During the same year he engaged in a less arduous competition.  A certain Mr. Greaves of Fulbourn had long since provided a reward of ten pounds for “the Junior Bachelor of Trinity College who wrote the best essay on the Conduct and Character of William the Third.”  As the prize is annual, it is appalling to reflect upon the searching analysis to which the motives of that monarch must by this time have been subjected.  The event, however, may be counted as an encouragement to the founders of endowments; for, amidst the succession of juvenile critics whose attention was by his munificence turned in the direction of his favourite hero, Mr. Greaves had at last fallen in with the right man.  It is more than probable that to this old Cambridgeshire Whig was due the first idea of that History in whose pages William of Orange stands as the central figure.  The essay is still in existence, in a close neat hand, which twenty years of Reviewing never rendered illegible.  Originally written as a fair copy, but so disfigured by repeated corrections and additions as to be unfit for the eyes of the college authorities, it bears evident marks of having been held to the flames, and rescued on second, and in this case it will be allowed, on better thoughts.  The exercise, (which is headed by the very appropriate motto,

               “Primus qui legibus urbem
 Fundabit, Curibus parvis et paupere terra
 Missus in imperium magnum,”)

is just such as will very likely be produced in the course of next Easter term by some young man of judgment and spirit, who knows his Macaulay by heart, and will paraphrase him without scruple.  The characters of James, of Shaftesbury, of William himself; the Popish plot; the struggle over the Exclusion bill; the reaction from Puritanic rigour into the license of the Restoration, are drawn on the same lines and painted in the same colours as those with which the world is now familiar.  The style only wants condensation, and a little of the humour which he had not yet learned to transfer from his conversation to his writings, in order to be worthy of his mature powers.  He thus describes William’s lifelong enemy and rival, whose name he already spells after his own fashion.

“Lewis was not a great general.  He was not a great legislator.  But he was, in one sense of the words, a great king.  He was a perfect master of all the mysteries of the science of royalty,—­ of all the arts which at once extend power and conciliate popularity,—­which most advantageously display the merits, or most dexterously conceal the deficiencies, of a sovereign.  He was surrounded by great men, by victorious commanders, by sagacious statesmen.  Yet, while he availed himself to the utmost of their services, he never incurred any danger from their rivalry.  His was a talisman which extorted the obedience of the proudest and mightiest spirits.  The haughty and turbulent warriors whose contests had agitated France during his minority yielded to the irresistible