Between the matriculation of John Milton at Christ's and that of Charles Darwin at the same college is a period exactly of two centuries. The Christ's Roll of Honour for that period contains many worthy names, but none certainly which shed a brighter lustre on the College history than that of Henry More, a leader in that remarkable school of thinkers in the seventeenth century--Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, John Smith, John Worthington, Samuel Cradock--known as "the Cambridge Platonists," for whom Burnet claims the high credit of "having saved the Church from losing the esteem of the kingdom," and whose distinctive teaching is perhaps best brought out in More's writings. Henry More had been admitted to Christ's College about the time when John Milton was leaving it. He was elected a Fellow of the College in 1639, and thenceforth lived almost entirely within its walls. Like many others, he began as a poet and ended as a prose writer. He had, in fact, the Platonic temperament in far greater measure probably than any other of the Cambridge school. How the soul should escape from its animal prison--when it should get the wings that of right should belong to it--into what regions those wings could carry it--were the questions which occupied him from youth upwards. "I would sing," he had said in one of his Platonical poems, "The pre-existency Of human souls, and live once more again, By recollection and quick memory, All what is past since first we all began."