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But of all the University buildings the most beautiful is St. Mary's Church, where the University sevmons are preached, and from the pulpit of which, in the course of successive generations and successive con- troversies, a changeful and often heady current of theology has flowed. There preached Newman, Pusey, and Manning; there preached Hampden, Stanley, and the authors of '* Essays and Reviews." Oxford and Cambridge were not at first Universities of Colleges. The Colleges were after growths which for a time absorbed the University. The University of Oxford was born in the twelfth century, fully a century before the foundation of the first College. To recall the Oxford of the thirteenth cen- tury, one must bid vanish all the buildings which now meet our eyes, except yonder grim castle to the west of the city, and the stern tower of St. Michael's Church, at once the bell tower of the Church and a defence of the city gate facing the danger- ous north. The man-at-arms from the castle, :f CGES. ol antiqui- ch is King ical Library new edifice lildings the urch, wliere eaclied, and le course of cessive con- )ften heady red. There i Manning; ley, and the vs." I not at first :;olleges were absorbed the ; Oxford was lly a century first College, irteenth cen- ihe buildings ccept yonder city, and the Church, at hurch and a the danger- cm the castle, OXFORE AND HER COLLEGES. 15 the warder from the gate, looks down upon a city of five or six thousand inhabitants, huddled for protection under the castle, and within those walls of which a fine remnant is seen bounding the domain of New Col- lege. In this city there is a concourse of scudents brought together to hear a body of teachers who have been led, we know not how, to open their mart of knowledjre here. Printing not having been invented, and books being scarce, the fountain of knowledge is the lecture-room of the professor. It is the age of an intellectual revival so remarkable as to be called the Mediaeval Renaissance. After the migrations and convulsions, by which the world was cast in a new mould, ensues a reign of comparative peace and settled government, under which the desire of knowledge has been reawakened. Uni- versities have been coming out all over Eu- rope like stars in the night ; Paris, famous for theology and philosophy, perhaps being the brightest of the constellation, while Bo- logna was famed for law and Salerno for medicine. It was probably in the reign of Henry I. that the company of teachers set- tled at Oxford, and before the end of the thirteenth century students had collected to a number which fable exaggerates to thirty f? ' 1 i 1 {'• ' II i6 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. jl : I i 1 K 1 \ I (I thousand, but which was really large enough to crowd the little city and even the bastions of its walls. 4 light had shone on youths who sat in the shadow of feudal servitude. There is no more romantic period in the history of human intellect than the thir- teenth century. The teachers, after the fashion of that age, formed themselves into a guild, which guarded its monopoly. The undergraduate was Jie apprentice ; the degree was a li- cense to teach, and carried with it the duty of teaching, though in time it became a lit- erary title, unconnected with teaching, and coveted for its own sake. The University obtained a charter, elected its Chancellor, formed its academical Legislature of grad- uates, obtained jurisdiction over its own members. In time it marshalled its teach- ers and students into regular Faculties of theology, law, and medicine, with arts, or general and liberal culture, if the name can be applied to anything so rudimentary as the literature and science of that day, form- ing the basis of all. At first the professors taught where they could ; in the cloisters, perhaps, of St. Frydeswide's monastery, subsequently absorbed by Christ Church ; in the porches of houses. A row of lecture- £S. OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 17 ;e enough bastions )n youths servitude. )d in the the thir- n of that ild, which rgraduate was a li- the duty same a lit- ;hing, and University hancellor, B of grad- r its own its teach- iculties of h arts, or name can lentary as lay, form- professors cloisters, lonastery, Church ; 3f lecture- rooms, called the Schools, was afterwards provided in School Street, which ran north and south just under the Radcliff e. So little anchored was the University by buildings, that when maltreated at Oxford it was ready to pack up its literary wares and mi- grate to another city such as Northampton or Stamford. Many of the undergraduates at first were mere boys, to whom the Uni- versity was a grammar school. For the real University students the dominant study was that of the School philosophy, logical and philosophical, with its strange metaphysical jargon ; an immense attempt to extract knowledge from consciousness by syllogistic reasoning, instead of gathering it from ob- servation, experience, and research, mocking by its barrenness of fruit the faith of the enthusiastic student, yet training the mind to preternatural acuteness, and perhaps forming a necessary stage in the mental education of the race. The great instru- ment of high education was disputation, often repeated, and conducted with the most elaborate forms in the tournaments of the Schools, which might beget readiness of wit and promptness of elocution, but could hardly beget habits of calm investigation or paramount love of truth. The great event i8 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. i in the academical life was Inception, when the student performed exercises which in- augurated his teachership ; and this was commonly celebrated by a feast, the expen- diture on which the University was called upon to restrain. Oxford produced some of the gi'eatest schoolmen : Duns Scotus, the ** subtle," who hai written thirteen folio volumes of arid metaphysics before his early death ; Bradwardine, the " pro- found,'* and Ockham, the "invincible and unmatched." The idol was Aristotle, viewed mainly as the metaphysician, and imperfectly understood through transla- tions. To reconcile Aristotelian speculation with orthodox theology was a hard task, not always successfully performed. The- ology was, of course, first in dignity of the Faculties, but the most lucrative was the civil and canon law practised in the ecclesi- astical courts and, as Roman, misliked by the patriotic Parliament. Philosophy complained that it had to trudge afoot while the liegemen of Justinian rode high in the car of preferment. Of physical science the hour was not yet come, but before its hour came it:, wonderful and almost miraculous precursor, Roger Bacon, who anticipated the invention of gunpowder and the tele- OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 19 scope, and whose fabled study stood over Folly Bridge, till, with Carfaxes monument and Cranmer's prison, it was cleared away by an improving city corporation. Roger Bacon was, of course, taken for a dealer in black arts ; an astrologer and an alchemist lie was, and at the same time an illustrious example of the service indirectly rendered by astrology and alchemy in luring to an investigation of nature which led to real discoveries, just as Columbus, seeking a western passage to the golden cities of the East, discovered America. All the Universities belonged not to one nation but to Latin Christendom, the edu- cated population of which circulated among them. At one time there was a migration to Oxford from the University of Paris, which had got into trouble with the government. Of all the Universities alike, ecclesiastical Latin was the language. The scholar all ranked with the clerical order, so that at Ox- ford, scholar and clerk, townsman and lay- man, were convertible terms. In those days all intellectual callings, and even the higher mechanical arts, were clerical. The student was exempted by his tonsure from lay juris- diction. The Papacy anxiously claimed the ilif 20 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. Universities as parts of its realm, and only degrees granted by the Pope's authority were current throughout Christendom. When, with Edward III. , came the long war between England and France, and when the confederation of Latin Christendom was beginning to break up, the English Universities grew more national. Incorporated with the buildings of Wor- cester College are some curious little tene- ments once occupied by a colony from differ- ent Benedictine Monasteries. These, with the Church of St. Frydeswide, now Christ Church Cathedral, and the small remains of Osney Abbey, are about the only relics of monastic Oxford which survived the Reformation. But in the Middle Ages there were Houses for novices of the great Orders, Benedictines, Cistercians, Carme- lites, Augustinians, and most notable and powerful of all, the two great mendicant Orders of Dominicans and Francircans. The Mendicants, who cam_e into the country angels of humility as well as of asceticism, begging their bread, and staining the ground with the blood from their shoeless feet, soon changed their character, and began in the interest of Holy Church to grasp power and OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 21 amass wealth. The Franciscans especially, like the Jesuits of an after day, strove to master the centres of intellectual influence. They strove to put the laws of the Univer- sity under their feet. Struggles between them and the seculars, with appeals to the Crown, were the consequence. Attraction of callow youth to an angelic life seems to have been characteristic of the Breth- ren of St. Francis, and it is conjectured that in this way Bacon became a monk. Faintly patronised by a liberal and let- tered Pope, he was arraigned for necro- mancy by his Order, and ended his days in gloom, if not in a monastic prison. The Church of the Middle Ages with one hand helped to open the door of knowl- edge, with the other she sought to close it. At last she sought to close it with both hands, and in her cruel panic estab- lished the Inquisition. Tory in its later days, the University was liberal in its prime. It took the part of the Barons and De Montfort against Henry III., and a corps of its students fought against the King under their own banner at Northampton. Instead of being the stronghold of reaction, it was the focus of i i' r I |,.f. in 22 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. active, even of turbulent aspiration, and the saying ran, that when there was fighting at Oxford tliere was war in England. Oxford's liero in the thirteenth century was its Chancellor, Grosseteste, the friend of De Mont fort and the great reformer of his day, " of prelates the rebuker, of monks the corrector, of scholars the instructor, of the people the preacher, of the incontinent the chastiser, of writings the industrious investigator, of the Komans the hammer and contemner. ' ' If Grosseteste patronised the Friars, it was in their first estate. At first the students lodged as *' Chamber- dekyns " with citizens, but that system prov- ing dangerous to order, they were gathered into hostels, or, to use the more dignified name. Halls (aidce) under a Principal, or Master of the University, who boarded and governed them. Of these Halls there were a great number, with their several names and signs. Till lately a few of them remained, though these had lost their orig- inal character, and become merely small Colleges, without any foundation except a Principal. The students in those days were mostly poor. Their indigence was almost taken for granted. Some o* them 1 I* i •<1 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 23 begged ; chests were provided by the charitable for loans to them. A poor student's life was hard ; if he was earnest in study, heroic. He shared a room with three or four chums, he slept under a ri'g, his fare was coarse and scanty, his garment was the gown which has now become merely an academical symbol, and thankful he was to be provided with a new one. He had no fire in his room, no glass in his window. As his exercises in the University Schools began at five in the morning, it is not likely that he read much at night, otherwise he would have to read by the light of a feeble lamp flickering with the wind. His manuscript was painful to read. The city was filthy, the water polluted with sewage ; pestilence often swept through the crowded hive. Mediaeval students were a rough set ; not less rough than enthusiastic ; rougher than the students of the Quartier Latin or Heidel- berg, their nearest counterparts in recent times. They wore arms, or kept them in their chambers, and they needed them not only in going to and from the University over roads beset with robbers, but in conflicts with the townspeople, with whom the Uni- !!! 24 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. Ii:l versity was at war. With the townspeople the students had desperate affrays, ancient precursors of the comparatively mild town and gown rows of this century. The de- fiant horns of the town were answered by the bells of the University. Arrows flew ; blood was shed on both sides ; Halls were stormed and defended ; till Royalty from Abingdon or Woodstock interfered with its men-at-arms, seconded by the Bishop with bell, book, and candle. A Papal Legate, an Italian on whom national feeling looks with jealousy, comes to Oxford. Scholars crowd to see him. There is a quarrel be- tween them and his train. His cook flings a cauldron of bc'^ng broth over an Irish student. The scholars fly to arms. The Legate is ignominiously chased from Ox- ford. Excommunications, royal thunders, and penitential performances follow. Jews settle in Oxford, ply their trade among the scholars, and form a quarter with invidi- ously wealthy mansions. There is a royal edict, forbidding them to exact more than forty-three per cent interest from the stu- dent. Wealth makes them insolent ; they assault a religious procession, and with them also the students have affrays. Pro- vincial feeling is strong, for the students ) OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 25 are divided into two nations, the Northern and tlie Southern, which are always wran- gling, and sometimes fight pitched battles with bows and arrows. The two Proc- tors, now the heads of University police, were appointed as tribunes of the two nations to settle elections and other matters between them without battle. Amusements as well as everything else were rude. Foot- ball and other rough games were played at Beaumont, a piece of ground to the north of the city ; but there was nothing like that cricket field in the parks, nor like the sensation now created by the appearance of a renowned cricketer in his paddings before an admiring crowd, to display the fruit of his many years of assiduous prac- tice in guarding his stumps. The Crown and local lords had to complain of a good deal of poaching in Bagley, Woodstock, Shotover, and Stowe Wood. To this Oxford, with its crowd of youth thirsting for knowledge, its turbulence, its vice, its danger from monkish encroach- ment, came Walter de Merton, one of the same historic group as Grosseteste and Grosseteste's friend, Adam de Marisco, the man of the hour, with the right device in I! ill' 111' 26 OXFORD AND IlEll COLLEGES. his mind. Merton had been Chancellor of Henry III. amidst the political storms of the time, from which he would gladly turn aside to a work of peaceful improvement. It was thus that violence in those ages paid with its left hand a tribute to civilisation. Merton's foundation is the first College, though University and Balliol come before it in the Calendar in deference to the priority of the benefactions out of which those Colleges grew. Yonder noble chapel in the Decorated style, with its tower and the old quadrangle beneath it, called, nobody knows why. Mob Quad, are the cradle of College life. Merton's plan was an academical brotherhood, which com- bined monastic order, discipline, and piety with the pursuit of knowledge. No monk or friar was ever to be admitted to his House. The members of the House are called in his statutes by the common name of Scholars, that of Fellows (Socii), which afterwards prevailed here and in all the other Colleges, denoting their union as an academical household. They were to live like monks in common ; they were to take their meals together in the Refec- tory, and to study together in the common library, which may still be seen, dark and OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 27 austere, with the chain by which a precious volume was attached to tlie desk. They had not a common dormitory, but they nmst have slept two or three in a room. Probably they were confined to their quad- rangle, except when they were attending the Schools of the University, or allowed to leave it only with a companion as a safe- guard. They were to elect their own Warden, and fill up by election vacancies in their own number. The Warden whom they had elected, they were to obey. They were to watch over each other's lives, and hold annual scrutinies into conduct. The Archbishop of Canterbury was to visit the College and see that the rule was kept. But the rule was moral and academical, not cloistral or ascetic. The mediaeval round of religious services was to be duly per- formed, and prayers were to be said for the Founder's soul. But the main object was not prayer, contemplation, or masses for souls ; it was study. Monks were per- manently devoted to their Order, shut up for life in their monastery, and secluded from the world. The Scholars of Merton were destined to serve the world, into which they were to go forth when they had com- pleted the course of preparation in their I 'I 1.1 w 28 OXFORD AND IIER COLLEGES. College. They were destined to serve the wcrld as their Founder had served it. In fact, we find Wardens and Fellows of Mer- ton employed by the State and the Church in important missions. A Scholar of Merton, though he was to obey the College author- ities, took no monastic vow of obedience. He took no monastic vow of poverty; on the contrary, it was anticipated that he would gain wealth, of which he was ex- horted to bestow a portion on his College. He took no monastic vow of celibacy, though, as one of the clerical order, he would of course not be permitted to marry. He was clerical as all Scholars in those days were clerical, nut in the modern and professional sense of the term. The allow- ances of the Fellow were only his Com- mons, or food, and his Livery, or raiment, and there were to be as many Fellows as the estate could provide with these. In- struction was received not in College, but in the Schools of the University, to which the Scholars of Merton, like the other Scholars, were to resort. A sort of gram- mar school, for boys of the Founder's kin, was <;ttached to the College. But other- wise the work of the College was study, not tuition, nor did the statutes contem- OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 29 plate the admission of any members except those on the foundation. Merton's plan, meeting the need of the hour, found acceptance. His College be- came the pattern for others both at Oxford and Cambridge. University, Balliol, Exe- ter, Oriel, and Queen's were modelled after it, and monastic Orders seem to have taken the hint in founding Houses for their nov- ices at Oxford. University College grew out of the benefaction of William of Dur- ham, an ecclesiastic who had studied at Paris, and left the University a sum of money for the maintenance of students of divinity. The University lodged them in a Hall styled the Great Hall of the Univer- sity, which is still the proper corporate name of the College. In after days, this Hall, having grown into a College, wished to slip its neck out of the visitorial yoke of the University, and on the strength of its being the oldest foundation at Oxford, claimed as founder Alfred, to whom the foundation of the University was ascribed by fable, asserting that as a royal founda- tion it was under the visitorship of the Crown. Courts of law recognised the claim ; a Hanoverian court of law probably recog- 'I I.! 30 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. I i J. r, nlsed it with pleasure, as transferring power from a Tory University to tlie King; and thus was consecrated a fiction in palliation of which it can only be said, that the earli- est of our literary houses may not im- properly be dedicated to the restorer of English learning. Oriel was founded by a court Almoner, Adam de Brome, who dis- played his courtliness by allowing his Schol- ars to speak French as well as Latin. Queen's was founded by a court Chaplain, Robert Egglesfield, and dedicated to the honour of his royal mistress, Queen Phi- lippa. It was for a Provost and twelve Fel- lows who were to represent the number of Christ and his disciples, to sit at a table as Egglesfield had seen in a picture the Thir- teen sitting at the Last Supper, though in crimson robes. Egglesfield' s building has been swept away to make room for the Pal- lad ian palace on its site. But his name is kept in minrl by the quaint custom of giv- ing, on his day, a needle (aiguille) to each member of the foundation, with the in- junction. Take that and be thrifty. Yonder stone eagles too on the building recall it. Exeter College was the work of a political Bishop who met his death in a London insurrection. OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 31 As the fashion of founding Colleges grew, that of founding Monasteries decreased, and the more as the mediaeval faith de- clined, and the great change drew near. That change was heralded by the appear- ance of Wycliffe, a genuine offspring of the University, for while he was the greau religious reformer, he was also the great scholastic philosopiier of his day. To what College or Hall his name and fame belong is a moot point among antiqua- ries. We would fain imagine him in his meditations pacing the old Mob Quadran- gle of Merton. His teaching took strong and long hold of the University. His re- forming company of *'poor priests " drew with it the spiritual aspiration and energy of Oxford youth. But if his movement has left any traces in the shape of foundations, it is in the shape of foundations produced by the reaction agaiist it, and destined for its overthrow. Yonder rises the bell tower of New Col- lege over a famous group of buildings, with ample quadrangle, rich religious chapel, a noble Hall and range of tranquil cloisters, defaced only by the addition of a modern upper story to the quadrangle and Van- dalic adaptation of the upper windows to 32 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. i :;f ;;!. li' ': •'• ?ii 1 V ' :if I modern convenience. This pile was the work of William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, a typical charactei of the Mid- dle Ages, prelate, statesman, and court archi- tect in one, who negotiated the peace of Bretigny and built Windsor Castle. The eye of the great architect as well as of the pious Founder must have ranged with delight over his fair creation. It is likely that New College, as a foundation highly religious in its character, was intended to counteract Wycliffism as well as to replenish the clergy which had been decimated by the Black Death. Wykeham was a reformer in his way, and one of the party headed by the Black Prince which strove to correct the abuses of the court in the dark decline of Edward III. But he was a conservative, religious after the orthodox fashion, and devoted to the worship of the Virgin, to whom his College was dedicated, after whom it was named, and whose image surmounts its gate. The College of St. Mary of Win- ton his foundation was entitled. In its day it might well be called New College. New it was in its scale, having seventy Fellows and Scholars besides ten Chaplains, three Clerks, and sixteen Choristers for the ser- vices of the Chapel, which is still famous OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 33 for its choiFe Nev/ it was in the extent and magnificence ci its buildings. New it was in the provision made for solemn services in its Chapel, for religious processions round its cloisters, for the daily orisons if all its members. New it was in the state assigned to its Warden, who was not to be like the Warden of Merton, only the first among his humble peers, living with them at the com- mon board, but to resemble more a great Abbot with a separate establishment of his own, keeping a sumptuous hospitality and drawn by six horses when he went abroad. New it was m having undergraduates as well as graduates on the foundation, and providing for the training of the youth dur- ing the whole interval between school and the highest University degree. Even fur- ther back than the time of admittance to the University, stretched the care of the re- former of education. The most important novelty of all, perhaps, in his creation, was the connection between his College and the school which he founded at Winchester, his cathedral city, to feed his College with a constant supply of model Scholars. This was the first of those great Public Schools which have larerely moulded the character of the ruling class in England. The exam- 34 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ili ! 1 pie was followed by Henry VI. in connect- ing King's College, Cambridge, with Eton, and would have been followed by Wolsey had he carried out his design of connecting Cardinal College with his school at Ipswich. From the admission of an undergraduate element into the College it naturally fol- lowed that there should be instruction of the juniors by the seniors, and superintend- ence of study within the College walls. This was yet another novelty, and Wykeham seems to have had an additional motive for adopting it in the low condition of the Uni- versity Schools, from the exercises of which attention had perhaps been diverted by the religious movement. In the careful pro- vision for the study of Grammatica, that is, the elements of Latin, we perhaps see a gleam of the Kenaissance, as the style of the buildings belonging to the last order of mediaeval architecture indicates that the Middle Age was hastening to its close. But it was one of Wykehain's objects to strengthen the orthodox priesthood in a time of revolutionary peril. Ten of his Fellows were assigned to the study of civil, ten to that of canon, law. Two were per- mitted to study medicine. All the rest were to be theologians. The Founder was false OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 35 to his own generous design in giving a parti- mount and perpetual preference in the elec- tion of Fellows to his own kin, who, being numerous, became at length a fearful incu- bus on hjs institut" )n. It is not likely that his own idea of kinship was unlimited, or extended beyond the tenth degree. All the Fellows and Scholars were to be poor and indigent. This was in unison with the medi- aeval spirit of almsgiving as well as with the mediaeval theory of poverty as a state spiritually superior, held, though not embod- ied, by wealthy prelates. Study, not teach- ing, it is always to be remembered, was the principal duty of those who were to eat the •Founder's bread. The Statutes of New College are elaborate, and were largely copied by other founders. They present to us a half-monastic life, with the general hue of asceticism which pervades everything mediaeval. Here, as in the case of Merton, there are no vows, but there is strict discipline, wi.h frugal fare. The Commons, or allowances for food, are not to exceed twelve pence per week, except in the times of dearth. Once a year there is an allowance of cloth for a gown. There is a chest for loans to the I; t in 36 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ii! '■'1 ill! ff ^^ very needy, but there is no stipend. The Warden rules with abbatial power, though in greater matters he requires the consent of the Fellows, and is himself under the censorship of the Visitor, the Bishop of Winchester, who, however, rarely inter- posed. Every year he goes on '* progress" to view the College estates, there being in those days no agents, and is received by tenants with homage and rural hospitality. The Fellows and Scholars are lodged three or four in a room, the seniors as monitors to the juniors. Each Scholar undergoes two years of probation. As in a baronial hall the nobles, so in the College Hall the seniors, occupy the dais, or high table, while the juniors sit at tables arranged down the Hall. In the dining-hall the Fellows and Scholars sit in silence, and listen to the reading of the Bible. In speaking they must use no tongue but the Latin. There is to be no lingering in the Hall after dinner, except when in winter a fire is lighted on some church festival. Then it is permitted to remain awhile and rehearse poems, or talk about the chron- icles of the kingdom, the wonders of the world, and other things be^tting clerical discourse. This seems to be the principal OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 37 concession made to the youthful love of amusement. As a rule, it appears that the students were confined to the College and its cloisters when they were not attending the Schools of the University. They are forbidden to keep hounds or hawks, as well as to throw stones or indulge in any rough or noisy sports. The injunctions against spiking wine and slops in the upper rooms, or beer on the floor of the Hall, to the annoyance of thoso who lodged be- neath, betoken a rough style of living and rude manners. The admission of strangers is jealously restricted, and on no account must a woman enter the College, except a laundress, who must be of safe age. There were daily prayers for the Founder's soul, daily masses, and fifty times each day every member of the College was to repeat the salutation to the Virgin. The Founder's obit was to be celebrated with special pomp. Self-love in a mediseval ascetic was not annihilated by humility, though it took a religious form. Thrice every year are held scrutinies into life and conduct, at which the hateful practice of secret denun- ciation is admitted, and the accused is for- bidden to call for the name of his accuser. Every cloistered society, whether monastic '}3 38 OXFORD AND HER COLLKGKS. i l^i' I I' I or academic, is pretty sure to seethe with cabals, suspicions, and slanders. Leave of absence from the (College was by statute very sparingly allowed, and seldom could the young Scholar pay what, in the days before the lette.r post, nuist have been angel's visits to the old people on the paternal homestead. The ecclesiastical and ascetic system of the Middle Ages had little regard for domestic affection. It treated the boy as entirely a child of the Church. In times of pestilence, then com- mon, the inmates of the Colleges usually went to some farm or grange belonging to the College in the neighbourhood of Oxford, and those were probably pleasant days for the younger members. Oaths of fearful length and stringency were taken to the observation of the statutes. They proved sad traps for conscience when the statutes had become obsolete, a contingency of which the Founders, ignorant of progress and evolution, never dreamed. In the interval between the foundation of New College and the revolution, religious and intellectual, which we call the Reforma- tion, were founded Lincoln, All Souls', Mag- dalen, and Brasenose. Lincoln, All Souls', OXFORD AND IIEU COLLEGES. 39 and Brasenose lie immediately round us, close to wliat was the centre of academical life. Ma<^(lalen we recognise in the distance by the most beautiful of towers. Lincoln was theological, and was peculiar in being con- nected with two of the Churches of Oxford, which its members served, and the tithes and oblations of which formed its endow- ment. Its Founder, Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had as a graduate resident at Oxford been noted for sympathy with the Wycliffites. But when he became Bishop of Lincoln, the fact dawned upon him that the Scriptures too freely interpreted were dangerous. He went over to the Beaction, burned Wycliffe's body, and determined to found a little college of true students in theology, who would " defend the mysteries of the sacred page against those ignorant iaics who profaned with swinish snouts its most holy pearls.'* His successor, Bishop Rotherham, being of the same mind, carried forward the work, and gave the College statutes enjoining the expulsion of any Fellow convicted of favouring in public or in private heretical tenets, and in par- ticular the tenets of " that heretical sect lately sprung up which assails the sacra- ments, diverse orders and dignities, and 40 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. Ill ll properties of the Church." Rotherham had evidently a keen and just sense of the fact, that with the talismanic sacraments of the Church were bound up its dignity and wealth. The two orthodox prelates would have stood aghast if th^y could have fore- seen that their little College of true theolo- gians would one day number among its Fellows John Wesley, and that Methodism would be cradled within its walls. They would not less have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that such a chief of Liberals as Mark Pattison, would one day be its Rector. The history of these foun- dations is full of lessons for benefactors who fancy that they can impress their will upon posterity. All Souls' was designed by its Founder, Archbishop Chicheley, ad orandum as well as ad studendum ; it was to serve the pur- pose of a chantry not less than of a College. The sculptured group of souls over the gate- way in High Street denotes that the Warden and Fellows were to pray for the souls of all Christian people. But particularly were they to pray for the souls of " the illustrious Prince Henry, late King of England, of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and of all the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, OXFORD AND IIEll COLLEGES. 41 and others who fell in the v/ar for the Crown of France.'' Of that unhappy war Chiclie- ley had been the adviser ; and seeing the wreck which his folly, or, if the suspicion immortalised by Shakespeare is true, his selfish policy, as the head of a bloated Es- tablishment threatened with depletion, had wrought, he may well have felt the sting of conscience in his old age. The figures in the new reredos of the Chapel tell the story of the foundation. Magdalen was the work of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of Henry VI., another statesman-prelate who turned from the political storm to found a ho use of learning. Of all the houses of learning in England, perhaps of any country, that which Waynflete founded is the loveliest, as he will say who stands in its cloistered and ivy-mantled quadrangle, either beneath the light of the summer's sun or that of the winter's moon. Some Ameri- can architect, captivated by the graces of Magdalen, has reproduced them in his plan for a new University in California. Those courts, when newly built, were darkened by the presence of Kichard III. Waynflete came to Oxford to receive the king ; and M 42 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. , 1 I) ^:- this homage, paid by a saintly man, seems to show that in those fierce times of dynas- tic change, Richard, before the murder of his nephews, was not regarded as a criminal usurper, perhaps not as a usurper at all. The tyrant v^as intellectual. In him, as still more notably in Tiptoft, Earl of Worces- ter, nicknamed for his cruelty the Butcher, but literary and a benefactor to the Univer- sity, was something like an English counter- part of the mixture in the Italian Renais- sance of culture with licentiousness and crime. But as he sat beside Waynflete in the Hall wooing popularity by apparent at- tention to the exercises, Richard's thoughts probably were far away. A red rose among the architectural ornaments is found to have been afterwards painted white. It changed, no doubt, with fortune, when she left the red for the white rose. A new relation be- tween College and University is inaugurated by the institution at Magdalen of three Readers to lecture to the University at large. The old quadrangle of Brasenose remains much as it was left by its co-founders, a munificent Bishop and a pious Knight. It is of no special historic interest, and its im- portance belongs to later times. It absorbed OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 43 several Halls, the sign of one of which was probably the brazen nose which now adorns its gate, and so far it marks an epoch. The quiet and sombre old quadrangle of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by the side of Merton, much as its Founder left it. Now we have come to the real dawn of the Eng- lisl Kenaissance, a gray dawn which never became a very bright day ; for in England, as in Germany and other Teutonic coun- tries, reawakened and emancipated intellect turned to the pursuit of truth rather than of beauty, and the great movement was less a birth of literature and of art than of re- formation in religion. This is the age of Grocyn, the teacher of Greek ; of Linacre, the English Hippocrates ; of Colet, the re- generator of education ; of Sir Thomas More, who carried culture to the Chancellorship of the realm, and whose "Utopia" proclaims the growth of fresh aspirations and the opening of a new era in one way, as Rabe- lais did in another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI., had per- haps opened the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift^^ of books, in which the Renais- sance literature was strongly represented, and which was the germ of the University 44 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ■'.if I < f ' ri 1 i Library. Soon Erasmus will visit Oxford and chant in elegant Latin the praises of the classical and cultured circle which he finds there. Now rages the war between the humanists of the new classical learning, called the Greeks, and its opponents, the Trojans, who desired to walk in the ancient paths, and who, though bigoted and gro- tesque, were, after all, not far wrong in identifying heresy with Greek, since the study of the New Testament in the original was subversive of the mediaeval faith. Again, as in the cases of Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a statesman-prelate turns in old age from the distractions of State to found a house of learning. Eoxe, Bishop of Win- chester, was the chief counsellor and diplo- matist of Henry VIL , in whose service he had no doubt passed anxious hours and trodden dark paths. It may have been partly for the good of his soul that he pro- posed to found a house in Oxford for the reception of young monks from St. Swithin's Priory in Winchester while studying in Ox- ford. He was diverted from that design, and persuaded to found a College instead, by his fiiend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exe- ter, who is represented as saying, '* What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide ! i m OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 45 I livelihoods for a company of bussing monks whose end and fall we ourselves may live to see ? No, no. It is more meet, a great deal, that we should have care to provide for the increase of learning and for such as by their learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth.' ' Supposing the prog- nostication embodied in these words gen- uine, they show that to an enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable. The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the highest classical elegance. They elab- orate throughout the metaphor of a bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects of his lect- ures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin authors is given, and who is to keep *' bar- barism," that mortal sin in the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional, tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a Professor, but its guides i I. 46 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. I ■■ ■ It t «§'':l in interpreting Scripture are not to be the mediaeval text-books, such as Aquinas and the Master of the Sentences, but the Greek and Latin Fathers, including the dar- ing Origen and Augustine the favourite of Luther. The Readers are to lecture not to the College only, but to the University at large, a new provision, connecting the College with the University, which hardly took effect till very recent times. One of the first Lv?aders was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis Vives, whose appointment bespoke the cosmopolitan character of the humanist republic of letters. The statutes were signed by the Founder with a trembling hand eight months before his death, so that only in imagination did he see his literary bees at work. ::i m I P Yonder to the south is Tom Tower, where hangs the great bell, which, " swinging slow with sullen roar," was heard by Milton at Forest Hill. It was tolled a hundred and one times for the hundred and one students of Wolsey's House. The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not of Wolsey but of Wren. Around the great quadrangle over which it rises are seen the lines for cloisters which were never built. The balustrade OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ] 47 on the top of the quadrangle is an alien work of modern times. The Church of St. Frydeswide's Monastery does duty as the College Chapel, in place of the grand Chapel in the perpendicular style, which, had the Founder's plan taken effect, would have stood there. Moreover, that which should have been wholly a College is made to serve and to expend a part of its power as the Chapter of the Diocese of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which has been productive of strained relations between occupants of the See and Heads of the College. Ample and noble are the courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his magnificence is the great Hall, the finest room, barring Westminster Hall, in England, and filled with those portraits of Alumniy which, not- withstanding the frequency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest tapestry with which hall was ever hung. But it all falls short of Wolsey's conception. Had Wolsey' s conception Ijeen fulfilled, Ipswich would have been a nursery of scholars for Cardinal College, as Winchester was for New College, and Eton for King's College, Cambridge. The Cardinal was an English Leo X. in morals, tastes, perhaps in be- 3H 48 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. i?} liefs ; a true Prince, not of the Church but of the Renaissance. For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a refreshment to turn from public life, full, as it must have been, of care and peril for the Vizier of a head- strong and capricious despot, to the calm happiness of seeing his great College rise, and gathering into it the foremost of teach- ers and the flower of students. But in the midst of his enterprise the sky of the Renaissance became overcast with clouds, and the storm of religious revolution, which had long been gathering, broke. Forewarn- ings of the storm Wolsey had received, for he had found that in opening his gates to the highest intellectual activity he had opened them to free inquiry and to hetero- doxy. Himself, too, had set the example of suppressing monasteries, though he did this not for mere rapine or to gorge his parasites, but to turn useless and abused endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all but drew his foundation down with him in his fall. The tyrant and his minions were builders of nothing but ruin. Christ Church, as at last it was called, was threatened with confiscation and destruction, but was finally spared in its incomplete condition, appro- priated by Henry as his own foundation, I!' \ f OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 49 and dedicated to the honom* of the king, whose portrait, in its usual attitude of ob- trusive self-conceit, occupies in the Hall the central place, where the portrait of the Car- dinal should be. The Cardinal's hat, on the outer wall of the house, is left to speak of the true Founder. That the College was to be called after its Founder's name, not, like the Colleges of Wykeham and Waynflete, after the name of a Saint, seems a symptom of the pride which went before Wolsey's fall. Now come upon the hapless University forty years of religious revolution, the monuments of which are traces of de- struction and records of proscription. All the monastic houses and houses for monastic novices were forfeited to the Crown, and their buildings were left desolate, though, from the ruins of some of them, new Colleges were afterwards to rise. Libraries which would now be priceless, were sacked and destroyed because the illumination on the manuscripts was Popish. It was the least to be deplored of all the havoc, that the torn leaves of the arid tomes of Duns Scotus were seen flying about the quadrangle of New College, while a sporting gentleman of the neighbourhood was picking them up to k so OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. i: '■:^!f hi: ■ i r^'^ be used in driving the deer. There is a comic monument of the religious revolution in the coffer shrine at Christ Church, in which the dust of Catherine, wife of the Protestant Doctor, Peter Martyr, is mingled with that of the Catholic Saint, Frydeswide. Catholicism, in its hour of triumph under Mary, had dug up the corpse of the heretic's concubine and buried it under a dung-hill. Protestantism, once more victorious, rescued the remains, and guarded against a repeti- tion of the outrage, in case fortune should again change, by mingling them with those of the Catholic Saint. A more tragic memorial of the conflict is yonder recum- bent cross in Broad Street, close to the spot, then a portion of the town ditch, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died. Bocardo, the prison over the neighbour- ing gate of the city, from the window of which Cranmer, then confined there, wit- nessed the burning of Latimer and Ridley, was pulled down at the beginning of this century. The Divinity School, Christ Church Cathedral, and St. Mary's Church witnessed different scenes of the drama. St. Mary's witnessed that last scene, in which Cranmer filled his enemies with fury and confusion by suddenly recanting his 1 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. SI I recantation, and declaring that the hand which had signed it should burn first. Col- lege archives record the expulsion, readinis- sion, and re-expulsion of Heads and Fellows, as victory inclined to the Protestant or Catholic side. So perished the English Renaissance. For the cultivation of the humanities there could be no room in a centre of religious strife. ' Fatal bequests of the religious war were the religious tests. Leicester, as Chan- cellor, introduced subscription to the Thirty- nine Articles to keep out Romanists ; King James, that to the three articles of the Thirty- sixth Canon to keep out Puritans. These tests, involving scores of controverted propositions in theology, were imposed on the consciences of mere boys. The Uni- versities were thus taken from the nation and given to the State Church, which, in the course of time, as dissent from its doctrines gained ground, came to be far from identical with the nation. In the first lull, however, new Colleges arose, partly out of the ruins of vhe monas- tic houses of the past. Trinity College, of which the quiet old quadrangle is curiously '"! II * ^i tor's stipend. Thus the importance of the College waxed while that of the University waned, and the College Statutes became more and more collectively the law of the ITniversity. These S ^atutes were mediaeval and obsolete, but they were unalterable, the Heads and Fellows being sworn to their observance, and there being no power of amendment, since the Visitor could only interpret and enforce. Thus the mediaeval type of life and study was stereotyped and progress was barred. The Fellowships hav- ing been originally not teacherships or prizes, but aids to poor students, the Found- ers deemed themselves at liberty in regu- lating the elections to give free play to their local and family partialities, and the conse- quence was a mass of preferences to fa- voured counties or to kin. With all these limitations, the teaching body of the Uni- versity was now practically saddled. Even the restrictions to particular schools — as to Winchester in the case of New College, to Westminster, which had been substi- tuted for Wolsey's Ipswich, in the case of Christ Church, and to Merchant Tailors' School in the case of St. John's — were noxious, though in a less degree, albeit their bad influence might be redeemed by .o» •ii OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 59 some pleasant associations. Worst of all, however, in their effect were the restric- tions to the clerical Order. This meant little in the Middle Ages, when all intel- lectual callings were clerical, when at Ox- ford gownsman and clerk, townsman and laic, were convertible terms. Wykeham, Foxe, and Wolsey themselves were thor- ough laymen in their pursuits and charac- ter, though they had received the tonsure, were qualified, if they pleased, to celebrate mass, and derived their incomes from bish- oprics and abbeys. But the Reformation drew a sharp line between the clerical and the other professions. The clergyman w^as henceforth a pastor. The resident body of graduates and the teaching staff of Ox- ford belonging almost exclusively to the clerical profession, the studies and inter- ests of that profession now reigned alone. Whatever life remained to the University was chiefly absorbed in theological study and controversy. This v^as the more de- plorable as theology, in the mediaeval se^^se, was a science almost as extinct as astrol- ogy or alchemy. Oxford was turned into the cock-pit of theological party. At the same time she was bound hand and foot to a political faction, because her clergy- I i 60 OXFORD AND HER COLLKGES. I men belonged to the Episcopal and State Church, the patrons and upholders of which, from political motives, were the Kings and the Cavaliers, or, as they were afterwards called, the Tories. Cambridge suffered like Oxford, though with some abatement, be- cause there, owing to the vicinity of a great Puritan district, high Anglicanism did not prevail, and, for reasons difficult to define, the clergy altogether were less clerical. Newton was near forfeiting his Fellowship and the means of prosecuting his specula- tions because he was not in Holy Orders. Luckily, a Lay Fellowship fell just in time. Let Founders, and all who have a passion for regulating the lives of other people, for propagating their wills beyond the reach of their foresight, and for grasping posterity, as it were, with a dead hand, take warning by a disastrous example. As the Colleges became the University, their Heads became the governors of the University. They formed a Board c&lled the Hebdomadal Council, which initiated all legislation, while the executive was the Vice- Chancellorship, which, though legally elec- tive, was appropriated by the Heads, and passed down their list in order. With a Jlli: iH;! OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 6l single exception, the Headships were all clerical, and they were almost always filled by men of temperament, to say the least, eminently conservative. Thus academical liberty and progress slept. On the eve of another great storm we have a pleasant glimpse of Oxford life and study in Clarendon's picture of Falkland's circle, at Great Tew, within ten miles of Oxford, whither, he says, " most polite and accurate men of that University resorted, dwelling there as in a College situated in a purer air, so that his was a University bound in a less volume, whither his intellectual friends came not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and con- sent made current in conversation." This indicates that, while study was going on, liberal inquiry was also on foot. But clouds again gathered, the storm again came, and once more from the ecclesiastical quarter. The triumph of the Reformation, the acces- sion of a Protestant Queen, and the Chancel- lorship of Leicester, who, for politic purposes, played the Puritan, had been attended by a general expulsion or secession of the Ro- manising party, which left the University ii f 62 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ^M i fii J 1 ! ! for a time in the hands of the Calvinists and Low Churchmen. Hooker, the real father of Anglicanism, had, for a time, stud- ied Church antiquity in the quiet quadrangle of Corpus, but he had come into collision with Puritanism, and had, for a time, been driven away by it. Perhaps its prevalence may have ultimately inclined him to ex- change the University for a far less congenial sphere. The clergy, however, of an Epis- copal Church, and one which laid claim to Apostolical succession, was sure in time to come round to High Church doctrine. To High Church doctrine the clergy of Oxford did come round under the leadership of Laud, University Preacher, Proctor, Presi- dent of St. John's College, and afterwards Chancellor of the University. Of Laud there are several memorials at Oxford. One is the inner quadrangle of St. John's College, ornamented in the style of Inigo Jones, where the Archbishop and Chancellor, in the noontide of his career, received with ecstasies of delight, ecclesiastical, academical, and political, his doomed king and master with the fatal woman at Charles's side. Another is a fine collection of oriental books added to the Bodleian Library. A third and more important is the new code of statutes framed OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 63 j for the reformation of the University by its all-powerful Chancellor. A fourth is the statue of the Virgin and Child over the porch of St. Mary's Church, which, as proof of a Romanising tendency, formed one of the charges against the Archbishop, though it was really put up by his Chaplain. The fifth is the headless corpse which lies buried in the Chapel of St. John's College, whither pious hands conveyed it after the Restora- tion. Laud was a true friend of the Uni- versity and of learned men, in whom, as in Hales, he respected the right of inquiry, and to whom he was willing to allow a free- dom of opinion which he would not allow to the common herd. He was not so much a bigot as a martinet. It was by playing the martinet in ecclesiastical affairs that he was brought into mortal collision with the nation. In the code of statutes which by his characteristic use of autocratic power he imposed on Oxford the martinet is be- trayed ; so is the belief in the efficacy of regulation. We see the man who wrecked a kingdom for the sake of his forms. Nor had Laud the force to deliver University education from the shackles of the Middle Ages and the scholastic system. But the code is dictated by a genuine spirit of re- 1 64 OXFORD AND HEK COLLEGES. m rh ft; I'll form, and might have worked improvement had it been sustained liy a 1:1 otive power. The period of the C- iJ W .t is a gap in academical liistory. IL. mo ments are only traces of destruction, such as tlie de- facement of Papistical images and window paintings by the Puritan sold'&ry, and the sad absence of the old College plate, of which two thousand five hundred ounces went to the Royal mint in New Inn Hall, only a few most sacred pieces, such as the Founder's drinking-horn at Queen's, and the covered cup, reputed that of the Founder, at Corpus, being left to console us for the irrepara- ble loss. Exeter College alone seems to have shown compunction; perhaps there had remained in her something of the free spirit for which in the days of Wycliffe she had been noted. Art and taste may mourn, but the University, as a centre of Episco- palianism, had little cause to complain ; for the war was justly called the Bishops' war, and by the Episcopal Church and the Queen, between them, Charles was brought to the block. Oxford was bound by her ecclesi- asticism to the Royal cause, and she had the ill luck to be highly available as a place of arms from her position between the two OXFOKD AND HER COLLEGES. 65 lent rivers, while she formed an advanced post to the Western country in whicli the strengtli of the King's cause lay. During those years the University was in buff and bandolier, on the drill ground instead of in the Schools, while the Colleges were filled with the ex- iled Court and its ghost of a Parliament. Traces of works connecting the two rivers were not long ago to be seen, and tradition points to the angle in the old city wall under Merton College as the spot where Winde- bank, a Royalist officer, was shot for sur- rendering his post. There was a reign of garrison manners as well as of garrison duties, and to the few who still cared for the objects of the University, even if they were Royalists, the surrender of the city to the Parliament may well have been a relief. Then came Parliamentary visitation and the purge, with the inevitable violence and inhumanity. Heads and Fellows, who re- fused submission to the new order of things, were turned out. Mrs. Fell, the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, deposed for Royal- ism, refused to quit the Deanery, and at last had to be carried out of the quadran- gle, venting her wrath in strong language as she went, by a squad of Parliamentary 66 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. I i iiii '^1 'i I ill musketeers. But the Puritans put in good men : such as Owen, who was made Dean of Christ Church ; Conant, who was made Rector of Exeter ; Wilkins, who was made Warden of Wadham ; and Seth Ward, the mathematician, who was made President of Trinity College. Owen and Conant appear to have been model Heads. The number of students increased. Evelyn, the Angli- can and Royalist, visiting Oxford, seems to find the academical exercises, and the state of the University generally, satisfactory to his mind. He liked even the sermon, barring some Presbyterian animosities. Nor did he find much change in College Chapels. New College was "in its ancient garb, not- withstanding the scrupulosity of the times." The Chapel of Magdalen College, likewise, was *' ill pontifical order,*' and the organ remained undemolished. The Protectorate was tolerant as far as the age allowed. Evelyn was cordially received by the Puri- tan authorities and hospitably entertained. Puritanism does not seem to have been so very grim, whatever the satirist in *'The Spectator ' ' may say. Tavern-haunting and swearing were suppressed. So were May- poles and some innocent amusements. But instrumental music was much cultivated, as 0XF0IIL» AND HER COLLEGES. 67 »» ; we learn from the Royalist and High Church antiquary Anthony Wood, from whom, also, we gather that dress, though less donnish, was not more austere. Cromwell, having saved the Universities from fanatics who would have laid low all institutions of worldly learning, made himself Chancellor of Oxford, and sought to draw thence, as well as from Cambridge, promising youths for the service of the State. Even Clarrii- don admits that the Restoration found the University " abounding in excellent learn- ing,*' notwithstanding "the wild and bar- barous depopulation" which it had under- gone ; a miraculous result, which he ascribes, under God's blessing, to " the goodness and richness of the soil, which could not be made barren by all the stupidity and negli- gence, but choked the weeds, and would not suffer the poisonous seeds, which were sown with industry enough, to spring up." Puritanism might be narrow and bibliola- trous, but it was not obscurantist nor the enemy of science. We see this in Puritan Oxford as well as in Puritan Harvard and Yale. In Puritan Oxford the scientific cir- cle which afterwards gave birth to the Royal Society was formed. Its chief was Warden Wilkins, and it included Boyle, 68 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. li if, I ■ill ' I Wallis, Seth Ward, and Wren. It met either in Wilkins's rooms at Wadliam, or in those of Boyle. Evelyn, visiting Wilkins, is ravished with the scientific inventions and experiments v^rhich he sees. On the stones of Oxford, Puritanism has left no trace ; there was hardly any building during those years. There were benefactions not a few, among which was the gift of Selden's Library. Upon the Restoration followed a Royal- ist proscription, more cruel, and certainly more lawless, than that of the Puritans had been. All the good Heads of the Common- wealth era were ejected, and the Colleges received back a crowd of Royalists, who, during their exclusion, had probably been estranged from academical pursuits. An- thony Wood himself is an unwilling witness to the fact that the change was much for the worse. " Some Cavaliers that were restored,'* he says, "were good scholars, but the majority were dunces.'* "Before the War," he says in another place, "we had scholars who made a thorough search in scholastic and polemical divinity, in humane learning and natural philosophy, but now scholars study these things not more than what is just necessary to carry \ I '4 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 69 them through the exercises of their respec- tive Colleges and the University. Their aim is not to live as students ought to do, tem- perate, abstemious, and plain in their ap- parel, but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies i/^o places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparel and long periwigs." Into the Rectorship of Exeter, in place of the excellent Conant, was put Joseph Maynard, of whom Wood says, " Exeter College is now much de- bauched by a drunken Governor ; whereas, before, in Doctor Conant' s time, it was ac- counted a civil house, it is now rude and uncivil. The Rector is good-natured, gen- erous, and a good scholar, but he has forgot the way of College life, and the decorum of a scholar. He is much given to bibbing, and when there is a music meeting in one of the Fellow's chambers, he will sit there, smoke, and drink till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings by the junior Fel- lows." This is not the only evidence of the fact that drinVing, idling, and tavern- haunting were in the ascendant. Study as well as morality, having been the badge of the Puritan, was out of fashion. Wilkins's scientific circle took its departure from Oxford to London, there to become the 70 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ¥ \y .t! I ' •!* :!i germ of the Royal Society. The hope was gone at Oxford of a race of ''young men provided against tlie next age, whose minds, receiving tlie first impressions of sober and generous knowledge, should be invincibly armed against all the encroachments of enthusiasm." The presence of the merry monarch, with his concubines, at Oxford, when his Parliament met there, was not likely to improve morals Oxford sank into an organ of the High Church and Tory party, and debased herself by servile manifestos in favour of government by pre- rogative. Non-conformists were excluded by the religious tests, the operation of which was more stringent than ever sin e »;hc passing of the Act of Uniformity. The iove of liberty and truth embodied in Locke was expelled from Christ Church ; not, how- ever, by the act of the College or of the University, but by Royal warrant, though Fell, Dean of Christ Church, bowed slav- ishly to the tyrant's pleasure ; so that Christ Church may look with little shame on the portrait of the philosopher, which now hangs triumphant in her Hall. The Cavaliers did not much, even in the way of building. The Sheldonian Theatre was given them by the Archbishop, to whom OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 71 of subscriptions had been promised, but did not come in, so that he had to bear the whole expense himself. He was so deeply dis- gusted that he refused ever to look upon the building. Over the gateway of University College stands the statue of James II. That it should have beeu left there is a proof both of the ingrained Toryism of old Oxford, and of the mildness of the Revolution of 1688. Obadiah Walker, the Master of the Colleges, was one of the political converts to Roman Catholicism, and it was in ridicule of him that ' ' Old Obadiah, Ave Maria,' ' was sung by the Oxford populace. A set of rooms in the same quadrangle bears the trace of its con- version into a Roman Catholic Chapel for the king. It faces the rooms of Shelley. Refer- ence was made the other day, in an eccle- siastical lawsuit, to the singular practice which prevails in this College, of filing out into the ante-chapel after the sacrament to consume the remains of the bread and wine, instead of consuming them at the altar or communion table. This probably is a trace of the Protestant reaction which followed the transitory reign of Roman Catholicism under Obadiah Walker. All are familiar 72 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 11 i' with the Magdalen College case, and with the train of events by which the most devoutly royalist of Universities was brought, by its connection with the Anglican Church and in defence of the Church's pos- sessions, into collision with the Crown, and arrayed for the moment on the side of constitutional liberty. After the Revolution the recoil quickly followed. Oxford became the stronghold of Jacobitism, the scene of treasouv^ble talk over the wine in the Com- mon Room, of riotous demonstrations by pot-valiant undergraduates in the streets, of Jacobite orations at academical festivals, amid frantic cheers of the assembled Uni- versity, of futile plotting and puerile con- spiracies which never put a man in the field. ♦ ' The king to Oxford '^ent a troop of horse." But the troop of hoi'se was not called upon to act. There was a small Hanoverian and constitutional party, and now and then it scored a point against its adversaries, who dared not avow their disloyalty to the reigning dynasty. A Jacobite Proctor, having intruded into a convivial meeting of Whigs, they tendered him the health of king George, which, for fear of the trea- son law, he was fain to drink upon his knees. OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 73 In the early part of the eighteenth cen- tury there was some intellectual life in Christ Church, to which Westminster still sent up good scholars, and which was the resort of the nobility, in whom youthful ambition and desire for improvement might be stirred by the influences of political homes, and the prospects of a public life. Dean Aldrich was a scholar and a virtuoso. The spire of All Saints' Church is a soar- ing monument of his taste, if not of his genius, for architecture. In the controversy with Bentley about the Epistles of Phalaris, Christ Church, though she was hopelessly in the wrong, showed that she had some learning and some interest in classical studies. Otherwise the eighteenth century is a blank, or worse than a blank, in the history of the University. The very por- traits on the College walls disclose the void of any but ecclesiastical eminence. That tendency to torpor, which, as Adam Smith and Turgot have maintained, is inherent in the system of endowments, fell upon Ox- ford in full measure. The Colleges had now, by the increase in value of their es- tates, become rich, some of them very rich. The estates of Magdalen, Gibbon tells us, were thought to be worth thirty thousand 74 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ?Wi pounds a year, equivalent to double that sum now. Instead of being confined to their original Commons and Livery, the Heads and Fellows, as administrators of the estate, were now dividing among them- selves annually large rentals, though they failed to increase in equal proportion the stipends of the Scholars and others who had no share in the administration. The stat- utes of mediaeval Founders had become utterly obsolete, and were disregarded, not- withstanding the oath taken to observe them, or observed only so far as they guarded the interest of sinecurists against tie public. Nor were any other duties as- sumed. A few of the Fellows in each Col- le^^e added to their income by iioldir^'* the tui,orships, the functions of ^hich tn-iy cm- ally performed in the most slovenly way, each Tutor professing to teach all subjects, v/hile most of them knew none. In the Common Room, with which each of the Colleges now provided itself, the Fellows spent lives of TruUiberian luxury, drinking, smoking, playing at bowls, and, as Gibbon SJ\i(l, by their deep but dull potations ex- cuEin;^: tlie bvisk intemperance of youth. Even the obligation to residence was re- la.x?ja ;.nd at last practi 'ally annulled, so (is* OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 75 that a great part of the Fellowships be- came sinecure stipends held by men uncon- nected with the University. About the only restriction which remained was that on marriage. Out of this the Heads had managed to slip their necks, and from the time of Elizabeth downwards there had ^ been married Heads, to the great scandal of Anthony Wood and other academical pre- cisians, to whom, in truth, one lady, at least, the wife of Warden Clayton of Mer- ton, seems to have afforded some grounds for criticism by her usurpations. But in the case of the Fellows, the statute, being not constructive, but express, could not be evaded except by stealth, and by an appli- cation of the aphorism then current, that he might hold anything who would hold his tongue. The effect of this, celibacy being no longer the rule, was to make all the Fel- lows look forward to the benefices, of a number of which each College was the patron, and upon which they could marry. Thus devotion to a life of study or educa- tion in College, had a Fellow been inclined to it, was impossible, under the ordinary conditions of modern life. Idleness, in- temperance, and riot were rife among the students, as we learn from the novels 76 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. I i I and memoirs of the day. Especially were they the rule among the noblemen and gen- tlemen-commoners, who were privileged hy their birth and wealth, and to whom by the servility of the Dons every license was al- lowed. Some Colleges took only gentlemen- commoners, who paid high fees and did what they pleased. All Souls' took no students at all, and became a mere club which, by a strange perversion of a clause in their stat- utes, was limited to men of high family. The University as a teaching and examin- ing body had fallen into a dead swoon. Few of the Professors even went through the form of lecturing, and the statutory obligation of attendance was wholly disre- garded by the students. The form of medi- aeval disputations was kept up by the farcical repetition of strings of senseless syllogisms, which were handed down from generation to generation of students. The very nomenclature of the system had be- come unmcanviig. Candidates for the the- ological degree pace-? the Divinik,y School for an hour, nominal;.} challenging oppo- nents to dispuiati'}!!, but the door was locked by the Bea ■ , that no opponent might appear. Examina ions were held, but the candidates, by feeiug tlie University officer, '(■■■ OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. n were allowed to choose their own examin- ers, and they treated the examiner after the ordeal. The two questions, " What is the meaning of Golgotha ? " and " Who founded University College?" comprised the exam- ination upon which Lord Eldon took his degree. A little of that elegant scholar- ship, with the power of writing Latin verses, of which Addison was the cynosure, was the most of which Oxford could boast. Even this there could hardly have been had not the learned languages happened to have formed an official part of the equip- ment of the clerical profession. Of science, or the mental habit which science forms, there was none. Such opportunities for study, such libraries, such groves, a liveli- hood so free from care could scarcely fail, now and then, to give birth to a learned man, an Addison, a Lowth, a Thomas Wharton, an Elmsley, a Martin Routh. The Universities being the regular finish- ing schools of the gentry and the professions, men who had passed through them became eminent in after life, but they owed little or nothing to the University. Only in this way can Oxford lay claim to the eminence of Bishop Butler, Jeremy Bentham, or Adam ^T!*""" 78 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. Smith, while Gibbon is her reproach. The figures of Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose ponderous twin statues sit side by side in the Library of University College, were more academical, especially that of Lord Stowell, who was Tutor of his College, and held a lectureship of Ancient History. Here and there a Tutor of the better stamp, no doubt, would try to do his duty by his pupils. A rather pathetic interest attaches to Richard Newton, who tried to turn Hart Hall into a real place of education, and had some distinguished pupils, among them Charles Fox. But the little lamp which he had kindled went out in the uncongenial air. On the *- ite, thanks to the munificence of Mr. Baring', now stands Hertford Col- lege. Johnson's residence at Pembroke College was short, and his narrative shows that it was unprofitable, though his High Church principles afterwards made him a loyal son and eulogist of the University. One good effect the interdiction of marriage had. It kept up a sort of brotherhood, and saved corporate munificence from ex- tinction by the private interest of fathers of families. As the College revenues in- creased, building went on, though after the false classical fashion ot the times and IM > OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 79 ere no his ches mostly for the purpose of College luxury. Now rose the new quadrangle of Queen's, totally supplanting the mediaeval College, and the new buildings at Magdalen and Corpus. A plan is extant, horrible to relate, for the total demolition of the old quad- rangle of Magdalen, and its replacement by a modern palace of idleness in the Italian style. To this century belong Peckwater and Canterbury quadrangles, also in the classical style, the first redeemed by the Library which fills one side of the square, and which has a heavy architectural gran- deur as well as a noble purpose. To the eighteenth century we also mainly owe the College gardens and walks as we see them ; and the gardens of St. John's, New College, Wadham, Worcester, and Exeter, with the lime walk at Trinity and the Broad walk — now unhappily but a wreck — at Christ Church, may plead to a student's heart for some mitigation of the sentence on the race of clerical idlers and wine-bibbers, who, for a century, made the University a place, not of education and learning, but of dull sybarit- ism, and a source, not of light, but of dark- ness, to the nation. It is sad to think how different the history of England might have been had Oxford and Cambridge done their 8o OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. duty, like Harvard and Yale, during the last century. \\ Hi ' r :1 . 1 1 ^ t Urn At the end of the last or beginning of the present century came the revival. At the end of the last century Christ Church had some brilliant classical scholars among her students, though the great scene of their eminence was not the study but the senate. The portraits of Wellesley and Canning hang in her Hall. In the early part of the pres- ent century the general spirit of reform and progress, which had been repressed during the struggle with revolutionary France, be- gan to move again over the face of the tor- pid waters. Eveleigh, Provost of Oriel, led the way. At his College and at Balliol the elections to Fellowships were free htm. local or genealogical restrictions. They \ ere now opened to merit, and those two Colleges, though not among the first in wealth or magnificence, attained a start in the race of regeneration which Balliol, being very fortunate in its Heads, has since in a remark- able manner maintained. The examination system of Laud had lacked a motive power, and had depended, like his policy, on his fiat instead of vital force. There was no sufficient inducement for the examiner to OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 8i be strict or for the candidate to excel. The motive power was now supplied by a list of honours in classics and mathemy,tics, and among the earliest winners in the first class in both schools was Robert Peel. Scarcely, however, had the University begun to awake to a new life, when it was swept by another ecclesiastical storm, the consequence of its unhappy identification with clericism and the State Church. The liberal movement which commenced after the fall of Napoleon and carried the Reform Bill, threatened to extend to the religious field, and tc withdraw the support of the State from the Anglican Church. This led the clergy to look out for another basis, which they found in the reassertion of High Church and sacerdotal doctrines, such as apostolical succession, eucharistical real presence, and baptismal regeneration. Presently the movement assumed the form of a revival of the Church of the Middle Ages, such as High Church imagination pictured it, and ultimately of secession to Rome. Oxford, with her mediaeval build- ings, her High Church tradition, her half- monastic Colleges, and her body of un- married clergy, became the centre of the IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I 1.25 ■"IS 1.4 1.6 Photographic Sdences Corporation 23 WIST MAIN STRUT WEBSTIR.N.Y. 14580 (716)872-4303 r 82 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. ii'^ movement. The Romanising tendencies of Tractarianism, as from the *' Tracts for the Times " it was called, visible from the first, though disclaimed by the leaders, aroused a fierce Protestant reaction, which encoun- tered Tractarianism both in the press and in the councils of the University. The Armageddon of the ecclesiastical war was the day on which, in a gathering of religious partisans from all sections of the country which the Convocation House would not hold, so that it was necessary to adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre, Ward, the most daring of the Tractariaii writers, after a scene of very violent excitement, was deprived of his degree. This was the be- ginning of the end. Newman, the real leader of the movement, though Pusey, from his academical rank, was the official leader, soon recognised the place to which his principles belonged, and was on his knees before a Roman Catholic priest, supplicating for admission to the Church of Rome. A ritualistic element remained, and now reigns, in the Church of England ; but the party which Newman left, bereft of Newman, broke up, and its relics were cast like drift-wood on every theological or philosophical shore. Newman's poetic ver- OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 83 sion of mediaeval religion, together with the spiritual graces of his style and his personal influence, had for a time filled the imagina- tions and carried away the hearts of youth, while the seniors were absorbed in the theo- logical controversy, renounced lay studies, and disdained educational duty except as it might afford opportunities of winning youthful souls to the Neo-Catholic faith. Academical duty would have been utterly lost in theological controversy, had it not been for the Class List, which bound the most intellectual undergraduates to lay studies by their ambition, and kept on foot a staff of private teachers, " coaches," as they were called, to prepare men for the examinations, who did the duty which the ecclesiastical Fellows of the University dis- dained. Tractarianism has left a monu- ment of itself in the College founded by the party saint, Keble, the gentle and pious author of **The Christian Year.'' It has left an ampler monument in the revival of mediaeval architecture at Oxford, and the style of new buildings which everywhere meet the eye. The work of the Oxford Architectural Society, which had its birth in the Neo-Catholic movement, may prove more durable than that movement itself. ; I Hi ':l\ II I :l m r.\ 84 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. Of the excess to which the architectural revival was carried, the new Library at University College, more like a mediaeval Chapel than a Library, is a specimen. It was proposed to give Neo-Catholicism yet another monument by erecting close to the spot where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died for truth, the statue of Cardinal New- man, the object of whose pursuit through life had been, not truth, but an ecclesias- tical ideal. Of the reaction against the Tractarian movement the monument is the memorial to the Protestant martyrs Cran- mer, Latimer, and Ridley, the subscription for which commenced among the Protes- tants who had come up to vote for the con- demnation of Ward, and which Tractarians scornfully compared to the heap of stones raised over the body of Achan. Here ended the reign of ecclesiasticism, of the Middle Ages, and of religious ex- clusion. The collision into which Roman- ising Oxford had been brought with the Protestantism of the Britich nation, prob- ably helped to bring on the revolution which followed, and which restored the University to learning, science, and the nation. The really academical element in OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 85 in the University invoked the aid of the national government and Legislature. A Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the University and its Colleges was appointed, and though some Colleges closed their muniment rooms, and inquiry was obstructed, enough was revealed in the Report amply to justify legislative reform and emancipation. An Act of Parliament was passed which set free the University and Colleges alike from their mediaeval statutes, restored the University Professo- riate, opened the Fellowships to merit, and relaxed the religious tests. The curriculum, the examination system, and the honour list were liberalised, and once more, as in early times, all the great departments of knowledge were recognised and domi- ciled in the University. Science, long an exile, was welcomed back to her home at the moment when a great extension of her empire was at hand. Strictly professional studies, such as practical law and medicine, could not be recalled from their professional seats. Elections to Fellowships by merit replaced election by local or school prefer- ences, by kinship, or by the still more objectional influences which at one time had been not unfelt. Colleges which had 86 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. '1 ; :i:^ declined the duty of education, which had been dedicated to sinecurism and indolence, and whose quadrangles had stood empty, were filled with students, and once more presented a spectacle which would have gladdened the heart of the Founder. A Commission, acting on a still more recent Act of Parliament, has carried the adapta- tion of Oxford to the modern requirements of science and learning further than the old Commission, which acted in the penumbra of mediaeval and ecclesiastical tradition, dared. The intellectual Oxford of the pres- ent day is almost a fresh creation. Its spirit is new ; it is liberal, free, and pro- gressive. It is rather too revolutionary, grave seniors say, so far as the younger men are concerned. This is probably only the first forward bound of recovered free- dom, which will be succeeded in time by the sober pace of learning and scientific investigation. Again, as in the thirteenth century, the day of Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, Oxford is a centre of progress, instead of being, as under the later Stuarts, the stronghold of reaction. Of the College revival, the monuments are all around in the new buildings, for which increasing num- bers have called, and which revived energy OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 87 has supplied. Christ Church, New College, Magdalen, Merton, Balliol, Trinity, Uni- versity have all enlarged their courts, and in almost every College new life has been shown by improvement or restoration. Of the reign of medisevalism the only trace is the prevalence in the new buildings of the mediBBval style, which architectural har- mony seemed to require, though the new buildings of Christ Church and Trinity are proofs of a happy emancipation from archi- tectural tradition. The University revival has its monument in the new examination Schools in High Street, where the student can no longer get his degree by giving the meaning of Golgotha and the name of the Founder of University College. There are those who, like Mark Pattison, look on it with an evil eye, regarding the examination system as a noxious excrescence and as fatal to spontaneous study and research ; though they would hardly contend that spontaneous study and research flourished much at Ox- ford before the revival of examinations, or deny that since the revival Oxford has pro- duced the fruits of study and research, at least to a fair extent. The restoration of science is proclaimed by the new Museum yonder; a strange structure, it must be 88 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. fii ! ;f ■ owned, which symbolises, by the unfitness of its style for its purpose, at once the un- scientific character of the Middle Ages, and the lingering attachment of Oxford to the mediseval type. Of the abolition of the religious tests, and the restoration of the University to the nation, a monument is Mansfield College for Congregationalists, a vision of which would have thrown an orthodox and Tory Head of a College into convulsions half a century ago. Even here the mediseval style of architecture keeps its hold, though the places of Catho- lic Saints are taken by the statues of Wycliffe, Luther, John Knox, Whitefield, and Wesley. By the side of Mansfield College rises also Manchester College for Independents, in the same architectural style. Neither of them, however, is in the Oxford sense a College ; both are places of theological instruction. On the North of the city, where fifty years ago stretched green fields, is now seen a suburb of villas, all of them bespeak- ing comfort and elegance, few of them overweening wealth. These are largely the monuments of another great change, the removal of the rule of celibacy from the OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 89 Fellowships, and the introduction of a large body of married teachers devoted to their profession, as well as of the revival of ihe Professorships, which were always tena- ble by married men. Fifty years ago the wives of Heads of Houses, who generally married late in life if they married at all, constituted, with one or two officers of the University, the whole female society of Oxford. The change was inevitable, if ed- ucation was to be made a profession, in- stead of being, as it had been in the hands of celibate Fellows of Colleges, merely the transitory occupation of a man whose final destination was the parish. Those who re- member the old Common Room life, which is now departing, cannot help looking back with a wistful eye to its bachelor ease, its pleasant coi^panionship, its interesting talk and free interchange of thought, its pota- tions neither ' ' deep ' ' nor ' ' dull.' ' Nor were its symposia without important fruits when such men as Newman and Ward, on one side, encountered such men as Whateley, Arnold, and Tait, on the other side, in Com- mon Room talk over great questions of the day. But the life became dreary when a man had passed forty, and it is well ex- changed for the community that fills those » I' I '1 m\ I" 90 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. villas, and which, with its culture, its mod- erate and tolerably equal incomes, permit- ting hospitality but forbidding luxury, and its unity of interests with its diversity of acquirements and accomplishments, seems to present the ideal conditions of a pleasant social life. The only question is, how the College system will be maintained when the Fellows are no longer resident within the walls of the College to temper and control the younger members, for a barrack of un- dergraduates is not a good thing. The per- sonal bond and intercourse between Tutor and pupil under the College system was valuable as well as pleasant ; it cannot be resigned without regret. But its loss will be compensated by far superior teach- ing. Half a century ago conservatism strove to turn the railway away from Oxford. But the railway came, and it brings, on summer Sundays, to the city of study and thought not a few leaders of the active world. Ox- ford is now, indeed, rather too attractive ; her academical society is in danger of being swamped by the influx of non-academical residents. The buildings stand, to mark by their varying architecture the succession of the OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 91 changeful centuries through which the Uni- versity has passed. In the Libraries are the monuments of the successive genera- tions of learning. But the tide of youthful life that from age to age has flowed through college; quadrangle, hall, and chamber, through University examination-rooms and Convocation Houses, has left no memorials of itself except the entries in the University and College books ; dates of matriculation, which tell of the bashful boy standing be- fore the august Vice-Chancellor at entrance ; dates of degrees, which tell of the youth put- ting forth, from his last haven of tutelage, on the waves of the wide world. Hither they thronged, century after century, in the costume and with the equipments of their times, from mediaeval abbey, grange, and hall, from Tudor manor-house and homestead, from mansion, rectory, and com- mercial city of a later day, bearing with them the hopes and affections of number- less homes. Year after year they departed, lingering for a moment at the gate to say farewell to College friends, the bond with whom they vowed to preserve, but whom they were never to see again, then stepped forth into the chances and perils of life, while the shadow on the College dial moved 92 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. '" 1 !:( h ul : h on its unceasing round. If they had only left their names in the rooms which they had occupied, there would be more of his- tory than we have in those dry entries in the books. But, at all events, let not fancy frame a history of student life at Oxford out of ** Verdant Green." There are reali- ties corresponding to *' Verdant Green," and the moral is, that many youths come to the University who had better stay away, since none get any good and few fail to get some harm, saving those who have an apti- tude for study. But the dissipation, the noisy suppers, the tandem-driving, the fox- hunting, the running away from Proctors, or, what is almost as bad, the childish devo- tion to games and sports as if they were the end of existence, though they are too com- mon a part of undergraduate life in the University of the rich, are far from being the whole of it. Less than ever are they the whole of it since University reform and a more liberal curriculum have increased, as certainly they have, industry and frugal- ity at the same time. Of the two or three thousand lamps which to-night will gleam frona those windows, few will light the supper-table or the gambling- table ; most will light the book. Youthful effort, ambi- OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 93 tion, aspiration, hope, College character and friendship have no artist to paint them, — at least as yet they have had none. But whatever of poetry belongs to them is pres- ent in full measure here. r INDEX. Addison, Joseph, 77. Aldrich, Henry, 73. Alfred (King), 14, 29. All Souls' College, 38 et sq. Amusemenis, mediaeval, 25. Antiquity, apparent, of the buildings, 2. Architectural revival at Oxford, 83, 84. Aristotle, 18. Athmolean Museuna, 13, 14. Augustinians, 20. Aulre, 22. Bacon, Roger, 18, 19, 21. Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 52. Balliol College, 29; intel- lectual revival in, 80. Baring, T. C, 78. Benedictines, 20. Bentham, Jeremy, 77. Bentley, Richard, 73. Black Prince, the, 57. Bocardo, 50. Bodleian Library, 11, 12, 55. Bodley, Sir Thomas, 12, 53. Bologna, University of, 15. Botanic Garden, 55. Boyle, Charles, 67, 68. Bradwardine, Thomas, 18. Brasenose College, 88 et sq., 42, 43. Broadwalk, the, 79. Brome, Adam de, 30. Bdildings, dates of, 2 et sq. Butler, Bishop, 77. Cardinal College, 47. Carmellites, 20. Celibacy enjoined on Heads of Colleges, 54, 55; effects of its with- drawal, 75. Chamberdekyns, 22, 56. Charles I. at Oxford, 64. 65. * Charles II. at Oxford, 70. Chicheley, Archbishop. 40, 41. Christ Church Cathedral. 20. Christ Church College, 46 et sq. ; intellectual re- vival in, 73, 80. Cistercians, 20. Civil War, Oxford in the time of the, 64 et sq. Clarendon, Earl of, 10, li, 61. Clarendon Building, 10, Clarendon Press, 11. Class Lists, 81. Clayton, Thos., wife of, 76. 95 96 INDEX. EC' m: m W>1 Clerical profession, domi- nance of, 59. Colet, John, 43. CoWegy life, 6, T. Colleges, administration and government of, 5 et sq. ; growing impor- tance of, 56 et sq. ; the present intellectual re- vival in the, 86, 87. Commemoration, 9. Common Iwoom life, 89. Commons, 28. Commonwealth, Oxford in the time of the, 65 et sq. Conant, John, 65. Congregation, 5. Convocation, 5. Convocation House, 7, 8, 55. Corpus Christi College, 43. Cranmer, Archbishop, 50. Cromwell, Oliver, Chan- cellor of Oxford, 67. Degrees, manner of con- ferring, 8. B'sputation, stress laid upon, 17. Divinity School, 8. Dominicans, 20. Duns Scotus, 18. Durham College, 52. Egglesfield, Robert, 30. Eldon, Lord, 77, 78. Elizabeth (Queen), 56. Elp.oley, Peter, 77. Erasmus, D., 44. "Essays and Reviews," authoro of, 14. Eton, 84. Eveleigh, John, 80. Evelyn, John, 66, 68. Examinations, 12, 18. Examination system, the, 87. Examination-rooms. See Schools. Exeter College, 29, 80, 44 etsq. Faculties, 16. Falkland, Viscount, 61. Fawkes's (Guy) lantern, 12. Fell, John, 70. Fellows, 26. Fellowships, 58. Fleming, Bishop, 39. Founders, portraits of, 12. Foxe, Bishop, 44. Franciscans, 20, 21. Frydeswide, St., 50. Gibbon, Edward, 78. Gladstone, "W. E., 13. Graduation. See Degrees. Great Hall of the Univer- sity, the, 29. Great Tew, 61. Grocyn, "William, 43. Grosseteste, Robert, 22, 25. Halls, 22, 56. Hart Hall, 78. Hebdomadal Council, 60. Hertford College, 78. High Church Traditions at Oxford, 81 et sq. Hooker, Richard, 62. Hou^jes, monastic, 29. Humanists, the, 44. Humphrey, Duke, of Gloucester, 12, 43. Inception, 18. INDEX. 97 » 2. iS. 52, ). at of Jacobitism at Oxford, 72. James I., 18, 56. James II., statue of, 71. Jesus College, 53. Jews at Oxford in the Middle Ages, 24. Johnson, Samuel, at Ox- ford, 78. Keble, John, 83. Keble College, 83. Laud, Archbishop, 6?. 63, 64. Leicester, Earl of, 61. Lime Walk at Trinity Col- lege, the, 79. Linacre, Thomas, 43. Lincoln College, 38 €t sq. Livery, 28. Locke, John, 70. Lowth, Eobert, 77. Magdalen College, 38 et sq., 41 et sq., 73, 74. Magdalen College Case, 72. Manchester College 88. Manning, H. E., 14. Mansfield College, 88. Marisco, Adam de, 25. Martyr, Catherine, 50. Maynard, Joseph, 69. Mendicant Orders, 20. Merton, Walter de, 25, 26. Merton College, 26 et sq. Mob Quad, 26. Monastic Orders, 20. Monastic Oxford, 20. Monasteries, 20, 21, 29, 31. Montfort, Simon de, 21. More, Sir Thomas, 43. Museum, the Ashmolean. £>eeAshmoleafi. Museum, the University, 87, 88. Neo - Catholicism. See Tractarianism. Neville, George, 57. Newman, J. H., 14, 82, 83. New College, 81 et sq. Newton, Isaac, 60. Newton, Richard, 78. Non conformists ex- cluded, 70. Ockham, 18. Oldham, Hugh, 44. Oriel College, 29, 80. Osney Abbey, 20. Owen, John, 65. Oxford (the name), deri- vation of, 1. Oxford Architectural So- cietv, 83. Oxford (the city), situa- tion of, 1; endrons of, 1,2; of the 13th century, i5 et sq. Oxford (the University), administration and gov- ernment of, 4 et sq., 60 et sq.; origin and gi'owth of, 14 et sq.; political proclivities of, 16, 21, 59, 60 : in the 18th cen- tury, 74 et sq. ; in the 19th century, 80 et sq. ; intellectual revival of, in the present day, 86. Oxford University Com- missions (1850 and 1876), 85, 86. Papacy, the, and the Uni- versities, 19, 20, 21. Paris, University of, 15,19. I I ! ^1 If m 98 INDEX. Pattison, Mark, 40. Pembroke College, 55. Peel, Robert, 81. Petre, Sir William, 53. Philippa, Queen, 30. Philosophy, Scholastic, early addiction to, 17. Pole, Cardinal, 52. Pope, Sir Thomas, 52. Portraits of Founders, 12. Press, the University (see also Clarendon Press), 11. Proctors, 5, 6, 8. Professors, 6. Protectorate, the. See Commonwealth. Puritanism and Oxford, 65 et sq. Pusey, E. B., 14, 82. Queen's College, 29, 80. Radcliffe, Dr. John, 13. Badcliffe Library, 13. Reformation, influence of, on Oxford, 61, 62. Religious tests, 51. Renaissance, the Medi- 8Bval, 15. Restoration, the, and Ox- ford, 68 et sq. Revolution, the (1688), and Oxford, 71, 72. Richard III. at Oxford, 41, 42. Rotheram, Bishop, 39, 40. Routh, Martin, 77. Royal Commissions. See Oxford University Com- missions. Royal Society, The, 67 et sq. St. Frydeswide's Church, 20. St. John's College, 52. St. Mary of Winton, Col- lege of, 82. St. Mary's Church, 9, 14. St. Michael's Church, 14. Salerno, University of, 15. Scholars, 26 et sq. Schools, the, 12. Schools, the new examina- tion, 87. Sermons, University, 14. Sheldon, Archbishop, 8. Sheldonian Theatre, 8, 9, 70, 71. Smith, Adam, 77, 78. Socii, 26. Sports, 92. Statutes, fettering influ- ence of, 58 ; disregarded, 74. Stowell, Lord, 78. Student life, medispval, 22 et sq., 86 et sq. Students, mediaeval, 22 et sq. ; their affrays with the townspeople, 23 24 ; their amusements, 25. Suburbs of Oxford, 88e«sg. Teachers, the first, at Ox- ford, 16. Tests, See Religious tests. Theology, 18. Tiptoft,Earl of Worcester, 42. Tom Tower, 46. Tractarianism, 82 et sq. Trinity College, 51. "Trojans, The," 44. Turner's picture of Ox- ford, 2. Tutors, 6. ii I INDEX. 99 Undergraduate life, mod- ern, 92, 98. . Universities, rise of, m Europe, 15. University College, 29. University Gallery, 12. " Verdant Green," 92. Vice-Chancellorship, the, 60. Vives, Juan Luis, 4o. Wadham, Dorothy, 55. Wadham, Su* Nicholas, 64. Wadham College, 53, 54. Walker, Obadiah, Tl. Ward, Seth, 65. Ward, W. G., 82. Waynflete, Bishop, 41, 42. Wellington, Duke of, his Inauguration as Chan- cellor, 10. Wesley, John, 40. Wharton, Thomas, 77. White, Sir Thomas, 52, 53. WUkins, John, 65, 68, 69. William of Durham, 29. 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