but had been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. One of his contemporaries and friends there was George Herbert, who was more of a courtier than of an academic, but who, though he moved among fancies and forms, exercised his spirit in thoughts of the high and holy. Like all men of quick intelligence and broad sympathy, Henry Fairfax largely reflected the ideas and aspirations of his age. We are all more like our age than we are like our very parents, or they like their parents before them; and the University idea was characteristic of the earlier half of the seventeenth century in more European countries than one, for reasons into which I cannot now enquire. The Northern petition, which designated Manchester as the fittest place for the foundation of a new English University, noted, as the chief reason for this choice, that here was the centre of these northern parts; and it
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