"
By the year 1705, when Tom Hearne, of St. Edmund's Hall, began to
keep his diary, the "honest folk"--that is, the High Churchmen--had
the better of the Independent Ministers. The Dissenters had some
favour at Court, but in the University they were looked upon as
utterly reprobate. From the Reliquiae of Hearne (an antiquarian
successor of Antony Wood, a bibliophile, an archaeologist, and as
honest a man as Jacobitism could make him) let us quote an example of
Heaven's wrath against Dissenters
"Aug. 6, 1706. We have an account from Whitchurch, in Shropshire,
that the Dissenters there having prepared a great quantity of bricks
to erect a spacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and
spoiled them all, and confounded their Babel in the beginning, to
their great mortification.
Hearne's common-place books are an amusing source of information
about Oxford society in the years of Queen Anne, and of the
Hanoverian usurper. Tom Hearne was a Master of Arts of St. Edmund's
Hall, and at one time Deputy-Librarian of the Bodleian. He lost this
post because he would not take "the wicked oaths" required of him,
but he did not therefore leave Oxford. His working hours were passed
in preparing editions of antiquarian books, to be printed in very
limited number, on ordinary and LARGE PAPER. It was the joy of Tom's
existence to see his editions become first scarce, then VERY SCARCE,
while the price augmented in proportion to the rarity.
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