Page:Terræ-filius- or, the Secret History of the University of Oxford.djvu/101

 whenever their ambition, or reentment, or caprice hould prompt them to it; and that, in hort, they would grow too powerful and retiff to be managed.

Notwithtanding all which, what with the interet they had, or made amongt the courtiers, and what with the plauiblenes of the thing at irt ight, their propoals were accepted, and a charter was granted them fuller than they deired.

When they had carried this point, ubcription-books (by them call'd matriculation-books) were open'd, and mot of the nobility and gentry ubcribed their ons and their wards into them; preently their tock roe, and happy was he that had any thing in it! Every old hunks and mier unhoarded his dea treaure upon this occaion, and thrut it into this fund, in expectation of vat dividends of learning and philoophy, which being novelties in thoe days, conequently bore a great price; carce was there a country farmer, or a chimney-weeper, who had rak'd a little money together, but mut come into the fahion, and make one of his boys a paron, or a philoopher; nay, ome ent whole colonies of male-heirs thither as fat as they could beget them, and were eiz'd with an inatiable avarice of letters and religion; inomuch that people began to think, that in a hort time they hould have nothing but Plato's, and Seneca's, and Aritotle's in the nation.

This cheme met with uch popular encouragement, that, in imitation of it, everal -chools and academies prung up and aped it in all its proceedings; they too produced old obolete charters, or bought new ones to teach youth in the ame faculties, and took in ubcriptions in the ame manner that the other did. Thoe perons, who could not raie money enough to come into the grand Oxford fund, jobb'd in thee little bubbles, one