Richard Okes was born in Cambridge, 15 December, 1797. His father, Thomas Verney Okes, was a surgeon in extensive practice. Tradition is silent respecting the future Provost’s childhood and early education; but, as in those days boys began their lives at Eton at a very early age, it is probable that when he was little older than a child he was sent to fight his battles among the collegers, in what even devoted Etonians have called ‘a proverb and a reproach’—Long Chamber. In 1816, when he was rather more than eighteen, he obtained a scholarship at King’s College; but it appears from the University records that he did not formally matriculate until November in the following year. In those days, be it remembered, King’s College was a very different place from what it is now, both structurally and educationally. The magnificent site, on which Henry VI. intended to place an equally magnificent college, was occupied by no structures of importance except the Chapel, and the Fellows’ Building, part of a second grand design which, like the first, was never completed. The scholars, or at all events the greater part of them, were packed into Old Court—the small, irregular quadrangle west of the University Library, to which the founder intended originally to limit his college. It must have been a curious structure—picturesque and interesting from an archeological point of view, but unwholesome and uncomfortable as a place of residence. The very nicknames given to some of the chambers—“the Tolbooth,” “the Block-house,” and the like—are a sufficient proof of their discomfort. In one of these, on the ground floor, facing Clare Hall, young Okes resided; and until a few months ago, when the last remnant of this part of the old college was absorbed by the University Library, the present generation could form a fairly correct idea of the gloom and damp that their ancestors were obliged to put up with. But members of Kings College had to endure something far worse than physical discomfort. It had been the object of their founder to make his college independent of the University, and, as a consequence of these well-intentioned provisions, scholars of King’s were not allowed to compete for University honours, but obtained their degrees as a matter of course. The result is not difficult to conceive. In every society there will be some whose love of letters, or whose ardour for distinction, is so strong that nothing can check it; but, as a rule, the young Etonians who were obliged to spend three years in Cambridge threw learning to the winds, and enjoyed to their hearts’ content the liberty, not to say license, of their new surroundings. It was a bad state of things; and that Okes felt it to be so is proved by the eagerness with which he, a strong Conservative, set himself to get it abolished as soon as he had the power to do so. We do not claim for the late Provost any specially studious habits as a young man; he was too genial and too fond of society to have ever been a very hard reader; but his scholarship in after years would not have been as accurate as it certainly was had he wasted his time at Cambridge; and, as a proof that he aimed at distinction, it should be mentioned that he obtained Sir William Browne’s prize for Greek and Latin Epigrams in 1819 and 1820. To the very end of his life he was fond of writing Latin verse; and when the Fellows of his college congratulated him on his ninetieth birthday in Latin and English poems, he replied in half-a-dozen Latin lines which many a younger scholar could not have turned so neatly.