Still younger men were growing up, in the Universities or just out of them, regarding the Protectorate as now the settled order of things, in which they must pass their future lives.
Cudworth, recently promoted from the mastership of Clare College, Cambridge, to that of Milton's old College of Christ's, had been asked by the Protector to recommend to him any very promising young Cambridge men he might discover;[2] and, doubtless, there had been a similar request to Owen of Oxford.

Dryden, still at Cambridge, though now twenty-five years of age, and already, by his father's death, a small Northamptonshire squire of L40 a year, was looking forward, we shall find, as his family connexions with the Parliamentarians and the Commonwealth made natural, to a life in London under the great Protector's shadow.
[Footnote 1: Orme's Life of Owen (1820), p.

113.] [Footnote 2: Life of Cudworth, as cited by Godwin, IV.

596.] All that could be expected by divines and scholars ranking in our second category, i.e.as subjects of the Protectorate by mere compulsion, and known to be strongly disaffected to it, was protection and safety on condition of remaining quiet.

This they did receive.