Knowing how, on the 29th of May, but four years later, all England was welcoming back the King to 'enjoy his own again,' one can hardly forbear wishing that Dean Wren might have been spared to see that day; yet those who loved him best cannot have grudged him the fulness of that peace which all his life he had desired, and which he had invoked upon his first home. Christopher was very warmly attached to his father, as all his letters show, and must have grieved greatly for his death. [_ASTRONOMY PROFESSORSHIP._] Soon after this he was summoned to London. The Gresham professor of astronomy, Mr. Laurence Rooke, retired in 1657, and the chair was offered to Wren. He was but twenty-four and doubted whether he should accept such a post while so young, and he clung to Oxford and his studies there. The friends whom he consulted advised him differently; accordingly he came up to London and delivered his opening address to a considerable audience. It was in Latin, and after a brief apology for his youth passed into a sketch of the history of astronomy. He dwells on the great riches of the science, how it is the handmaid of theology, the queen of sciences, speaks of the vast discoveries made by its means, touches upon Copernicus, whose mind first grasped the idea that the earth moved round the sun, then upon Kepler and upon Galileo, and the storms that had arisen, when in 1632 he had demonstrated that truth at which Copernicus had guessed; he praises highly Galileo's invention of the telescope, pays a tribute to the great men who had lectured at Gresham on these subjects, and especially to his own predecessor, Rooke, and winds up with an eloquent description of London as a Pandora of cities to whom each of the choir of planets gave a peculiar blessing, on whom the sun shines benignly, who possesses more inhabitants than any city in the world, a healthy air, a fertile soil stretching far around her, beautiful buildings springing as of themselves from the earth, and, lastly, is blessed by the moon, 'the governess of floods,' who alluring the seas thus far inland by means of the beloved Thames, makes her the city which nourishes the best seamen of the world. The rough draft of this address, written by Christopher in a bold hand with a few changes and corrections, is preserved in the 'Parentalia.' This professorship obliged him to come up to London and give a course of lectures every Wednesday in term time at Gresham College. None of these lectures have been preserved, and it seems from a hint in one of Dr. Sprat's letters, that Wren was in the habit of lecturing from rough notes merely, and used no pains to keep any record of them. ['_HE MAY COME OUT AN HE WILL._']