To return, however, to the history of the foundation. It is an illustration of the way in which at this time ultramontanist theories were contending for supremacy in England, in the universities as elsewhere, that the King should have applied to the pope for a bull granting him power to make his new college not only independent of the bishop of the diocese, but also of the University authorities. Such a bull was granted, and in 1448 the University itself consented, by an instrument given under its common seal, that the College, in the matter of discipline as distinguished from instruction, should be entirely independent of the University. By the limitation also of the benefits of this foundation to scholars only of Eton, the founder, perhaps unconsciously, certainly disastrously, created an exclusive class of students endowed with exclusive privileges, an anomaly which for more than four centuries marred the full efficiency of Henry's splendid foundation. This _imperium in imperio_ was happily abolished by a new code of statutes which became law in 1861. "A little flock they were in Henry's hall * * * * * Hardly the circle widened, till one day The guarded gate swung open wide to all." It may certainly be hoped that there is truth in the present provost's gentle prophecy, that "it is hardly possible that the College should relapse into what was sometimes its old condition, that of a family party, comfortable, indeed, but inclined to be sleepy and self-indulgent, and not wholly free from family quarrels." And yet at the same time it should not be forgotten, as good master Fuller reminds us, that "the honour of Athens lieth not in her walls, but in the worth of her citizens," and that during the lengthened period in which the society was a close foundation only open to scholars of Eton, with a yearly entry therefore of new members seldom exceeding half-a-dozen, it could still point to a long list of distinguished scholars and of men otherwise eminent--mathematicians like Oughtred, moralists like Whichcote, theologians like Pearson, antiquarians like Cole, poets like Waller--who had been educated within its walls. In Cooper's "Memorials of Cambridge," the list of eminent King's men down to 1860 occupies twenty pages, a similar list of Trinity men, the largest college in the university, only ten pages more. This hardly seems to justify Dean Peacock's well-known epigram on the unreformed King's as "a splendid _Cenotaph_ of learning."