[79]: Such discussion as may seem needful has already taken place before a Meeting of the resident Members of the Senate, who have spent at least forty nights in Cambridge during the last Academic year, and whose names are accordingly on the "Electoral Roll." They are summoned, as required, by the Vice-Chancellor, to discuss the various matters which it is proposed to embody in "Graces."
[80]: The office thus requires no mean scholarly and oratorical powers. When Queen Elizabeth visited Cambridge, the Public Orator had to make her a laudatory address of half an hour in duration, without notes, "with the Queen's horse curvetting under her" (for this was not in the Senate House—yet unbuilt—but in the open air before King's College Chapel), and with constant mock-modest interruptions from her Royal lips. Her only thanks were a commendation of his excellent memory.
[81]: One apartment was called the Regent House, as being thus used by the Governing Body of the University.
[82]: As Protestantism lost its first militant fervour, these performances more and more dropped their polemical features. But they still remained most inappropriate for a place of worship. We have seen how the higher minds of the University, such as Dr. Barrow, felt about them before the seventeenth century came to an end. (See p. [104].)
[83]: On the Sunday after All Saints' Day, when the "Lady Margaret Preacher," appointed by the Vice-Chancellor, officiates, he begins by reading the long roll of benefactors to the University from the earliest times; in itself a specially inspiring predication.
[84]: It is hard upon Dr. Jowett that his name should have come down to posterity associated, not with this real contribution to the gladness of the world, but with a satirical quatrain on the tiny plot which he reclaimed from the street in the angle of Trinity Hall adjoining Clare:
"A little garden little Jowett made,
And fenced it with a little palisade;
And would you know the mind of little Jowett,
This little garden will a little show it."
[85]: There was a fountain here, however, long before Hobson's day—at least as early as the fourteenth century—but whence the water came is not known. If, as seems probable, it was a natural spring, its existence was probably the factor which originally determined the site of the Market.
[86]: This is the name bestowed on the stalwart officials a couple of whom attend each Proctor and exercise such physical coercion of delinquents as he may bid.
[87]: One specially remembered conflict, when Rose Crescent was held by the Gown against an overwhelming force, till a police charge drove them in headlong rout to take refuge in Trinity, was made the subject of a parody of Macaulay's Horatius, to be found in Clark's Guide to Cambridge.