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Moncrieffe's Stockings

THE pubUc tribulations of Myles Cooper, Tory President
of King's (later Columbia) College, are described in our
leading article. Some of his private trials are exposed in
The Black Book of Misdemeanors in King's College, 1771-1775,
Cooper's hand-written record (still preserved in the Columbia
Library) of college discipline.

The notations range from a listing of student offenses such as
"stealing Stockings belonging to Moncrieffe" or "coming thro'
a Hole in the College-fence" to the last entry made the day before
the mob forced Cooper himself to flee through that same college-
fence: "NicoU 2d. to translate 4th Section of the third Chapter
of Puffendorf. . . When desired to do it. He told the President
to his Face He would not."

The unprecedented impertinence of NicoU 2d. was perhaps the
first murmur of the morrow's mob: a melancholy ending to
Cooper's labors to lead the colonial lads to "truth and honour's
sacred shrine." Thirteen years before, he had come over from
Oxford, full of zeal, like the missionary preacher depicted in our
frontispiece. But he suffered the fate of many reactionary colo¬
nizers since his time, and had to sail sadly back to the mother
country.

Side by side on the shelves of the Columbia Libraries lie the
records of the misdemeanors and of the triumphs of the human
race: a jumble of public uproar and private perplexity. No lover
of libraries can be untouched by the fascinating impartiality of
these chronicles, which in one breath proclaim the doom of
nations, and in the next the fate of Moncrieffe's stockings.