'My dear Sir,--I must confess I have some little Peek against you--therefore am not much displeased, that I have this occasion of telling you some ill news. The Vice-Chancellor did yesterday send for me to inquire where the _Astronomy Professor_ was, and the reason of his absence so long after the beginning of the _term_. I used all the arguments I could for your Defence. I told him that _Charles the Second_ was King of _England_, _Scotland_, _France_ and _Ireland_; and that he was by the late _Act of Parliament_ declared absolute Monarch in these his dominions: and that it was this mighty Prince who had confined you to _London_. I endeavour'd to persuade him that the drawing of lines in _Sir Harry Savill's_ school was not altogether of so great a concernment for the benefit of Christendom as the rebuilding of _St. Paul's_ or the fortifying of _Tangier_; (for I understood those were the great works in which that extraordinary Genius of yours was judg'd necessary to be employ'd). All this I urged, but after some Discourse, he told me, that he was not now to consider you as _Dr. Bayly_[94](for so he ow'd you all Kindness) but as _Vice Chancellor_, and under that Capacity he most terribly told me that he took it very ill you had not all this while given him any Account of what hinder'd you in the Discharge of your Office. This he bid me tell you, and I do it not very unwillingly because I see that our Friendships are so closely ty'd together that the same Thing which was so great a Prejudice to me (my losing your Company all this while here) does also something redound to your Disadvantage. And so, my dear Sir, now my Spite and Spleen is satisfied, I must needs return to my old Temper again, and faithfully assure you that I am with the most violent Zeal and Passion, your most affectionate and devoted Servant, 'THO. SPRAT.' Wren had also employment at Cambridge, of a kind he would have been loth to put in other hands. His uncle, the Bishop of Ely, had instantly on his release determined to give a chapel to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he had been a scholar under Launcelot Andrewes,[95] and he employed his nephew as his architect. Upon this work and its endowment the Bishop expended 5,000_l._, the first money he received after his release. His personal habits were austerely simple; for the last twenty years of his life he drank no wine, and only ate off a wooden trencher, practising fasting and abstinence with great strictness. He had never spent any of the revenues of his see upon his children, and now he made the chapel his heir, bestowing upon it an estate at Hardwick in Cambridgeshire.