Corbet appears, says Headley[9], to have been of that poetical party who, by inviting Ben Jonson to come to Oxford, rescued him from the arms of a sister University, who has long treated the Muses with indignity, and turned a hostile and disheartening eye on those who have added most celebrity to her name[10]. We do not find that Ben expressed any regret at the change of his situation: companions whose minds and pursuits were similar to his own, are not always to be found in the gross atmosphere of the muddy Cam, though easily met with on the more genial banks of the Isis: Largior hic campos æther. In 1616 he was recommended by the Convocation as a proper person to be elected to the college which Dr. Matthew Surtclyve, dean of Exeter, had lately erected at Chelsea, for maintaining polemical Divines to be employed in opposing the doctrines of Papists and Sectaries. Whether he obtained his election I have not learned: nor is it of much moment; for the establishment, as might be naturally foreseen from the circumstances of the times, soon declined from its original purpose[11]. Being now in a situation to indulge his inclinations, he in 1618 made a trip to France, from whence he wrote an “epistle to sir Thomas Aylesbury,” in which he gently laughs at his friend’s astronomical fondness; and composed a metrical description of his journey, from which we may conclude that he returned less disgusted with his native country, and less enamoured of the manners and habits of his new acquaintance, than is usual with the modern visitors of our transmarine neighbours. He was now in holy orders; and, in the language of Antony Wood, “became a quaint preacher, and therefore much followed by ingenious men.” None of Corbet’s sermons are, I believe, in existence: the modesty that withheld his poems from the press, during his life, prevented his adding to the multitude of devotional discourses with which the country was at this period infested[12]. Those who are at all acquainted with the ecclesiastical oratory of James’s reign, will be at no loss to comprehend “honest Antony’s” description; but to those who are not, it may be sufficient to observe, that, of its peculiar excellencies and demerits, the sermons of bishop King, his contemporary, (which have been republished) are a complete “picture in little.” About this time he appears, from the following characteristic letter[13], to have solicited promotion at the hands of Villiers duke of Buckingham: “May it please your Grace