"Nec modo seminarium augustum et conclusum nimis, verum in se amplissimum campum collegium esse cupimus: ubi juvenes, apum more, de omnigenis flosculis pro libita libent, modo mel legant, quo et eorum procudantur linguæ et pectora, tanquam crura, thymo compleantur: ita ut tandem ex collegio quasi ex alveari evolantes, novas in quibus se exonerent ecclesiæ sedes appetant."--_Statutes of Sidney College._ Queen Elizabeth and the Founder of Emmanuel--The Puritan Age--Sir Walter Mildmay--The Building of Emmanuel--The Tenure of Fellowships--Puritan Worthies--The Founder of Harvard--Lady Frances Sidney--The Sidney College Charter--The Buildings--The Chapel the old Franciscan Refectory--Royalists and Puritans--Oliver Cromwell--Thomas Fuller--A Child's Prayer for his Mother. "I hear, Sir Walter," said Queen Elizabeth to the founder of Emmanuel College, "you have been erecting a Puritan foundation." "No, madam," he replied, "far be it from me to countenance anything contrary to your established laws; but I have set an acorn, which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit therefrom." And Sir Walter Mildmay expressed no doubt truthfully what was his own intention as a founder, for although it is customary to speak of both Emmanuel and Sidney Colleges as Puritan foundations, and although it admits of no question that the prevailing tone of Emmanuel College was from the first intensely Puritan in tone, yet it cannot certainly be said that either Emmanuel College or the college established by the Lady Frances Sidney two years later, were specially designed by their founders to strengthen the Puritan movement in the University. They synchronised with it no doubt, and many of their earliest members gave ample proof of their sympathy with it. But as foundations they sprang rather from the impulse traceable on the one hand to the literary spirit of the Renaissance, and on the other to the desire of promoting that union of rational religion with sound knowledge, which the friends of the New Learning, the disciples of Colet, Erasmus, and More had at heart. The two colleges were born, in fact, at the meeting-point of two great epochs of history. The age of the Renaissance was passing into the age of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widening every hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system which recognised the grandeur of the people as a whole. [Illustration: Hall & Chapel, Emmanuel College.]