Moreover there was the penniless and threadbare student Bonwicke; and the well-paid Bernard, tutor to the Dukes of Grafton and Northumberland, sons of Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland; but for his employers he was too pure and grave a man. And there was Wells, the Nonconformist and, sad blot in the school escutcheon, Titus Oates, who was also a nonconformist to morality and religion; and Needler, fit name for pupil of such house, and who wrote in defence of the Trinity when half England had more delight in the argument than the end for which the argument was raised. Several others of the pupils, now grown men, in the reign of James II., were hanging over their pulpits, half Romanists, half Reformers. Like the tomb of the old prelate at Canterbury, they were neither in the Church nor out of it, but a little of both. Indeed many of these men were singularly constituted; and we may cite as an instance the case of young Dawes, who began his poetical career by composing a poem, which I should not like to read, entitled the ‘Anatomy of Atheism.’ Nevertheless Merchant Tailors’ School boasted of Dawes, and of Boulter and Wilcox, whose election to Magdalen was called by Dr. Hough, the President, the “Golden Election,” as the Charterhouse boasted of Addison. The “small change” here hardly represented the value of the larger piece. Sayer and Oliver, two fellow-pupils of the school, were successive Archdeacons of Surrey; Joshua Barnes and Peter Heylin were also of the “Table” or the “Bench;” and Wright, Vicar of Okeham, was of the latter, and not less famed for his steady refusal of all preferment. Like ‘Silver Penny,’ so named for his pure eloquence, though it might have been also for his liberality, and who has made so exquisite a restoration of Mongeham Church, near Deal, he loved the temple of which he was the priest too well to wish to change his office. Then there were botanical Sherrard; Torriano, of Italian blood; Dee, descended from that Dr. Dee who fooled Elizabeth so “consumedly;” and William Bridge, himself the son of a tailor and draper, and who contributed a Threnodia to the cairn of melodious mourning heaped upon the dead body of William the Third.