le notice would have been taken by
the College authorities. But his notoriously wild life told against the
young man, and certain dark suspicions were not easily passed over.
After the _fiasco_ of the Rebellion Dr. Holmes, then President of the
College, seems to have made a scapegoat of Temple. He was deprived of
his fellowship, and though not formally expelled, such pressure was put
upon him as resulted in his leaving St. John's and removing to Magdalen
Hall. There his great wealth evidently secured him consideration, and he
was given the best rooms in the Hall, that very set looking on to New
College Lane which Sir John Maltravers afterwards occupied.

In the first half of the eighteenth century the romance of the middle
ages, though dying, was not dead, and the occult sciences still found
followers among the Oxford towers. From his early years Temple's mind
seems to have been set strongly towards mysticism of all kinds, and he
and Jocelyn were versed in the jargon of the alchemist and astrologer,
and practised according to the ancient rules. It was his reputation as
a necromancer, and the stories current of illicit rites performed in
the garden-rooms at St. John's, that contributed largely to his being
dismissed from that College. He had also become acquainted with Francis
Dashwood, the notorious Lord le Despencer, and many a winter's night
saw him riding through the misty Thames meadows to the door of the sham
Franciscan abbey. In his diaries were more notices than one of the
"Franciscans" and the nameless orgies of Medmenham.

He was devoted to music. It was a rare enough accomplishment then, and a
rarer thing still to find a wealthy landowner performing on the violin.
Yet so he did, though he kept his passion very much to himself, as
fiddling was thought lightly of in those days. His musical skill
was altogether exceptional, and he was the first possessor of the
Stradivarius violin which afterwards fell so unfortunately into Sir
John's hands. This violin Temple bought in the autumn of 1738, on the
occasion of a first visit to Italy. In that year died the nonagenarian
Antonius Stradivarius, the greatest violin-maker the world has ever
seen. After Stradivarius's death the stock of fiddles in his shop was
sold by auction. Temple happened to be travelling in Cremona at the time
with a tutor, and at the auction he bought that very instrument which we
afterwards had cause to know so well. A note in his diary gave its co