was within the walls of that house that the members of that Society first congregated and tried their experiments in physic. After the great fire of London which destroyed the Exchange, the Gresham professors placed their rooms for a time at the disposal of their fellowcitizens. The building became a temporary mansionhouse as well as a temporary Exchange; some of the spacious rooms were converted into courts of law, and others were fitted up as a residence for the Lord Mayor; shops were erected in the piazzas and galleries, and the merchants assembled at 'Change hours in the quadrangle.

During the seventeenth century we find a good many eminent names among the Gresham professors, as Dr. Barrow, Sir William Petty, Sir Christopher Wren, Briggs, Hooke, Greaves, Bull the Music Doctor, &c. But as early as the year 1701, the trustees of the Gresham property entirely fell off from their duty, and having already made extensive innovations, and suspended for two years all payments to the professors, they petitioned Parliament to allow them to make great and lasting changes. Parliament refused its assent to the prayer of the petition; but from this moment the college, the building, and everything connected with it, appear to have been shamefully neglected; the two wealthy trustee corporations pleading poverty, and feasting away more sumptuously and gluttonously than ever. As the auditory fell off, the city magnates thought that any man was good enough for a dumb or a non-lecturing professor; and in some instances they put broken-down tradesmen, or connexions, or dependants, or mere lacqueys of their own into the college, in order that they might draw the annual salaries which the founder had intended for the support of competent and eminent men. The institution became contemptible in the eyes of the citizens, and the citizens had not taste and spirit enough to take any steps or to raise any reproach against the two trustee corporations. In the year 1706, however, some citizens of a higher and more intellectual order made strenuous efforts for obtaining the revival and restitution of the lectures. But the city magnates were not to be

moved; and so nothing was done of the least consequence. The two trustee corporations were thinking much less about keeping up the lectures than of knocking down the great house in which they were given and making large sums by letting out the ground upon building leases. In the year 1717 they again petitioned Parliament for leave to knock down the college, &c. Still, however, they had the conscience or decency to state, that if this permission were granted by the legislature, they would erect upon part of the site another building capable of accommodating the professors and such as went to hear them. Their petition was again rejected. Thus did the government and Parliament of King William III. and George I. show more reverence for the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, and more regard for an institution intended for the enlightenment of the citizens of London than were shown afterwards by a government and a Parliament of George III.

As the value of the ground-plot continued to rise rapidly, the trustees became proportionably more eager to carry out their old scheme. Their exceeding eagerness drove them in the end into a very bad bargain, even for themselves. Their greed, like other men's anbition, over-leaped itself. For some time the government and Parliament turned a deaf ear to the impatient wishes of the two bodies corporate. But in the year 1767, government wanted a place whereon to build a new Excise-office, and thereupon they resolved that Gresham College should be pulled down. This could not be done without an Act of Parliament; but the Parliament then sitting was quite ready to give the power to the crown, and a bill was carried through without loss of time, and apparently without the slightest murmur or opposition: its progress being facilitated by the very trustees of the Gresham property, who were bound, as they would answer for it before God, to maintain the college. The bill ran as smoothly as a common turnpike act; and for the miserable sum of 5007. a-year, the city trustees agreed to demolish the building, and to alienate for ever from the public (whose property it

really was) the whole of the ground on which Gresham College stood! Nor was this all. By the Act of Parliament the City Corporation and the Mercers' Company, the joint trustees and guardians of this property, were bound "to pay the sum of 18007. within the space of one month from the passing of the Act, for and towards the expense of pulling down the same." "That is," says the excellent living Gresham professor of music, they were constrained by an especial law, framed for the purpose, to commit a gross and flagrant violation of their trust, and to employ those very funds which Sir Thomas Gresham had vested in them for the support and maintenance of his college, in demolishing and destroying it!"*

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The work of demolition was begun on the 8th of August, 1768; and in brief space of time the Excise Office began to show its shameless face on the spot where the college had once been. If the citizens of London alone had felt as they ought, the corporation of London and the mystery of mercers would not have trafficked away their rights and the rights of their posterity, and the legislature would no more have dared to demolish Gresham College than it would have dared to knock down the cathedral of St. Paul's. But the citizens had become gross and unintellectual, were indifferent to the reading of lectures, which had been allowed to become ridiculous, and careless about the preservation of rights and emoluments which had been so shamelessly abused by trustees and professors. It was because the city cared nothing about Gresham College that Gresham College was destroyed. It was only known to them as a place where a few prosing men, at very inconvenient hours for men of business and of feasts, read or spoke about astronomy, mathematics, law, medicine, and music. It does not appear, either from the newspapers or from the other publications of the day, that any effort whatsoever was made by the citizens of London to perpetuate the existence of their only college.

* Edward Taylor. Inaugural Lectures.

To compensate the worthless or neglectful Gresham professors for the loss of their apartments in the old college, their salaries were raised from 50l. to 1007. a year. A small, dirty, dusky room in an upper story of the old or second Royal Exchange was selected by the liberal and enlightened trustees of the Gresham property, as "a proper and convenient room for the public exhibition of the lectures;" and there, at very inconvenient hours, during Term time, certain of the Gresham professors drawled out vapid nonsense to a thin and sneering auditory until that edifice was consumed by fire. After that catastrophe the learned body met occasionally in the -City of London School; and there Mr. Taylor delivered those inaugural lectures from which we have repeatedly -quoted. This gentleman has done more than any one else, or than all other persons put together, to awake an interest in the public mind for the shipwrecked institution to which he belongs. The joint trustees have recently built a lecture-room in Gresham Street; but they must do more than this ere they can be relieved from the weight of the odium accumulated by their predecessors and themselves.

GEORGE BUCHANAN was born in February, 1506, at a small village called Killearn, on the borders of Stirlingshire and Dumbartonshire, and received his early education, it is said, in the school of that parish. He came, as he says, "of a family more gentle and ancient than wealthy." His father dying, left a wife and eight children in a state of poverty. George, one of the youngest, was befriended, and, perhaps, saved from want and obscurity, by the kindness of his mother's brother, James Heriot, who had early remarked his nephew's talents, and determined to foster them by a good education. The ancient friendship between France and Scotland, cemented by their mutual hate of England, was then in full force. The Scotch respected the superiority of the French in manners, arts, and learning; and very commonly sent the wealthier and more promising of their youth to be educated by their more polished neighbours. Accordingly Buchanan, at the age of fourteen, was sent