After a disappointment so severe as the loss of the much-coveted professorship, it might have been expected that Palmer’s connexion with Cambridge would soon have been severed; that he would have sought and obtained a lucrative appointment elsewhere. On the contrary, it was written in the book of fate, as one of his favourite Orientals would have said, that he should not only remain at Cambridge, but remain there in connexion with Oriental studies. Cambridge has two chairs of Arabic: a Professorship founded by Sir Thomas Adams in 1632; and a Readership, founded by King George I. in 1724, at the instance of Lancelot Blackburn, Bishop of Exeter and Lord Almoner. It is endowed with an income of £50 a year, paid out of the Almonry bounty, but reduced by fees to £40. 10_s._ If, however, the income be small the duties are none—or, rather, none are attached to the office as such; and moreover the Reader is technically regarded as a Professor, and has a Professor’s privilege of retaining a College Fellowship for life as a married man. The previous holder of the office, the Rev. Theodore Preston, Fellow of Trinity College, had regarded it as a sinecure, and moreover had generally been non-resident. On his resignation in 1871, the Lord Almoner for the time being, the Hon. and Rev. Gerald Wellesley, Dean of Windsor, gave the office to Palmer. At last, therefore, he seemed to have obtained his reward—congenial occupation in a place which had been the first to find him out and help him, where he had many devoted friends, and where he was now enabled to establish himself as a married man; for on the very day after he received his appointment he married a lady to whom he had been engaged for some years.