The college was never large, and its history is scanty. Its first master of any importance was Dr Thomas Nevile, who reigned from 1582 to 1593, and then removed to Trinity. His fame belongs to the history of the latter college. In the great concussion of the seventeenth century, Magdalene adhered, as was natural, to the royalist side, and its master, Dr Rainbow,* was rewarded after the Restoration with the Bishoprick of Carlisle. Nicholas Ferrar,* the famous superior of the community at Little Gidding, and the friend of Crashaw and Herbert, was a member of this college as well as of Clare, and his portrait, with that of his mother, is preserved in the Master’s Lodge. This saintly man, like Herbert, was happy in dying before the troubles of his party began. But one naturally connects Magdalene less with Ferrar than with an individual of a very different order. Mr Samuel Pepys was entered at Trinity in 1650, but, for some reason, preferred Magdalene. By no means a scholar, he enjoyed the social advantages of the University, and in after years remembered the grateful flavour of Goody Mulliner’s stewed prunes, which he used to buy “over against the college.” His eventual generosity to Magdalene was something of an accident. During the closing years of his life, the college was raising the exquisite eastern building. Pepys was then casting about for a suitable destination for his library, and there is no doubt that the singularly admirable qualities of the new building, as well as his own prepossession for Magdalene, aided his decision. By his will, he bequeathed his library to his nephew, Mr Jackson (another Magdalene man), as his trustee, and provided that, at the death of this gentleman, it should pass to Magdalene, and, by an express stipulation, be housed in the New Building “and any part thereof, at my nephew’s selection.” The document contained certain reservations in favour of Trinity. Its whole wording shows an amusing caution. After a preamble, in which he expresses his apprehension of the danger which might befall the books at the hands of an incompetent heir, he proceeds to leave them, at his nephew’s death, to one of the two Universities, but to Cambridge rather than to Oxford. Then he states his preference for a private to a public library, and confines the private libraries to Trinity and Magdalene. Finally, he prefers Magdalene to Trinity, but provides that, in case of specified losses, the books are forfeit to the latter college. In this respect, he imitates Parker’s bequest to Corpus. “And that for a yet further security herein, the sᵈ two colleges of Trinity and Magdalen have a reciprocall check upon one another; and that college, wᶜʰ shall be in present possession of the sᵈ Library, be subject to an annual visitation from the other, and to the forfeiture thereof, to the like possession and use of the other, upon conviction of any breach of their sᵈ covenants.”