nd
the same adhesion to planetary sigils, astrology, and the doctrine of
sympathies and primaeval signatures, which is perceptible in the
deliberate performance of his old age. Of himself he observes: "I owe
little to the advantages of those things called the goods of fortune,
but most (next under the goodness of God) to industry: however, I am a
free born Englishman, a citizen of the world and a seeker of
knowledge, and am willing to teach what I know, and learn what I know
not." No one can read the _Academiarum Examen_ without feeling that it
is the production of a vigorous and powerful mind, which had "tasted,"
and that not scantily, of the "sweet fruit of far fetched and dear
bought science." Yet it still remains a literary problem rather
difficult of solution, how a performance so clear, well digested, and
rational, could proceed, and that contemporaneously, from the same
author as the cloudy and fanatical "Judgment Set and Books Opened." On
behalf of the Universities, answerers started up in the persons of
Ward and Wilkins, both afterwards bishops, and the part taken by the
first of them in the controversy was considered of sufficient
importance to form matter of commemoration in his monumental
inscription. Two opponents so famous, might almost seem to threaten
extinction to one, of whom it could only be said, that he had been an
obscure country schoolmaster, and whose acquirements, whatever they
were, were mainly the result of his own unassisted study. In the joint
answer, the title of which is "Vindiciae Academiarum, containing some
briefe animadversions upon Mr. Webster's book entitled the
'Examination of Academies,' together with an appendix concerning what
Mr. Hobbes and Mr. Dell have published in this argument, Oxford,
1654," 4to., there is no want of bitterness nor of controversial
skill, but though, particularly in the limited arena of the prescribed
course of academical study, the knowledge displayed in it is more
exact, there is neither visible in it the same power of mind, nor the
same breadth of views, nor even the same variety of learning, as is
conspicuous in the original tract. This, with the two fanatical pieces
which Webster published contemporaneously with it, were entirely
unknown to his biographer, Dr. Whitaker, who has ceded him a place
amongst the distinguished natives and residents of the parish of
Whalley, in the full confidence "that there is no puritanical taint in
his writings, and that