Since the abolition of the paper duty and the consequent loss to the university of the advantage of drawback, this grant constitutes the single subsidy which the Syndics of the Press receive from an outside source.
About this time the competency of the Syndics was called into question. It was alleged, for instance, that one Syndic did not know the difference between collating and collecting MSS; a more serious charge was that the warehouse in Silver Street, acquired in 1672, was damp and that great injury had been done to the stock of sheets kept there. In reply, Dr Plumptre asserted that the damage done amounted only to £20. Archdeacon remained in office till the year of his death, 1795; in 1793 John Burges was elected printer and acted in partnership with him for two years.
Of the books printed in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century one of the most ambitious was Thomas Kipling's facsimile edition, in two folio volumes, of the Codex Bezae (1793), "the very crown of the Cambridge Press." Kipling was the leader of the prosecution of William Freind, author of Peace and Union recommended to the associated bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans (2nd ed. 1793), and refused to allow Gilbert Wakefield's Silva Critica to be printed at the Press on account of the author's unorthodoxy[122].
Gray's Commemoration Ode, set to music by Dr Randal, was printed in 1769[123]; Samuel Ogden's Sermons on the Efficacy of Prayer and Intercession (Boswell's favourite reading during his tour to the Hebrides) were published in 1770 and were followed by other volumes of sermons in 1777; the Parker MSS were catalogued by James Nasmith and published in 1777, the Baker collection by Robert Masters in 1784; Thomas Martyn, Professor of Botany, published a Catalogus Horti Botanici in 1771 and Elements of Natural History in 1775; the second edition of John Wesley's Duty and Advantage of early rising was printed in 1785 and the changing spirit of the age is reflected in a sermon of 1788 entitled Slavery inconsistent with the Spirit of Christianity and a Sermon on Duelling, by Thomas Jones (1792).
The beginnings of the study of modern languages in Cambridge are seen in La Butte's French Grammar (2nd ed. 1790) and in various editions of Tasso and other Italian authors by Agostino Isola, a teacher who, at different times, could reckon Thomas Gray, William Pitt, and William Wordsworth among his pupils[124].
Ten Minutes' Advice to Freshmen by A Questionist, printed by Archdeacon for J. Deighton in 1785, deserves a few lines of quotation:
It is not reckoned fashionable to go to St Mary's on a Sunday.—But I know no harm in going, nor that it is any reproach to a man's understanding to be seen publickly in the same place with the most dignified and respectable persons of the University.—To say nothing about the regularity of the thing, and its being approved of by people whose good opinion you may be desirous to obtain.
It is neither my business nor my inclination to prose to you upon the usefulness of Mathematical learning—it is sufficient that it has its uses....
Of the standard of mathematical printing at this period a circumstantial complaint is preserved by Nichols in a letter from William Ludlam, author of Rudiments of Mathematics (2nd ed. 1787) and other works[125]: