charge, and immediately afterwards betook himself to London. Sir Nathaniel Brent, on the contrary, returned to Oxford; and the star of the Parliamentarians being now in the ascendant, Merton College was not slow to reinstate its old Presbyterian warden in the room of its late royalist head.[20] From the date of the surrender of Oxford (July, 1646), Harvey followed the fortunes of Charles no longer. Of his reasons for quitting the service of his old master we know nothing. He probably felt anxious for repose; at sixty-eight, which was Harvey’s age, a man begins to find that an easy chair is a fitter resting-place than the bare ground, a ceiled roof more suitable covering than the open sky--prospects which a continuance of the strife held out. Harvey, besides, as we have seen, had no stomach for contention in any shape or form, not even in the literary arena; and he now probably resolved himself to follow the advice he had once given to his young friend Charles Scarborough, “to leave off gunning,”[21] and dedicate himself wholly to more congenial pursuits. And then Charles had long made it apparent, even to the most ardent of his adherents, that no faith was to be put in his promise, no trust to be reposed in his royal word. The wise old man, verging on the age of threescore years and ten, doubtless saw that it was better for him to retire from a responsible office, now become most irksome and thankless, and seek privacy and leisure for the remainder of his days. These Harvey found awaiting him in the houses of his affectionate brothers--now in the house of Eliab, in the City, or at Roehampton, and then in the house of Daniel, in the ‘suburban’ village of Lambeth, or at Combe near Croydon in Surrey, in each of which Harvey had his own apartments. The Harveys appear to have been united from first to last in the closest bonds of brotherly love,[22] and to have had a common interest in many of their undertakings; and Eliab, as we shall see, employed the small capital, which his brother William must have accumulated before the civil wars broke out, to such purpose, that the doctor actually died a rich man. With his brothers, then, retreating now to the “leads” of the house in the heart of the metropolis, now to the “caves” of the one at Combe, did Harvey continue to pass his days--but not in idleness; for the work on Generation, with the subject of which we saw him busied at Oxford several years before, must have found him in ample occupation. Nor was the love of ease so great in William Harvey, even at the advanced age of seventy-one, if we may credit some of the accounts, as to hinder him from again visiting the Continent, and making his way as far as Italy, a journey in which it is said he was attended by his friend the accomplished scholar and gentleman, Dr. Ent.[23]