Dr. Covel was twice Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the first time in 1689, when King William visited the University, and his letters show a considerable degree of anxiety as to how the King, whom he had maligned as Prince, would receive him. In reply to these anxieties, King William sent a curt answer, stating “that he could distinguish between Dr. Covel and the Vice-Chancellor of the University”. Dr. Covel was not fortunate with his voluminous writings; he got into another scrape with the Court in a book entitled _The Interpreter of Words and Terms_; it was ordered to be destroyed, being, as it was supposed, “in some points very derogatory to the supreme power of this Crown”. He also wrote on gardening and fruit-trees; but his _magnum opus_ was a work on the Greek Church, which he published shortly before his death, which remained for long the standard work on the subject. It is entitled: _Some Account of the present Greek Church, with Reflections on their present Doctrine and Discipline, particularly on the Eucharist and the rest of their seven Pretended Sacraments_. In his Preface he apologises for the long delay, owing to his “itinerant life”, and having been “chained to a perpetual college bursar’s place”. It is evident from his diary that, when at Constantinople, Dr. Covel gave himself up to this study very closely, in fact, he was deputed to do so, for the controversy was then at its height which was started by M. Arnold, Doctor of the Sorbonne, as to whether the Greeks held the doctrine of transubstantiation or not, and a union between the Eastern and Western Churches was much feared by the Protestants. The eccentric Marquis de Nointel, who was the French ambassador to the Porte at that time, was most eager to bring this about, and as he was on very friendly terms with Sir John Finch, it was suspected that he used his influence to win over the English ambassador; hence Dr. Covel had an important task to perform, and no wonder he writes so bitterly on the ignorance and corruption of the Greek clergy. To show his zeal, the Marquis de Nointel celebrated Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, 1673, in the cave of Antiparos, with a broken-off stalactite as his communion-table, on which may still be read the words he carved:— “Hic ipse Christus adfuit Ejus natali die mediâ nocte celebrato MDCLXXIII.” The ambassador was accompanied by five hundred people—his domestics, merchants, Greeks, and Turks—and he was so impressed by it, that he repeated the experiment on two subsequent occasions. The proposed union of the Churches, however, never came to anything, and by the time Dr. Covel’s book came out the controversy was at an end and forgotten. Dr. Covel was appointed Master of Christ’s College in 1688, and retained this position until his death in 1722, at the ripe age of eighty-four.