wrapped in a dozen flannel napkins, two towels and two table-cloths, two old shirts, and a carpet; also a little box with his hanging watch; also an alarum with lines and weights." He was expelled in July.[268] [Sidenote: _Cambridge University._] It is somewhat startling, amidst this story of anxieties, ejections, and impoverishments for conscience' sake, to turn to the oration delivered by young Isaac Barrow, on Commencement-day, the following year, 1651, and to hear him speaking thus:--"If it be true, as rumour tells, that you have so tired of all substantial fare as to nauseate the banquet of eloquence and the feast of sound philosophy--that nothing has for you any relish except painted comfits and unmeaning trifles--that not even wisdom will please you, unless without its own peculiar flavour; nor truth, unless seasoned with a jest; nor reason, unless soaked in fun; then in an unlucky hour have I been assigned as your purveyor, neither born nor bred to such a frivolous confectionary. The insatiable appetite of laughter keeps itself within no bounds. Have you crowded to this place for the purpose of listening and studying, and making progress; or only for the sake of laughing at this thing, and making a jest of that other? As if folly herself kept court amongst us--as if here were the market-place and universal emporium of nonsense, you drink in with greedy ears jibes, and squibs, and ribaldry, and then, when well considered and improved, set them all a-circulating again. There is nothing so remote from levity which you do not instantly--such is your alchemy--transmute into mirth and absurdity. And let a discourse be such as to move no laughter, nothing else will please--neither dignity, nor gravity, nor solidity--neither strength, nor point, nor polish."[269] One cannot suppose that this description applies to the Fellows or older members. But it must have been true of undergraduates and other young men. They--unless Barrow has gone beyond all bounds in his declamation--were a very noisy, boisterous, laughter-loving set. In truth, undergraduates were then what undergraduates have been ever since, full of fun, which at times leaped up in unseemly forms. Cambridge and Oxford commemorations, in the middle of the seventeenth century, were no contrasts to Cambridge and Oxford commemorations in the nineteenth. On reading Barrow's grandiloquent speech, it is easy to fancy shouts rolling round the hall in wit and humour--not unlike what our newspapers report of University festivals in our own time. And although Heads of houses and Fellows would decorously behave themselves on those occasions--from official prudence no less than from Puritanical propriety--let it not be supposed that the Puritans were men who never laughed and joked; for it is remarkable how often in their memoirs we find allusions to the "facetiousness" of persons, who, judged of from their portraits, were as solemn as the grave.