On the stones of Oxford, Puritanism has left no trace; there was hardly any building during those years. There were benefactions not a few, among which was the gift of Selden's Library. Upon the Restoration followed a Royalist proscription, more cruel, and certainly more lawless, than that of the Puritans had been. All the good Heads of the Commonwealth era were ejected, and the Colleges received back a crowd of Royalists, who, during their exclusion, had probably been estranged from academical pursuits. Anthony Wood himself is an unwilling witness to the fact that the change was much for the worse. "Some Cavaliers that were restored," he says, "were good scholars, but the majority were dunces." "Before the War," he says in another place, "we had scholars who made a thorough search in scholastic and polemical divinity, in humane learning and natural philosophy, but now scholars study these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the University. Their aim is not to live as students ought to do, temperate, abstemious, and plain in their apparel, but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparel and long periwigs." Into the Rectorship of Exeter, in place of the excellent Conant, was put Joseph Maynard, of whom Wood says, "Exeter College is now much debauched by a drunken Governor; whereas, before, in Doctor Conant's time, it was accounted a civil house, it is now rude and uncivil. The Rector is good-natured, generous, and a good scholar, but he has forgot the way of College life, and the decorum of a scholar. He is much given to bibbing, and when there is a music meeting in one of the Fellow's chambers, he will sit there, smoke, and drink till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings by the junior Fellows." This is not the only evidence of the fact that drinking, idling, and tavern-haunting were in the ascendant. Study as well as morality, having been the badge of the Puritan, was out of fashion. Wilkins's scientific circle took its departure from Oxford to London, there to become the germ of the Royal Society. The hope was gone at Oxford of a race of "young men provided against the next age, whose minds, receiving the first impressions of sober and generous knowledge, should be invincibly armed against all the encroachments of enthusiasm." The presence of the merry monarch, with his concubines, at Oxford, when his Parliament met there, was not likely to improve morals. Oxford sank into an organ of the High Church and Tory party, and debased herself by servile manifestos in favour of government by prerogative. Non-conformists were excluded by the religious tests, the operation of which was more stringent than ever since the passing of the Act of Uniformity. The love of liberty and truth embodied in Locke was expelled from Christ Church; not, however, by the act of the College or of the