In the seventeenth century, Magdalen was, for a short time, the very centre of England's interest. James II, in his desire to force Roman Catholicism on Oxford, tried to fill the vacant Presidency with one of his co-religionists. His first nominee was not only disqualified under the statutes, but was also a man of so notoriously bad a character that even the king had to drop him. Meanwhile, the fellows, having waited, in order to oblige James, till the last possible moment allowed by the statutes, filled up the vacancy by electing one of their own number, John Hough. When the king pronounced this election irregular and demanded the removal of the President and the acceptance of his second nominee, the fellows declared themselves unable thus to violate their statutes, even at royal command, and were accordingly driven out. The "demies," who were offered nominations to the fellowships thus rendered vacant, supported their seniors, and, in their turn, too, were driven out; they had showed their contempt for James' intruded fellows by "cocking their hats" at them, and by drinking confusion to the Pope. When the landing of William of Orange was threatening, James revoked all these arbitrary proceedings, but it was too late; he had brought home, by a striking example, to Oxford and to England, that no amount of past services, no worthiness of character, no statutes, however clear and binding, were to weigh for a moment with a royal bigot, who claimed the power to "dispense" with any statutes. The "Restoration" of the Fellows on October 25, 1688, is still celebrated by a College Gaudy, when the toast for the evening is /jus suum cuique/. Hough remained President for thirteen years, during most of which time he was bishop--first of Oxford and then of Lichfield. He finally was translated to Worcester, where he died at the age of ninety- three, after declining the Archbishopric of Canterbury. His monument, in his cathedral, records his famous resistance to arbitrary authority. Magdalen in the eighteenth century has an unenviable reputation, owing to the memoirs of its most famous historian, Edward Gibbon, who matriculated, in 1752, and who describes the fourteen months which elapsed before he was expelled for becoming a Roman Catholic, "as the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." The "Monks of Magdalen," as he calls the fellows, "decent, easy men," "supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder." It should be added that Gibbon was not quite fifteen when he entered the College, and that his picture of it is no doubt coloured by personal bitterness. But its substantial justice is admitted. Certainly, nothing could be feebler than the /Vindication of Magdalen College/, published by a fellow James Hurdis, the Professor of Poetry; his intellectual calibre may perhaps be gauged from the exquisite silliness of his poem, "The Village Curate," of which the following lines, addressed to the Oxford heads of houses, are a fair specimen: