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 himself with founding the University of Durham, for which the sequestered revenues of Dean and Chapter fell convenient, but whose history was to suffer a long interruption. The promoters of the earliest attempt to found, not a University, but a College whose teaching should be of the University type, were less intent upon the bearing of the academical interests of the nation on its public life in state and church than had been the contemporaries of Fairfax and Cromwell.

Those acquainted with English educational history in the eighteenth century, and in its latter half in particular, are aware with how large a grain of salt the common assertion is to be taken, that this was a period of stagnation in the educational, or for that matter in the religious, life of the country. It is true, with regard to higher education in particular, that our old Universities moved slowly when they moved at all, 20