else to express the sense of my greatest obligations to you, I beg you will commiserate so far as to accept this renewal of my heartiest acknowledgments. I hasten to make it, not for fear I should forget your favours (I know that to be next impossibility), but to shun the pain of delay, from the weight and pressure of them. It is some ease to a grateful mind, under such a load of obligations, to air itself in the field where they grow. Most honoured Sir, amongst all the rest of your noble kindnesses to me, I must single that out of the crowd, which made you unkind (I had almost said, unnatural) to yourself, to let me know how much you are my friend. I can but thank you, and tell stories at home and abroad of your goodness to me, and heartily pray for the increase of all honour to you, with a long enjoyment, and the reward at last of a blessed immortality.”[290] [Sidenote: REVENUES.] These well-timed compliments were not in vain; for, though Tully did not obtain any preferment in consequence of the death of the Bishop of Lincoln, he was immediately afterwards promoted to the Deanery of Ripon, upon the death of Dr. John Neile. Dr. Barlow, a well-known Oxford man, and an eager aspirant for a bishopric, obtained the see of Lincoln, and wrote on the 29th of May, as mentioned already, to his friend, the Secretary, stating that fees, first-fruits, and other charges cost him £1,500 or £2,000 before he could receive a penny from the bishopric. “I was never in debt,” he says, “yet borrow I must, and, to enable me to repay honestly, I mean to stay here (as others I see do in the like case) till a little after Lady-day next. My College and Margaret Lecture I can (without any dispensation) keep, and perform the duties of both till then.”[291] Amidst the turnings of the preferment-wheel at that time, Dr. Hall, referred to in Vice-Chancellor Fell’s letter, was elected to the Margaret professorship, vacated at length by Barlow’s resignation. In July of the same year, 1675, another letter reached Whitehall, upon a similar subject. “It is thought here,” wrote Dr. John Wallis, the celebrated Mathematician at Oxford, “that the Bishop of Worcester is either dead, or at least not likely to subsist long, which will give occasion of alterations. If that or any other occasion give you opportunity of doing a kindness to your servant, or my son, I believe His Majesty would be very ready to grant, if we knew what to ask. I have signified to Dr. Conant by his son your good thoughts of him.” We must now terminate these illustrations.