THE REV. WILLIAM COLE.

THIS laborious literary antiquary, whose voluminous MS. collections have so long proved serviceable to the student of history and antiquities, was the son of William Cole, a landed proprietor in Cambridgeshire, in which county his son was born at Little Abington, near Baberham, on the 3rd of August, 1714. At Eton, where he studied for five years on the foundation, he is said to have impressed himself on the minds of his schoolfellows chiefly as a quiet studious boy, devoted to curious old books with quaint frontispieces. Nor was this the only indication which he then gave of precocious antiquarian predilections. During his Eton vacations, for instance, it was his delight to employ himself in copying armorial bearings from the painted glass windows of such churches as were accessible to him; Baberham Church, and Moulton Church in Lincolnshire, being among those included in his archæological peregrinations.

Having probably from the want of a timely

vacancy-missed his fair chances of being elected to King's College, the young antiquary, on the 25th of January, 1733, was entered by his friends as a student at Clare Hall, Cambridge, at which college he was still residing when, by the death of his father, on the 14th of January, 1735, he came into possession of the neighbouring paternal estate. By this augmentation of his worldly means, he was not only enabled to enter himself a gentleman commoner at King's College, where he could enjoy the double advantages of superior apartments and accommodation with the society of his old Eton associates, but became, as a proprietor of the soil, a person of some slight consideration in the county in which he was pursuing his studies as an undergraduate. In 1736 he took his degree as B.A., and in 1740 as M.A. In 1739, he was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Cambridgeshire, and in 1740 a Deputy-Lieutenant of that county.

It was not till Cole had exceeded the age of thirty that he carried into effect the resolution at which he had arrived, of making the Church his profession; and accordingly, in December, 1744, he was admitted into Deacon's, and, in 1745, into Priest's Orders. The first preferment which he held in his new calling was the Rectory of Hornsey, in Middlesex, to which he was collated by Bishop Sherlock in November, 1749, but which, in consequence of the Rectory house being in a ruinous condition, and the

Bishop nevertheless insisting on his residing among his parishioners, he resigned in January, 1751, into other hands. He was in the next instance presented, in 1753, to the Rectory of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire; a living, however, which, as in the former case, he retained but for a limited period; resigning it spontaneously, on the 20th of March, 1768, as impelled by his sense of justice and duty, to his patron's grandson, the Reverend Thomas Willis.

Apparently, the next feature of any interest in the generally uneventful career of the Cambridge antiquary was a visit of instruction and pleasure which he paid to the Continent in 1765, in company with his old schoolfellow, correspondent, and friend, Horace Walpole. From neither Walpole's letters written during their absence, nor from the diary kept by Cole during their excursion, does it appear that any event of marked interest or importance occurred to either in the course of their peregrinations.

With the exception of a temporary domicile at Waterbeche, in Cambridgeshire, Cole's constant place of habitation after he had resigned the living of Bletchley in 1768, was Milton, near Cambridge, from which circumstance he derived his once familiar designation of "Cole of Milton," and at which spot he passed the remainder of his days. Not that his

long continuance at Milton was the

result of any

want of encouragement to fix his abode elsewhere.

On the 10th of June, 1774, for example, he was presented by the Provost and Fellows of Eton College to the vicarage of Burnham, in Buckinghamshire; yet eligible, on more than one account, as was the situation, and more especially, we might presume, from the propinquity of the place to his old friends at Eton, he could never, it would seem, prevail upon himself to make Burnham his home.

Cole, in his ecclesiastical capacity, appears to have been not only strongly prejudiced in favour of the ceremonies and observances, but also of the discipline, if not of the doctrines, of the Roman Catholic Church. Claims to be regarded as a liberal and enlightened Protestant he certainly had none. The fathers, for instance, and martyrs of the Reformation he held in little estimation; Puritans and Dissenters seem to have been his aversion; and, lastly, so little averse was he to the practice of intolerance in Church government, as to consider that Archbishop Laud had laid the Church of England under greater obligations than any prelate had done who had filled. the Metropolitan chair since St. Augustin." Entertaining such convictions as these, the sobriquet of "Cardinal" Cole, which he acquired from his contemporaries, was probably not ill applied.

1

Cole's celebrated MS. Collections, of which fifteen volumes were compiled before he quitted the University, consist of no fewer than one hundred folio 1 Nichols's 'Lit. Anecdotes,' vol. i. p. 670.

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volumes, fairly written in his own hand. Of this vast historical and antiquarian store, doubtless the most valuable portion are the materials amassed by him towards the construction and future publication of an Athenæ Cantabrigienses,' or memorials of Cambridge scholars, intended to be a companion to Anthony Wood's 'Athenæ Oxonienses.' On the whole, impaired in value as the collection unquestionably is by the interpolation of untrustworthy conversational anecdotes, by modern literary gossip, and by minute domestic details, its importance can nevertheless scarcely be said to have been exaggerated. Nor can Cole be accused of having been chary of placing his voluminous materials at the service of his brother antiquaries and topographers; and accordingly, when, among the persons indebted to him for literary assistance, we discover no less eminent names than those of Gough, Granger, Dr. Ducarel, Grose, Nichols, Horace Walpole, and James Bentham, we are bound to accept the fact as reflecting infinite credit alike on the liberality of the collector and on the value of his collection.

Cole's character, as may already have been gleaned from these pages, appears to have been in no slight degree tinged with eccentricity. What kind of estimate, for instance, are we to form of the organization of a man's mind, who at one moment could concentrate all his interest in the transcription of a bishop's register or of an abbot's chartulary, and at another