Meanwhile I, as I have said, turned away not only my hands, but also, as far as it was possible, my eyes and my thoughts from war, conceiving that I should so acknowledge the great kindness of my Lord Fairfax. Here, therefore, I may not unfittingly set down somewhat about the thing with which I now concerned myself. Before my going to join company with my father before the battle at Naseby, being about to finish my second year of residing, I performed my first exercises, that is to say, I answered, as the Academical phrase has it, _in parviso_, and so became, to use again the somewhat barbarous dialect, _sophista generalis_, the visible signs and tokens of which honour was the putting into my hands of a book of Aristotle, and round my neck, by one of the bedels, when I had duly finished my answering, of a little hood of some common black stuff, which same hood, as might be concluded from its look, had done the like service for many before me. As I am speaking of this matter I may anticipate the time somewhat in this place, and relate how I afterwards answered for my degree, which by great fortune I was able to do before that I was constrained to leave Oxford. The questions on which I disputed were in part ethical, and in part philosophical. And here, for the edifying of my readers, I will set them forth, being two of each sort. First, then, came the philosophical. 1. _Whether there can be administered by the art of the physician an universal remedy?_ 2. _Whether the moon can be inhabited? And whether, it being granted that it has inhabitants, these have a popular or a despotic constitution?_ After these came the ethical questions, in which were included political. 1. _Whether the die be a lawful means of acquiring property?_ 2. _Whether a multitude of scholars be profitable to a commonwealth?_ But this was not done till after the time of which I have been now speaking, when I was near upon completing my fourth academical year. CHAPTER XIV. OF BODLEY'S LIBRARY. 'Tis no small pleasure for me, and will be doubtless for any that shall hereafter read what I have here written, to turn from wars and fighting, of which I must perforce say much, to the quiet and delectable realm of learning. And, though I would not be thought wilfully to praise myself, I may say so much that, amidst all the distractions of the time, which were indeed many and great, this realm I did never wholly leave or desert, though compelled often to be absent therefrom.