Finally, under the mastership of Cherry, Townley’s successor, a scene of another description took place, which caused infinite commotion. When the French Revolution broke out, the “Tailors” became infected; and inscriptions scrawled on the walls of the school-passages proved how disloyalty pervaded the breasts of the youthful writers. But from writing they proceeded to action. On the 13th of January, 1796, the Queen’s birthday, a tricoloured flag was hoisted on the Tower Walls, where, strange enough, it was allowed to remain for three hours, side by side with the royal standard. The City burst forth into a tumult of indignation or delight. When the authorities, acting on information, proceeded to the fortress, the insulting emblem had disappeared; but it was traced to a hiding-place beneath the bed of the son of the Rev. Mr. Grose, assistant chaplain at Merchant Tailors’. The horrified sire burnt the rag of rebellion to ashes, while his son confessed his guilt, and implicated in the raising of the insurrectionary standard a fellow-pupil named Hayward, under whose suggestions young Grose professed to have acted. Their fellow-pupils showed the vigour of _their_ loyalty by nearly pounding Hayward to a pulpy consistence like that of the men whom Professor Whewell, as I have elsewhere noticed, concedes as possibly existing in the wide plane of Jupiter. The offenders were solemnly expelled; and since that period, the establishment has flourished in usefulness to the public and credit to its conductors. It is an establishment which, despite some drawbacks, has produced not a few eminent “Merchant Tailors.” I can cite but a few, and, among the many, name the good and modest Bishop Andrews, and the learned Dove, who in the reign of James preached the funeral sermon of Mary Queen of Scots, at Peterborough. Spenser the Greek scholar, and the three virtuous sons of the virtuous Sandys, Bishop of London; Fox, the son and biographer of the Martyrologist; Heth, who logically tranquillized the public in 1582, when Harvey of Cambridge informed the world that it was coming to an end; the pious Bowsfield and Gwinne, who renewed a love for Church music after the Reformation, were all “Merchant Tailors.” So too were those eminent Oxford men, Searchfield and Perin; Paddin, the physician at James’s death-bed; Ravens and Buckridge, Latewar, Whitelocke, and Boyle; Price, Tomson, and Lymby, Rawlinson, Rainsbee, Sansbury, Lauson, and Tuer; with Wren and Campin, who upheld the honour of Merchant Tailors’ at Cambridge. What they did in general learning, in divinity, poetry, or law, in the Hampton Court Conference, in the student’s closet, in ambassadorial councils or the tented field, behold, is it not written in the dictionaries of biographers? To them may be added Hutton the controversialist, and the clever and profligate Hill, who lived an Epicurean and died a Romanist, and to whose opinions Ben Jonson alludes when he says:—