But while the difficulties with the Usher and the Assistants were developing, the attitude of the Head Master was not altogether satisfactory. In December, 1798, "Mr. Preston reports that Rev. Mr. Paley refuses his resignation upon such terms as the Governors are inclined to receive ... therefore resolved that the Recorder be applyed to for every matter that the Governors are doubtful about." William Paley was a man of considerable age, and disinclined to believe that he was unfit for his work. The Governors had recognized the possibility that he would not be strong enough for his duties, when in 1797 they had agreed to give him a salary of £250 "for the time that School shall be taught by him or by a sufficient and diligent Assistant." Clayton probably acted as the Assistant. Yet in December, 1798, the Governors' patience was exhausted, for they had already questioned Miss Elizabeth Paley on the subject, and she appears to have given grounds for hoping that her father would resign, but on the twenty-ninth he definitely refused. They waited another nine months, and on September 28, 1799, they adjourned their meeting to October 5, "as the present Master is not considered to survive many days." On September 29 he lay dead. For fifty-five years William Paley had presided over the destinies of the School and his work may fitly be compared with that of his great predecessor Christopher Shute. Both had taken up their work, when the fortunes of the School were at a low ebb. Shute had watched the careful saving of the School money, until they had been able to purchase "the school-house and yard in 1610 and a cart-road in the same yard and liberty for the schollers to resort to a certain spring to drink and wash themselves 1619, and likewise a garden for the use of the Masters and several other good things." Paley had become Head Master in 1744 when no accounts were kept, when the Master and Usher appropriated all the money from the rents and when the boys were few in number. Rapidly matters began to mend. His own son William left the School in 1759 already a scholar and destined to a lasting fame. Thomas Proctor was a boy at the School between 1760 and 1770, and became a great sculptor. His "Ixion" exhibited in 1785 is still recognized as a work of genius. William Carr, of the same family as James Carr, the founder of the School, won a Scholarship at University College, Oxford in 1782, a Fellowship at Magdalen 1787, and settled down at Bolton Rectory in 1789. His literary tastes brought him the friendship of Wordsworth, and he became famous as the breeder of a heifer of remarkable proportions. One of Paley's pupils--Thomas Kidd--probably a member of the same family as the Writing Assistant, a family who had lived in the neighbourhood certainly since 1587--wrote from Trinity College, Cambridge, to the Vicar, the Rev. John Clapham, in 1792: Revd. Sir,