The reverend Dean,

With his band starch'd clean,
Did preach before the King;
A ring was his pride
To his bandstrings tied,
Was not this a pretty thing?

The ring, without doubt,
Was the thing put him out,

And made him forget what was next;
For every one there

Will say, I dare swear,

He handled it more than his text.

With poetical badinage of this complexion the wits of the University of Oxford, with Corbet at their head, "who loved this boy's play to the last," abounded. While many of the pasquinades are lost, many, however, are still preserved among Ashmole's papers : on most occasions Corbet was at least a match for his opponents, but this misfortune of the ring became a standing jest against him: it

is alluded to at page 233; and it is demanded.

in another poem ", if

He would provoke court wits to sing

The second part of bandstrings and the ring.

Upon the evening of the same Sunday, the students of Christ-Church, willing to show their respect for the royal visitor, obtained leave to present a play before the King; and they chose, with no great display of taste, Barten Holyday's TEXNOTAMIA, or “The Marriage of the Arts," which had been acted in Christ-Church hall the 13th of February, 1617. The play was so little relished, that the king was with difficulty persuaded to sit till its conclusion: the "enactors" became subjects of ridicule to the University; and, though Corbet and King rhymed in their favour, the laugh went against them.

7 MS. Ashmole, A 37.

Indeed the Oxonians were not more unfortunate in their theatrical representations on this than on former occasions. Upon the visit of James, in 1605, two out of three dramatic exhibitions, prepared at great expense and performed by the students, were, according to the testimony of an eye-witness, received with tædium, and rewarded with unconcealed disgust*.

Martis, 27 Aug. 1605. "The comedy began between nine and ten, and ended at one; the name of it was Alba, whereof I never saw reason; it was a pastoral, much like one which I have seen in King's College in Cambridge. In the acting thereof they brought in five or six men almost naked, which were much disliked by the queen and ladies, and also many rustical songes and dances, which made it very tedious, insomuch that if the chancellors of bothe the Universities had not intreated his majesty earnestly, he would have been gone before half the comedy had been ended." Leyland's Collectanea, vol. ii. p. 637. edit. 1770.

Mercurii, 28 Aug. 1605. "After supper, about nine of the clock, they began to act the tragedy of Ajax Flagellifer, wherein the stage varied three times; they had

The writers of the poet's life are silent as to the period of his marriage; and if I am unable to communicate any information on this point, it will not, I trust, be attributed to any parsimony of research, or indifference as to fact when conjecture can be substituted. Those who have made literary biography their study, know that it is frequently much easier to write many pages than to ascertain a date, and hence but too frequently ingenuity supplies the place of labour and inquiry: in the present instance, every record that suggested a probability of containing any memorial relative to the family of the subject of this biography has been inspected personally;

all goodly antique apparell; but, for all that, it was not so well acted by many degrees as I have seen it in Cambridge. The king was very weary before he came thither, but much more wearied by it, and spoke many words of dislike." Ibid. p. 639.

but before the passing of the Marriage Act,‹ nothing is more uncertain than the probable place of the celebration of that ceremony9.

In this dearth of fact as to dates, I shall presume to suppose he married about 1625 Alice the only daughter of his fellow-collegian Dr. Leonard Hutton, a man of some eminence in his day as adivine and an antiquary, and whose character is thus drawn by Antony Wood with a felicity that rarely accompanies his pencil: "His younger years were beautified with all kind of polite learning, his middle with ingenuity and judgment, and his reverend years with great wisdom in government, having been often subdean of his college."

9 Although the register of Flore, the residence of Dr. Hutton, was preserved from an early date during the lifetime of Brydges, an early one is not now to be found. That of Christ-Church, Oxford, is not so old as the death of the bishop: his name is not found in that of Twickenham.