Months passed, and Walpole’s promise was still unfulfilled. “I wait here,” he tells Lord Percival in March, 1730, “with all the anxiety that attends suspense, until I know what I can depend upon, or what course I am to take. On the one hand I have no notion that the Court would put what men call a _bite_ upon a poor clergyman, who depended upon charters, grants, votes, and the like engagements. On the other hand, I see nothing done towards payment of the money.” Later on he writes—“As for the raillery of European wits, I should not mind it, if I saw my College go on and prosper; but I must own the disappointments I have met with in this particular have nearly touched me, not without affecting my health and spirits. If the founding a College for the spread of religion and learning in America had been a foolish project, it cannot be supposed the Court, the Ministers, and the Parliament would have given such public encouragement to it; and if, after all that encouragement, they who engaged to endow and protect it let it drop, the disappointment indeed may be to me, but the censure, I think, will light elsewhere.” The suspense was at last ended. Gibson, the Bishop of London, pressed Walpole for a final answer. “If,” he replied, “you put this question to me as a Minister, I must, and can, assure you that the money shall most undoubtedly be paid, as soon as suits with public convenience; but if you ask me as a friend, whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America expecting the payment of twenty thousand pounds, I advise him by all means to return home to Europe, and to give up his present expectations.” It was thus that in 1731 the Prime Minister of England crushed the project conceived ten years before, and to which the intervening period had, under his encouragement, been devoted by the projector with a singular enthusiasm. [Illustration] Berkeley’s Alcove, Rhode Island