Mention may also be made of an undergraduate of Lincoln College at this time who was famous beyond any undergraduate of his own or subsequent years. Robert Montgomery, then in the full enjoyment of the reputation of being the great poet of the century, a reputation evinced by the sale of thousands of copies of his poems, and unassailed as yet by any whisper of adverse criticism, entered the College as Commoner on 18th Feb., 1830. Although he put himself down in the Bible-Clerk’s book as son of “Robert Montgomery, esquire,” he was really of very poor parentage, and was able to come to the University only by the profits of his pen. His undergraduate contemporaries, whether because they believed it or not, used to assert that he was the son of Gomerie, a well-known clown of the day. He was mercilessly persecuted in College. Some of the forms of this persecution were little creditable to the persecutors, and had best be left unrecorded; but one instance of a practical joke on the victim’s egregious vanity may be noted. When about to enter for “Smalls” in his first term, he was persuaded to go to the Vice-Chancellor and request that a special decree should be proposed putting off his _vivâ-voce_ till late in the vacation, “to avoid the inconveniences likely to be caused by the crowds which might be expected to attend the examination of that distinguished poet.” Montgomery took a fourth class in “Literæ Humaniores” in 1834, and was afterwards minister of Percy Chapel in London, which members of the College used occasionally to attend to listen to his florid but not ineffective preaching. John Radford, who had succeeded Tatham as Rector in 1834, was succeeded in 1851 by James Thompson, and Thompson by Mark Pattison in 1861. Both these elections were keenly, not to say bitterly, contested, with a partizan spirit which has found its way into several pamphlets and memoirs; but when the present Rector, W. W. Merry, the thirtieth who has ruled over the College, was elected in 1884, the College Register once more recorded an election made “_unanimi consensu omnium suffragantium_.” He had been Fellow and Lecturer since 1859; and by his editions of Homer and Aristophanes, had charmed wider circles of pupils than that of the College lecture-room.