"Here is a good garden, an admirable bowling green, a beautiful summer house, at the back of which is a walk agreeably winding, with variety of trees and shrubs intertwining, and forming the whole length, a fine canopy overhead; with nothing but singing and fragrance and seclusion; a delightful summer retreat; the sweetest lovers' or poets' walk, perhaps in the University." To the extremely eclectic character of the College in its early days the Master's admission register testifies. Among its members were some of the stoutest Royalists and also some of the stoutest Republicans in the country. Among the former we find such names as those of Edward Montagu (afterwards first Baron Montagu of Boughton), brother of the first Master, a great benefactor of the College; of Sir Roger Lestrange, of Hunstanton Hall, in Norfolk, celebrated as the editor of the first English newspaper, "a man of good wit, and a fancy very luxuriant and of an enterprising nature," in early youth--his attempt to recover the port of Lynn for the King in 1644 is one of the funniest episodes in English history--a very Don Quixote of the Royalist party; and of Seth Ward, a Fellow of the college, who was ejected in Commonwealth times, but had not to live long, before he was able to write back to his old College that he had been elected to the See of Exeter, and that "the old bishops were exceeding disgruntled at it, to see a brisk young bishop, but forty years old, not come in at the right door, but leap over the pale." Among the Republican members of the College it is enough, perhaps, to name the name of Oliver Cromwell. And of him, at least, whatever our final verdict on his career may be, whatever dreams of personal ambition we may think mingled with his aim, we cannot surely deny, if at least we have ever read his letters, that his aim was, in the main, a high and unselfish one, and that in the career, which to our modern minds may seem so strange and complex, he had seen the leading of a divine hand that drew him from the sheepfolds to mould England into a people of God. And to some, surely, he seems the most human-hearted sovereign and most imperial man in all English annals since the days of Alfred. And no one, I trust, would in these days endorse the verdict of the words interpolated in the College books between the entry of his name and the next on the list:-- "_Hic fuit grandis ille impostor, carnifex perditissimus, qui, pientissimo rege Carolo primo nefaria cæde sublato, ipsum usurpavit thronum, et tria regna per quinque ferme annorum spatium sub protectoris nomine indomita tyrannide vexavit_," which may be Englished thus--