aud was writing his memoir. [The school is at present shut up for want
of funds to carry it on; and all inquiries I have made have failed to
elicit any trace of this memory.] Similarly we know little of his
undergraduate days at Oxford, except that he entered as a commoner at
Balliol in 1710, took his B.A. in the regular course in 1714, and his M.A.
in 1717. As a career he chose the Church, being ordained in 1719, and
presented to the vicarage of Bridstow in Monmouthshire; but he only
discharged the duties of vicar for a couple of years, for in 1721 he
returned to Oxford as Professor of Astronomy, an appointment which
involved the resignation of his livings; and so slight was this
interruption to his career as an astronomer that we may almost disregard
it, and consider him as an astronomer from the first. But to guard against
a possible misconception, let me say that Bradley entered on a clerical
career in a thoroughly earnest spirit; to do otherwise would have been
quite foreign to his nature. When vicar of Bridstow he discharged his
duties faithfully towards that tiny parish, and moreover was so active in
his uncle's parish of Wansted that he left the reputation of having been
curate there, although he held no actual appointment. And thirty years
later, when he was Astronomer Royal and resident at Greenwich, and when
the valuable vicarage of Greenwich was offered to him by the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, he honourably refused the preferment, "because the duty of
a pastor was incompatible with his other studies and necessary
engagements."

[Sidenote: Learnt astronomy _not_ at Oxford, but from his uncle, James
Pound.]

[Sidenote: Pound a first-rate observer.]

But now let us turn to Bradley's astronomical education. I must admit,
with deep regret, that we cannot allow any of the credit of it to Oxford.
There was a great astronomer in Oxford when Bradley was an undergraduate,
for Edmund Halley had been appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry in
1703, and had immediately set to work to compute the orbits of comets,
which led to his immortal discovery that some of these bodies return to us
again and again, especially the one which bears his name--Halley's
Comet--and returns every seventy-five years, being next expected about
1910. But there is no record that Bradley came under Halley's teaching or
influence as an undergraduate. In later years the two men knew each other
well, and it was Halley's one desire towards the