Boyle devoted to the New England mission, £300 a year during his life, and, by his will, bequeathed a legacy of £100; and although several persons of distinction were nominally connected with the scheme, he was its moving-spring, its power and life. The meetings for the transaction of its affairs, which he commonly attended, were held at Alderman Ashurst’s residence in London--the first board of foreign missions in Protestant England, and the first mission-house of that kind in its enterprising metropolis. Missionary operations on a much larger scale were commenced after the Revolution. XIII. I have recorded several incidents which occurred in the Universities. Nothing like a history of those great institutions comes within the purpose of this work, nor is there any need to describe their state after the Restoration, as in former volumes I described it before that event:--because, during the Commonwealth, the Universities were extraordinarily circumstanced, but at the Restoration they returned to their normal condition, in which they have continued ever since. A few notices, however, indicative of the studies and habits of the members, may be appropriately included within this chapter. Sancroft conveys an unfavourable impression of the state of things at Cambridge in the year 1663:--“It would grieve you to hear of our public examinations; the Hebrew and Greek learning being out of fashion everywhere, and especially in the other Colleges, where we are forced to seek our candidates for fellowships; and the rational learning they pretend to, being neither the old philosophy, nor steadily any one of the new. In fine, though I must do the present society right, and say, that divers of them are very good scholars, and orthodox (I believe) and dutiful both to King and Church; yet methinks I find not that old genius and spirit of learning generally in the College that made it once so deservedly famous; nor shall I hope to retrieve it any way sooner, than by your directions who lived here in the most flourishing times of it.”[361] Not only would the transition from Puritan to Anglican occasion inconvenience, but a transition also occurred from the study of the old to the study of the new philosophy,--from Aristotle to Plato, and from the pursuit of metaphysics to the investigation of physical science. Lucas founded a professorship of Mathematics in the year 1663, to which office Barrow was the first appointed, and in his inaugural address, he eulogizes that department of knowledge which he was about to teach.[362] [Sidenote: UNIVERSITIES.]