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more influenced by hatred and all uncharitableness, than by their spiritual calling.[1] It is certain that
- ↑ The Author thinks proper to guard against the misconception (for it would be one) that his remarks on those Commissioners from Oxford and Cambridge, who were all of them in priest's orders, were intended to apply to gentlemen of the clerical profession generally—some of whom, it behoves him to say, he has long known, and with increased esteem. But the obligation of a correct memoir writer is to take persons and things as he finds them, and 'neither to extenuate, nor set down ought in malice.' There is undesirable evidence that the pseudo Philosopher who cuts such an anomalous and dashing figure in these transactions, though nobody thinks of him in our time, was supported by Bachelors and Doctors of Divinity in brutally refusing a man seventy-four years of age those facilities which he told them would save him the labour of one year in three. It would be unjust towards the Author to suppose him warped by the desire of censure, when engaged with the documents before him: besides he has enough of the Englishman about him to feel the irksomeness of giving any foreigner an unfavourable idea of our Universities at the period in reference. He takes pleasure in unqualified praise, where it is deserved; conformably to which, he has endeavoured to bring forward George Graham;[subnote 1] not as the first clock and watchmaker of his day ("which Tompion had been before) that being well known, but as a philanthropist of the most exalted virtue: superior to 'the Man of Ross' immortalized by Pope: for he could control himself under circumstances of all others the most incompatible with mental infirmity and the baser passions of our nature.—Surely, it cannot but be observed, that the strictures which apply to the conduct of the mathematical Commissioners on the 28th of November, 1772, when it is distinctly seen they were a majority at the Board, are founded on their own minutes of that date. But though con-
