in pulling down than in building up again, he shews the same fondness for the philosophers of the Hermetic school, for Paracelsus, Dee, Fludd and Van Helmont, and 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 his taste had evidently been formed upon better models.[27]” Had these early theological and literary delinquencies of the physician of Clitheroe been communicated to his historian, it may be questioned whether the portals of his provincial temple of fame would have opened to receive so heinous a transgressor.  But Dr. Whitaker’s deduction would have been perhaps perfectly warrantable, had Webster left no