214 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1850. so don't say I write in a hurry. University College, London, 

 October 5, 9h. 30m. A M. + the error of my watch, 1850, the last 

 year of the first half of the nineteenth century, let who will call 

 it ihe first year of the second half. 



To Rev. W. Heald. 



7 Camden Street, Aug. 18, 1851. 



1851. DEAR HEALD, It has become quite the regular thing for the 

 depth of vacation to remind me not of you, for anything that 

 carries my thoughts back to Cambridge does that, but of in- 

 quiring how you are getting on, of which please write speedy word, 

 according to custom, once a year. For myself I have nothing 

 particular to report. My wife and seven children are all at 

 Broadstairs as they were when I last wrote so that the in- 

 formation is that they really eame back in the interval. 1 pre- 

 sume you really have not come to town to see the Exhibition, 

 supposing that you would surely have let me know. Are you 

 not coming ? Whether I with my short sight should know you 

 again after a quarter of a century, plus a quarter of a year, is 

 a problem I should very much like to solve. But you seem 

 determined not to furnish the data. 



It seems to me that I must have written to you just before 

 the Pope made his onslaught, which has occupied people ever 

 since. I remember, soon after the Catholic Emancipation Bill 

 was carried, reminding a friend of mine, a Catholic barrister, 

 that that Bill was an experiment a very proper experiment 

 one it was disgraceful not to have tried before ; but still an 

 experiment, in trial of whether it really was practically possible 

 that people with any foreign allegiance, call it spiritual or any- 

 thing else, could permanently exercise the rights of citizenship 

 here. The occasion was his speaking very seriously and earnestly 

 of it being a matter of discussion among the Roman Catholic body 

 whether they had not in right of the E. Bill a right to proceed 

 in Chancery against the Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which 

 were founded on condition of praying for the souls of the 

 founders, to make them either so pray or give place to those who 

 would. It gave me at the time (the man being neither a san- 

 guine man nor a fool) a fixed idea that from the very time of the 

 Emancipation Bill passing there was a settled purpose of legal 

 invasion. And I have never since faltered in the opinion that, 

 be it settled how it might, the time would come when, on poli- 

 tical grounds, the question would be reopened ; and I prophesy it 



