results of its mental activity,—one is inclined to apply the old Greek saying to our academic commonwealths; "It is not the walls that make the city, but the men."

The age which came next has usually been regarded as that in which the English Universities