and well expressed. But both to the military and the general reader the volume itself, bulky as it seems, will well repay perusal. The public are indebted to Mr. Maxtone Graham, Lord Lynedoch's successor, for having placed Lord Lynedoch's papers in the hands of so judicious an editor.

The career of the 90th Regiment, which is the subject of the second of these volumes, travels over a field of interest of the most extensive description, and would indeed furnish admirable material for a commentary of some length. But having devoted so much space to the story of the man who raised the regiment, we must content ourselves with a mere summary of its subsequent fortunes. We believe, however, that we do it no more than justice when we say that no regiment in the service has enjoyed, professionally and socially, a more uniformly high reputation than the 90th has sustained ever since its embodiment. It probably consisted, owing to the manner in which it was originally raised, of better material than always follows the allurements of the recruiting sergeant.

Our limits will not permit us to refer to the early history of this gallant corps, or to the first comparatively unimportant services they had to perform. Their share in the capture of Minorca we have already referred to. But in 1801 they had to discharge a service of great hazard, and of immense value, at the first engagement in Aboukir Bay on March 31. It does not appear that the 90th had ever been under fire before. On this occasion they had to support the whole weight of an attack of the French cavalry, equally unexpected and formidable. The resolute front shown by the 90th, taken by surprise as they were, saved the position, and prevented Sir Ralph Abercromby from being taken prisoner. He had his horse shot under him, and was nearly surrounded, when a party of the regiment rescued him. Lord Hill-then Colonel-was badly wounded in the affair. They were mentioned with distinction in the general orders.

At the rupture of the peace of Amiens, the 90th went to Ireland, thence, in 1810, to the West Indies, and accomplished the capture of Martinique and Guadaloupe. They served in the Kaffir war, through the whole struggle in the Crimea, and in the Indian Mutiny. On March 29, 1858, Sir James Outram, in relinquishing his duties as Chief Commissioner in Oude, wrote to Colonel Purnell, their commander: In my various despatches I have endeavoured to express my 'sense of the obligations under which I lie to yourself and the 'glorious 90th' (p. 203). They returned home covered with

distinction. In 1872 they deposited the remnants of their colours beneath a monument erected at Perth to the memory of their comrades. Their ranks at that time cannot have contained one of the gallant band who marched from Perth to Kingstown by night in 1794; but there is a touch of sentiment in this return, with honour and renown, to the cradle of the regiment's infancy after nearly eighty years' service of their country. Still further duties and further honours awaited them. They served throughout the Zulu campaign, and the gallant 90th still stands in the front rank, prepared to add to its now accumulated honours. We should gladly have followed Captain Delavoye through the stirring adventures he has so well recounted; but we can only commend his labours to our readers. The names, among many others of honourable fame, of Garnet Wolseley and Evelyn Wood, remain to shed lustre on the corps which owed its origin to the patriotism of Thomas Graham.

ART. II.-Register of the Rectors, Fellows, Scholars, Exhibitioners, and Bible Clerks of Exeter College, Oxford, with illustrative Documents and a History of the College. By Rev. C. W. BOASE, Fellow and Tutor. Oxford: 1879. 8vo. 200 copies printed for Rector and Fellows.

THE

HE reforms which the University Commission of 1854 recommended the various colleges at Oxford to adopt were assailed by many of the most distinguished graduates of a previous age with a storm of invective. The warnings of those prophets of evil were disregarded at the time, and the pernicious consequences which they freely predicted have not yet come to pass. Of all the political enthusiasts that denounced the action of Parliament in tampering with the sacred institutions of Oxford, Dr. Bliss, whose researches into its past history had blunted his perception of its present needs, was perhaps the fiercest in his resentment. After more than twenty-five years' experience of college life since the introduction of these reforms, his prophetic admonitions on the terrible dangers which would overwhelm his beloved university in ruin strike the reader with amazement. I have seen, alas!' says the excited antiquary, in a strain of rhetoric which he rarely attained to, Oxford deserted by the House of Peers, her interests neglected by the bench of bishops, and not as manfully supported as she should have been, nay, in some instances, betrayed, by her own sons. I have seen her members compelled to violate oaths, to disregard the in

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'junctions of friends, and set at naught the expressed intention of benefactors. I have seen old statutes swept away and 'new ones enacted with a wilful pertinacity and an ill-advised 'haste that forbad prudence and due consideration; and lastly, 'I have lived to see a system of plunder and confiscation 'practised upon several of the foundations . . . under the 'sanction of a second Commission, comprising, strange to say, 'men educated within the walls of Oxford, some of whom even 'profess the practice of the law, others the administration of 'justice.' These Cassandra-like strains fell on deaf ears a quarter of a century ago. Now they seem like the echoes of ages far distant. The alterations in the statutes of the colleges have raised instead of lowering the level of knowledge in the schools, have heightened and not diminished the love of learning.

In one respect, indeed, they have been productive of great changes. The throwing open to the whole country of many of the fellowships and scholarships previously confined to the natives of special districts has naturally weakened the local connexion which for many generations had characterised the majority of the Oxford colleges. In none has this been felt with greater severity than at Exeter College. For nearly five centuries and a half an unbroken succession of fellows had been maintained there from the Western counties. From the days of the founder until past the middle of the nineteenth century the fellowship which had been held by a Cornishman was on its vacation filled by a native of the same county, and a Devonshire man succeeded to the post which had been occupied by one born in the same shire, it might be within the same parish. The Petrean fellowships were subject to similar limitations. No one who was not born in a county in which some of the estates of the family of Petre were situate was eligible for election to those prizes. The Commission swept all these restrictions away. For years the number of the fellowships at Exeter was largely in excess of the requirements of the college. Several of them were suppressed, and those which were left were declared open to the world. Of those which still exist, only one is now held by a gentleman who enjoys it in right of birth within the limits of a privileged county; and it is a happy accident in the history of the college that the last of these close honours should be enjoyed by a scholar whose academic attainments would have enabled him to win the prize in a competitive examination. It is even more fortunate for its lasting fame that it need not seek outside its list of officers for an antiquary willing to 'scorn delights and live laborious days' among the mouldering records of bygone ages in search

of details of life at Exeter College under Lancastrians and Tudors, and able to annotate the career of its earliest members with ample knowledge of the genealogy and topography of the Western counties. Imperfect as the notices of the fellows in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries must ever remain, the obscurity which enshrouds their lives would have been still denser had the duty of editing the Register of the Rectors ' and Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford,' been entrusted to one who did not bring to his task a close acquaintance with the history of the West. But for an intimate familiarity with the names of the hamlets and homesteads of Devon and Cornwall, the succession of the earliest fellows could never have been traced or their identity proved with certainty. The value of such local knowledge will be instantly appreciated by anyone who takes the trouble to refer to the opening pages of this work. The birthplace of the second fellow on the list is attributed to an obscure village near Barnstaple. The two succeeding names are identified with the north of Devon. A fourth fellow on the same page is assigned to a parish in the east of Cornwall, and a similarity of name leads the editor to connect another of his predecessors with a family dwelling on the banks of the Truro river. There is not a single page throughout the whole of the volume which does not afford frequent proofs of the value of such learning to the historian of the great college of the West country, and we readily acknowledge our obligation to Mr. Boase for the zealous prosecution of a labour which no one else could have undertaken with the same certainty of success.

Exeter College, the fourth in antiquity in the University, owes its foundation and its name to the munificence of Walter Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter. His death was in sad contrast to a prosperous life. It was his misfortune to be charged by Edward the Second with the responsibility of guarding the City of London in his master's interest against the Queen and her foreign adherents. The choice of the King was not happy. The citizens of London were devoted to the cause of the Queen, and were full of resentment against the bishop for a rash attempt to curtail their liberties. Breaking out into open rebellion, they seized the Lord Mayor and forced him, through fear of losing his own life, to consent to preside at the trial of any of the King's advisers whom they might bring before him. As soon as the mob had extorted this promise from the abject Mayor, it rushed to the town-house without Temple Bar which the bishop had built for himself and for his successors in the see. The search proved fruitless, and

the infuriated rioters could only vent their rage on the bishop by destroying his property. Had he profited by the warnings of his friends, he might have succeeded in effecting his escape, but in a spirit of recklessness he insisted on passing through the city. At the north door of St. Paul's the bishop was detected by the mob, and being dragged to Cheapside was proclaimed a traitor to the realm and a destroyer of the civic liberties. He was then stripped of his armour and beheaded, together with two members of his household. His head was exposed to derision on a long pole, and his body thrown into a pit in a disused burial-ground. Six months later the corpse was laid with magnificent ceremonies in a tomb of polished marble on the north side of the altar in Exeter Cathedral. More than two centuries after his death an elaborate Latin epitaph, the composition of John Hoker, the well-known chamberlain of that city, was erected to the memory of Bishop Stapledon by one of his successors in the bishopric.

A Devonshire man by birth, as all the historians are agreed, he founded at Ashburton a guild of St. Lawrence, with particular stipulations concerning a free school for children,' which still flourishes within the bishop's court; he endowed the hospital of St. John at Exeter with a rich rectory for the maintenance and education of the poor; on the rebuilding of the cathedral he expended the enormous sum of 1,800l., whilst its library was often enriched by additions from his own store of manuscripts; but the fame of all his charitable works must yield to that of the most fruitfull seminary of 'virtue and learning' which he founded and endowed at Oxford, still famous under the title of Exeter College.

Early in the year 1314 Bishop Stapledon presented the rectory of Gwinear, in Cornwall, to the dean and chapter of his cathedral church, with injunctions that they should employ its proceeds in enabling twelve scholars from Devon and Cornwall to study philosophy at Oxford in the buildings called Hart Hall, which he had previously purchased. In a few months the accommodation proved insufficient for the requirements of the scholars, and in the following year the founder of the new institution obtained from his old friend, Peter de Skelton, the Rector of Saltash, in his own diocese (and possibly a member of the Cornish family long resident in St. Stephen's and Landulph, which, after the restoration of Charles II., supplied some of England's bravest officers on land or sea), his interest in St. Stephen's Hall, in the parish of St. Mildred. It is on the site of this hall and the adjacent tenements that the existing structure of Exeter College stands. Part of St. Stephen's