was, however, put to other and more secular uses. Laud was informed that the body of the church was seated like a theatre; that the pulpit was placed in the middle and called the Cock-pit; that at sermon-time the chancel was filled with boys and townsmen “and other whiles (thereafter as the Preacher is) with _Townswomen_ also, all in a rude heap between the Doctors and the Altar”; that the “Service there (which is done by Trin. Coll.) is commonly posted over and cut short at the pleasure of him that is sent thither to read it.” Divers other informations were laid against the state of the church. It certainly seems curious to our own day that the Commencements should have been held in church, and that the feeble buffoonery of the “Prevaricator” should have been, under these circumstances, their leading feature. The feeling against these extraordinary ceremonies led to the building of the Senate House, which was large enough for disputations as well as meetings of the senate. But Sir James Burrough, to whom the Senate House is partly due, did his best to spoil the University Church. The screen of 1640, which, with its spirelets and canopies, must have been very like the Laudian screens remaining in one or two northern churches,[1] was taken down; and the church was devoted entirely to the cult of the sermon. Mr William Worts had previously left a legacy to the University, which was employed in erecting the present galleries (1735). The Cock-pit was remodelled, and the centre of the church was filled with an immense octagonal pulpit on the “three-decker” principle, the crowning glory and apex of which was approached, like a church-tower, by an internal staircase. About 1740, Burrough filled the chancel-arch and chancel with a permanent gallery, which commanded a thorough view of this object. The gallery, known as the “Throne” was an extraordinary and unique erection. The royal family of Versailles never worshipped more comfortably than did the Vice-Chancellor and heads of houses, in their beautiful arm-chairs, and the doctors, sitting on the tiers of seats behind them. In this worship of the pulpit, the altar was quite disregarded, and Cole the antiquary remarked sorrowfully on this discreditable fact. Undergraduates, whose power of expression was not equal to their sense of humour, irreverently called the Throne Golgotha, because the heads of houses sat there. The church thus became an oblong box, with the organ at one end, the Throne at the other, and the pulpit between them. The portentous array of bevelled and panelled oak plunged the church in darkness, and so, in 1766, the aisle windows were altered and the present meagre insertions made.