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Of these the most conspicuous are Walter Ffysshe and John Vernon, by whose liberality an academical education has been placed within the reach of many a deserving scholar, whose pecuniary circumstances would never have enabled him to live at the University.

In 1666, on the morning of Sunday, September 2d, a terrible calamity occurred in London,-the GREAT FIRE, which, in three days only, reduced the greater part of the City to ashes. This awful conflagration began in Pudding Lane, a few streets east of Suffolk Lane, and by the afternoon of the first day the pile of ancient buildings devoted to Merchant Taylors' School was a heap of ruins. Through the foresight and activity of Mr. Goad, the then Master, the books forming the library of the School were all preserved, and in a few weeks, owing to this gentleman's high sense of duty, the business of tuition was carried on in a building temporarily engaged for the purpose. Although the Company took immediate steps for obtaining an estimate of the cost of re-building the School, yet such was the disastrous effect of the fire upon every description of business in London, that nearly ten years. elapsed before the new building, which gradually rose upon the ruins of the old one, was completed.

The subsequent history of the School is unmarked by any event of public interest. Its career has thenceforth been uniformly prosperous, and it now ranks as one of the first educational institutions in the kingdom.

The Buildings, erected in 1675, consisted of a long and spacious school-room, supported on the east side by a number of stone pillars, forming a handsome cloister. Adjoining to the School was the Library, and contiguous to these buildings was a large house appropriated to the Master. The premises are now divided into a commodious Upper Schoolroom; two writing-rooms, formed in 1829, out of apartments previously occupied by the Under Masters, and a portion of the cloister; a class-room for the Head Master; a class-room for the Head Master's Assistant, formerly used as a day-room for the Head Master's boarders; a common-room for the

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