31 



place of education, long continues to toe followed; and 

 one generation emulates another, in the cultivation of 

 a science or art which has taken deep root in an uni- 

 versity or college, under the care of those whose me- 

 mory is honored. Oxford produces men upon whom 

 the Muses smile, and whose minds are imbued with 

 the poetry and the eloquence of Greece and Rome; 

 and Cambridge sends forth her sons skilful to ex- 

 pound the problems of Euclid and Archimedes, to 

 analyse the complicated relations of numbers and 

 curves, to observe the revolutions of the planets, and 

 calculate the distance of the stars. Sir Henry Wotton, 

 who died in 1639, was appointed provost of Eton by 

 James I. in reward for his services when ambassador 

 at Venice. In one of his journeys through Germany 

 he inscribed in an album an indiscreet Latin version 

 of a good English pun: "An ambassador is a person 

 of honour sent to lie abroad, for the good of his 

 country." Sometime afterwards this sentence, which 

 has not in the Latin version the pair of handles which 

 it has in English, was extracted by a scurrilous "lite- 

 rary Ishmaelite" of the day, the Jesuit Scioppius, who 

 published it, with a bitter commentary, as the text of 

 the deliberate policy of the British court. James, 

 who was much annoyed by the aspersions which were 

 thus cast upon him, required from Sir Henry an ex- 

 planation of the circumstance; and on being made 

 acquainted with the punning English original, and 

 being assured that the writing in the album was in- 

 serted merely as a jest, he forgave the ambassador, 



