Parents, he said, were to be blamed for “the unthrifty looseness of youth,” who made them men seven years too soon, and when they “had but children’s judgments.”
“Warre is the curse, and peace the blessinge of a countrie;” and “a realme,” he said, “gaineth more by one year’s peace, than by tenne years’ warre.”
“That nation,” he would observe, “was happye where the king would take counsell and follow it.” With such a sage minister, it is not surprising that Elizabeth was the greatest princess that ever lived, nor that she gave such wise laws to Cambridge, whose Chancellor he was.
PORSON’S PROGRESS IN KNOWLEDGE.
“When I was seventeen,” Porson once observed, “I thought I knew every thing; as soon as I was twenty-four, and had read Bentley, I found I knew nothing. Now I have challenged the great scholars of the age to find five faults to their one, in any work, ancient or modern, they decline it.” On another occasion, he described himself as
A GENTLEMAN WITHOUT SIXPENCE IN HIS POCKET.
Person declining to enter into holy orders, as the statute of his college required he should do, lost his fellowship at Trinity, after he had enjoyed it ten years; “on which heart-rending occasion,” says his friend and admirer, Dr. Kidd, “he used to observe, with his usual good humour (for nothing could depress him,) that he was a gentleman living in London without a sixpence in his pocket.” Two years afterwards his friends procured his election to the Regius Professorship of Greek, on the death of Professor Cooke, the sudden news of which event, he says, in a letter printed in Parriana, addressed to the then Master of Trinity, the learned Dr. Postlethwaite, all his ambition of that sort having been long ago laid asleep, “put me in mind of poor Jacob, who, having served seven years in hope of being rewarded with Rachel, awoke, and behold it was Leah.” He had seven years previously projected a course of lectures in Greek, which most unaccountably were not patronised by the Senate.
GREEK PROTESTANTS AT OXFORD.
Mr. Pointer says, in his Oxoniensis Academia, &c., speaking of the curiosities connected with Worcester College, there were “Ruins of a Royal Palace, built by King Henry the First, in Beaumont, near Gloucester-green, upon some parts of which ruins, the late Dr. Woodroff (when principal of Gloucester Hall, now Worcester College) built lodgings for the education of young scholars from Greece, who, after they had been here educated in the reformed religion, were to be sent back to their own country, in order to propagate the same there. And accordingly some young Grecians were brought hither, and wore their Grecian habits; but not finding suitable encouragement, this project came to nothing.”