Chapter VI.
Abrogation of the Charter of the College by the Pennsylvania Legislature.
I have before alluded to the suspension of the duties of the college, in consequence of the occupation of Philadelphia by the British army, and to their resumption immediately after the city was evacuated. The schools were closed in the month of June, 1777, and were again opened in September of the following year. The institution, however, had been but a short time in renewed operation, when it experienced, in the disposition of the prevailing political party and of their representatives in the legislature, an hostility much more injurious to its interests than the presence of the enemy. The causes of this hostility it is difficult, at the present time, exactly to understand. The provost, who, from his long and very important services, and the success with which his exertions had been attended, was, in the public estimation, almost identified with the school itself, had, by his attachment to the proprietors, in their former disputes with the legislature, rendered himself highly unpopular with a numerous party before the war; and his foreign birth, his clerical office in the English church, the honours he had received from the loyal university of Oxford, and the favour in which he stood with men of high station in Great Britain, were circumstances which, as they might naturally give his partialities a direction towards the mother country, tended
