The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Charm of Oxford, by J. Wells This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Charm of Oxford Author: J. Wells Release Date: August 22, 2004 [EBook #13245] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHARM OF OXFORD *** This eBook was produced by Philip H Hitchcock
"'Home of lost causes'—this is Oxford's blame;
'Mother of movements'—this, too, boasteth she;
In the same walls, the same yet not the same,
She welcomes those who lead the age-to-be."
"Much have ye suffered from time's gnawing tooth,
Yet, O ye spires of Oxford domes and towers,
Gardens and groves, your presence overpowers
The soberness of reason."
WORDSWORTH.
There are many books on Oxford; the justification for this new one is Mr. Blackall's drawings. They will serve by their grace and charm pleasantly to recall to those who know Oxford the scenes they love; they will incite those who do not know Oxford to remedy that defect in their lives.
My own letterpress is only written to accompany the drawings. It is intended to remind Oxford men of the things they know or ought to know; it is intended still more to help those who have not visited Oxford to understand the drawings and to appreciate some of the historical associations of the scenes represented.
I have written quite freely, as this seemed the best way to create the "impression" wished. I have to acknowledge some obligations to Messrs. Seccombe & Scott's Praise of Oxford, a book the pages of which an Oxford man can always turn over with pleasure, and to Mr. J. B. Firth's Minstrelsy of Isis; it is not his fault that the poetic merit of so much of his collection is poor. Oxford has not on the whole been fortunate in her poets. My own quotations are more often chosen for their local colour than for their poetic merit.
I have unavoidably had to borrow a good deal from my own Oxford and its Colleges, but the aim of the two books is very different.
INTRODUCTION
RADCLIFFE SQUARE
THE BROAD STREET
BALLIOL COLLEGE
MERTON COLLEGE
MERTON LIBRARY
ORIEL COLLEGE
QUEEN'S COLLEGE
NEW COLLEGE: (1) FOUNDER AND BUILDINGS
NEW COLLEGE: (2) HISTORY
LINCOLN COLLEGE
MAGDALEN COLLEGE: (1) SITE AND
BUILDINGS
MAGDALEN COLLEGE: (2) HISTORY
BRASENOSE COLLEGE
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
CHRIST CHURCH: (1) THE CATHEDRAL
CHRIST CHURCH: (2) THE HALL STAIRCASE
CHRIST CHURCH: (3) "TOM" TOWER
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
WADHAM COLLEGE: (1) THE BUILDINGS
WADHAM COLLEGE: (2) HISTORY
HERTFORD COLLEGE
ST. EDMUND HALL
IFFLEY MILL
I. CHRIST CHURCH, THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE
GARDEN
II. ST. MARY'S SPIRE
III. VIEW IN RADCLIFFE SQUARE
IV. SHELDONIAN THEATRE, ETC., BROAD STREET
V. BALLIOL COLLEGE, BROAD STREET FRONT
VI. MERTON COLLEGE, THE TOWER
VII. MERTON COLLEGE, THE LIBRARY INTERIOR
VIII. ORIEL COLLEGE AND ST. MARY'S CHURCH
IX. HIGH STREET
X. NEW COLLEGE, THE ENTRANCE GATEWAY
XI. NEW COLLEGE, THE TOWER
XII. LINCOLN COLLEGE, THE CHAPEL INTERIOR
XIII. MAGDALEN TOWER
XIV. MAGDALEN COLLEGE, THE OPEN AIR PULPIT
XV. BRASENOSE COLLEGE, QUADRANGLE AND THE RADCLIFFE
LIBRARY
XVI. CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, THE FIRST
QUADRANGLE
XVII. CHRIST CHURCH, THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE
MEADOW
XVIII. CHRIST CHURCH, THE HALL STAIRCASE
XIX. CHRIST CHURCH, THE HALL INTERIOR
XX. CHRIST CHURCH, "TOM" TOWER
XXI. ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE GARDEN FRONT
XXII. WADHAM COLLEGE, THE CHAPEL FROM THE
GARDEN
XXIII. WADHAM COLLEGE, THE HALL INTERIOR
XXIV. HERTFORD COLLEGE, THE BRIDGE
XXV. ST. PETER-IN-THE-EAST CHURCH AND ST. EDMUND
HALL
XXVI. IFFLEY, THE OLD MILL
OXFORD FROM THE EAST
In what does the charm of Oxford consist? Why does she stand out among the cities of the world as one of those most deserving a visit? It can hardly be said to be for the beauty of her natural surroundings. In spite of the charm of her
"Rivers twain of gentle foot that pass
Through the rich meadow-land of long green grass,"
in spite of her trees and gardens, which attract a visitor, especially one from the more barren north, Oxford must yield the palm of natural beauty to many English towns, not to mention those more remote.
But she has every other claim, and first, perhaps, may be mentioned that of historic interest.
An Englishman who knows anything of history is not likely to forget of how many striking events in the development of his country Oxford has been the scene. The element of romance is furnished early in her story by the daring escape of the Empress-Queen, Matilda, from Oxford Castle. The Provisions of Oxford (1258) were the work of one of the most famous Parliaments of the thirteenth century, the century which saw the building of the English constitution, and the students of the University fought for the cause which those Provisions represented. The burning of the martyr bishops in the sixteenth century is one of the greatest tragedies in the story of our Church. The seventeenth century saw Oxford the capital of Royalist England in the Civil War, and though there was no actual fighting there, Charles' night march in 1644 from Oxford to the West, between the two enclosing armies of Essex and Waller, is one of the most famous military movements ever carried out in our comparatively peaceful island. The Parliamentary history, too, of Oxford in the seventeenth century is full of interest, for it was there that in 1625 Charles' first Parliament met in the Divinity School. And fifty years later, his son, Charles II, triumphed over the Whig Parliament at Oxford, which was trying by factious violence to force the Exclusion Bill on a reluctant king and nation. Few towns beside London have been the scene of so many great historical events; yet any one who looks below the surface will attach less importance to these than to the great changes in thought which have found in Oxford their inspiration, and which make it a city of pilgrimage for those interested in the development of England's real life. Matthew Arnold's famous description, hackneyed though it is by quotation, gives one aspect of Oxford, an aspect which will appeal to many beside the scholar poet:
"Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
'There are our young barbarians, all at play.'
And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering' from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?"
But this is not the real intellectual charm of Oxford, which has been ever the centre of strenuous life, rather than of dilettante dreamings. From the very beginning, she has been a city of "Movements." Some visitors, then, will come to Oxford as the home and the burial-place of Roger Bacon, representing as he does the Franciscan Order, with its Christ-like sympathy for the poor and its early attempts to develop the knowledge of Natural Science; Oxford was in the thirteenth century the great centre of the Friars' movement in England. Others will remember that in the next century it produced, in John Wycliffe, the great opponent of the Friars, the man who, as the first of the Reformers, is to many the most interesting figure in mediaeval English religious history. In the sixteenth century, Oxford plays no great part in the actual revolution in the English Church; yet it will be a place attractive to many who cherish the memory of the "Oxford Reformers," the members of Erasmus' circle—John Colet, Thomas More, William Grocyn, and other scholars—who hoped by sound learning to amend the Church without violent change. Some, on the other hand, will see in the sixteenth-century Oxford, the school which trained men for the Counter-Reformation, such as the heroic Jesuit, Campion, or Cardinal Alien, the founder of the English College at Douai. The Anglican "Via Media" found its special representatives in Oxford in Jewel and Hooker, and in Laud, the practical genius who carried out its principles in the Church administration of his day. It was fitting that the movement for the revival of Church teaching in England in the nineteenth century should be an Oxford movement, and Newman's pulpit at St. Mary's and the chapel of Oriel College are sacred in the eyes of Anglicans all over the world. In the interval between Laud and Newman, Church principles had found a different development in another Oxford man; John Wesley's character and spiritual life were built up in Oxford, till he went forth to do the work of an Evangelist during more than half of the eighteenth century. Wycliffe, More, Hooker, Laud, Wesley, Newman, these are not the names of men who have affected the religious history of the world as did Luther, Calvin or Ignatius Loyola; but they have affected profoundly the religious life of the English-speaking race, and Oxford must ever be a sacred place for their sakes.
And Oxford has been the starting-point of other than religious movements. No place in England has such a claim on the Englishmen of the New World as has Oxford. It was there that Richard Hakluyt taught geography, and collected in part his wonderful store of the tales of enterprise beyond the sea. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, both Oxford men, were the founders of English colonization. By their failures they showed the way to success later, and Calvert in Maryland, Penn in Pennsylvania, John Locke in the Carolinas, and Oglethorpe in Georgia are all Oxford men who rank as founders of States in the great Union of the West. And in our own day, Cecil Rhodes has once more proved that the academic dreamer can go out and advance the development of a great continent. By his magnificent foundation of scholarships at Oxford, he showed that he considered his old university a formative influence of the greatest importance in world history. Oxford with reason puts up one tablet to mark his lodgings in the city, and another to commemorate him in her stately Examination Schools.
But there are many to whom the past, whether in the realm of action or in the realm of ideas, does not appeal, whether it be from lack of knowledge or from lack of sympathy. To some of these Oxford makes a different appeal as perhaps the best place in England for studying the development of English architecture. The early Norman work of the Castle and St. Michael's, the Transition work of the cathedral, the very early lancet windows of St. Giles' Church (consecrated by the great St. Hugh of Lincoln himself), the Decorated Style as seen in St. Mary's spire and in Merton chapel, the glories of the specially English style, the Perpendicular, in Wykeham's work at New College and in Magdalen Tower, the Tudor magnificence of Wolsey's work at Christ Church, the last flower of Gothic at Wadham and at St. John's, the triumph of Wren's genius, alike in the classical style at the Sheldonian and in "Gothic" as in Tom Tower, the Classical work of Hawkesmore at Queen's and of Gibbs in the Radcliffe, the wonderful beauty of Mr. Bodley's modern Gothic in St. Swithun's Quad at Magdalen, and the skilful adaptation of old English tradition to modern needs by Sir Thomas Jackson at Trinity and at Hertford—what other city can show such a series of architectural beauties? And it must not be forgotten that Oxford disputes with York the honour of having the most representative sequence of painted glass windows in England. Oxford, indeed, is a paradise for the student of Art. Nowhere, except at Cambridge, can the series of architectural works be paralleled, and at both universities the charm of their ancient buildings is enhanced by their beautiful setting in college gardens.
It is not an accident that in the old universities more than anywhere else, so much of beauty has survived, nor is it to be put down as a happy piece of academic conservatism. It is rather the natural result of their constitution and endowment. What has been so fatal to the beauty of old England elsewhere has been material prosperity. The buildings inherited from the past had to go, at least so it was thought, because they were not suited to modern methods, or because the site they occupied was worth so much more for other purposes. But the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge could not carry on their work on different sites; "residence" was an essential of academic arrangements; and there was no temptation to the fellows of a college to make money by parting with their old buildings, for their incomes were determined by Statute, and any great increase of wealth would not advantage individual fellows. Hence, while great nobles and great merchants sold their splendid houses and grounds, and grew rich on the unearned increment, and while non-residential universities moved bodily from their old positions to new and more fashionable quarters, Oxford and Cambridge colleges went on working and living in the same places. Much the same reasons have preserved, in many old towns, picturesque alms-houses, to show the modern world how beautiful buildings once could be, while all around them reigns opulent ugliness. Certain it is that only in one instance, in recent times, has an Oxford college contemplated selling its old site and buildings and migrating to North Oxford, and then the sacrilegious attempt was outvoted. Hence, as has been said, the two old English Universities possess in an unique degree the
"Strange enchantments of the past
And memories of the days of old."
The charms of Oxford for the historical student and for the lover of Art have been spoken of. But a large part of the world comes under neither head; to it the charm of Oxford consists in the young lives that are continually passing through it. Oxford and Cambridge present ever attractive contrasts between their young students and their old buildings, between the first enthusiasm of ever new generations, and customs and rules which date back to mediaeval times.
But apart from the charm of contrast, Oxford has everything to make life attractive for young men. It is true that the old buildings combine with a dignity a millionaire could not surpass a standard of material comfort which in some respects is below that of an up-to-date workhouse. An amusing instance has occurred of this during the war. The students of one of the women's colleges, expelled from their own modern buildings, which had been turned into a hospital, became tenants of half of one of the oldest colleges. It was very romantic thus to gain admission to the real Oxford, but the students soon found that it was very uncomfortable to have their baths in an out-of-the-way corner of the college. And baths themselves are but a modern institution at Oxford; at one or two colleges still the old "tub in one's room" is the only system of washing. Perhaps this instance may be thought frivolous, but it is typical of Oxford, which has been described, with some exaggeration in both words, as a home of "barbaric luxury."
But after all, comfort in the material sense is the least important element in completeness of life. Oxford has everything else, except, it is true, a bracing climate. She has society of every kind, in which a man ranks on his merits, not on his possessions; he is valued for what he is, not for what he has; she gives freedom to her sons to live their own life, with just sufficient restraint to add piquancy to freedom, and to restrain those excesses which are fatal to it; she has intellectual interests and traditions, which often really affect men who seem indifferent to them; life in her, as a rule, is not troubled by financial cares—for her young men, most of them, either through old endowments or from family circumstances, have for the moment enough of this world's goods. In view of all this, and much more, is it not natural that Oxford has a charm for her sons? And this is enhanced with many by all the force of hereditary tradition; the young man is at his college because his father was there before him; the pleasure of each generation is increased by the reflection of the other's pleasure. What traditional feeling in Oxford means may, perhaps, be illustrated by the story of an old English worthy, though one only of the second rank. Jonathan Trelawney, one of the Seven Bishops who defied James II, was a stout Whig, but when it was proposed to punish Oxford for her devotion to the Pretender, the Government found they could not reckon on his vote, though he was usually a safe party man. "I must be excused from giving my vote for altering the methods of election into Christ Church, where I had my bread for twenty years. I would rather see my son a link boy than a student of Christ Church in such a manner as tears up by the roots that constitution."
But the days of hereditary tradition are over, and Trelawney belongs to an age long past; Oxford now is exposed to an influence compared to which the arbitrary proceedings of a king are feeble. A democratic Parliament with a growing Labour party has far more power to change Oxford than the Stuarts ever had, and even at this moment (1919) a third Royal Commission is beginning to sit. Will it modify, will it—transform Oxford?
The first answer seems to be that the very stones of Oxford are charged with her traditions. During the War the colleges have been full of officer-cadets; they were men of all ranks of life and of every kind of education; they came from all parts of the world; they were of all ages, from eighteen to forty, at least. Their training was a strenuous one by strict rule, a complete contrast to the free and easy life of academic Oxford. Yet in their few months of residence, most of them became imbued with the college spirit; they considered themselves members of the place they lived in; they tried to do most of the things undergraduates do. If Oxford thus, to some extent, moulded to her pattern men who, welcome as they were, were only accidental, surely the college spirit may be trusted to assimilate whatever material the changed conditions of social or of political life furnish to it. The hope of many at Oxford is that there will be a great development and a great change. On one side it will be good if Oxford becomes to a much greater extent not only an all-British, but also a world university; on another side it is to be hoped that far more than ever before men of all classes in England will come to Oxford. It would surprise many of the University's critics to find how much had already been done in these directions. It is certainly not true now that, as one of Oxford's critics wrote,
"Too long, too long men saw thee sit apart
From all the living pulses of the hour."
On the contrary, the Oxford of the last generation has already become markedly more cosmopolitan, and she has been drawing to her an ever-increasing number of able men of every class.
But these developments, thus begun, will certainly be carried much further in the near future. Oxford will be altered. Some of her customs will be changed. This may well issue in great and lasting good, though there will be loss as well as gain. But an Oxford man may be pardoned if he believes and hopes that his university will remain the university he has loved. There is a saying current in Oxford about Oxford men, which may not be out of place here—"If you meet a stranger, and if after a time you say to him, 'I think you were at Oxford,' he accepts it, as a matter of course, and is pleased. If you do the same to a Cambridge man, he indignantly replies, 'How do you know that?'" No doubt the saying is turned the other way round at Cambridge, and no doubt it is equally true and equally false of both universities, i.e. it is positively true and negatively false, like so many other statements. But it is positively true; the Oxford man is proud of having been at Oxford; the past and the present alike, his political and his religious beliefs, his traditions and his social surroundings, all endear Oxford to him. May it ever be so.
"Like to a queen in pride of place, she wears
The splendour of a crown in Radcliffe's dome."
L. JOHNSON.
The visitor to Oxford often asks—"Where is the University?" The proper answer is: "The University is everywhere," for the colleges are all parts of it. But if a distinction must be made, and some buildings must be shown which are especially "University Buildings," then it is undoubtedly in the Square, of which this picture shows one side, that they must be found. Immediately on the right is the Bodleian Library, the domed building in the centre is the Radcliffe Library, and in the background rises the spire of St. Mary's. Of this last building the tower and spire go back nearly to the beginnings of Oxford; they date from the time of Edward I; but for a century, at least, before they were erected, the students of Oxford had met for worship and for business in the earlier church, which stood on the site of the present St. Mary's.
The Bodleian Library occupies the old Examination Schools, which were built, in the reign of James I, for the reformed University of Archbishop Laud; within the memory of men who do not count themselves old, the university examinations were still held in this building. Finally, the shapely dome between the Bodleian and St. Mary's is the work of James Gibbs, the greatest English architect of the eighteenth century, to whom Cambridge owes its Senate House) and London the noble church of St. Martin's in the Fields. The dome was built for a separate library, the foundation of Dr. John Radcliffe, Queen Anne's physician, the most munificent of Oxford benefactors; it is still managed by his trustees, a body independent of the University, but since 1861 they have lent it to the Bodleian Library for a reading-room. It is fitting that the oldest public library in the modern world, a title the Bodleian can proudly claim, should have the finest reading-room, where 400 students can have each his separate desk, and where, if so minded and so physically enduring, they can put in twelve hours' work in a day. No other great library in Europe allows such privileges.
Round these three University buildings are grouped three colleges: Hertford, the youngest of Oxford foundations, the re-creation of an old hall by a Victorian financial magnate. Sir Thomas Baring; All Souls', standing a little beyond, of which the part here shown is the corner of the great Law Library, founded by Sir William Codrington in the days of good Queen Anne; while on the other side of the Radcliffe is Brasenose College (for pictures of which see Plates II and XV). No non-academic building fronts on the Square; the one or two houses facing on the south-west corner are occupied by college tutors. The academic influence has spread even under the earth, for between the Bodleian and the Radcliffe there is a great subterranean chamber of two stories, excavated 1909-1910, which, when full, will contain 1,000,000 books.
It is refreshing to turn from the thought of so much dead industry, as these multitudes of unread books will represent, to the inspiration of the buildings. They are the very epitome of Oxford. The classic symmetry of Gibbs' dome looks across at the soaring spire of the mediaeval University Church, while the Bodleian is one of the best examples of the Jacobean Gothic, which still held its own in Oxford when the classical style was triumphing elsewhere. Such contrasts are typical of Oxford. The University had a European reputation in the days when it was one of the two great centres of mediaeval scholasticism. Roger Bacon, the most famous name in mediaeval science, no doubt saw the tower of St. Mary's beginning to rise. The University welcomed the Classical Revival, it survived the storms of the Reformation, it was the great centre of the building up of Anglican theology under the Laudian rule, it was one of the inspirations of English science in the seventeenth century, though Dr. Radcliffe's generous benefactions are a little later, and have hardly begun to yield their full fruit till our own day. Such are the learned traditions of the Radcliffe Square, while it has also been the centre of the young lives which, for seven centuries at least, have enjoyed their happiest years in Oxford.
The view from the Radcliffe roof is undoubtedly the best in Oxford. It has been thus described by the worst of the many poets who have celebrated the University:
"Spire, tower and steeple, roofs of radiant tile,
The costly temple and collegiate pile,
In sumptuous mass of mingled form and hue,
Await the wonder of thy sateless view."
But Robert Montgomery is more likely to be remembered for Macaulay's merciless but well-deserved chastisement than for his praises of Oxford. Even their utter bathos cannot degrade a group of buildings so wonderful.
"Ye mossy piles of old munificence,
At once the pride of learning and defence."
J. WARTON,Triumph of Isis.
The east side of the University buildings proper was shown in the last picture (Plate III); in the following (Plate IV), the north side of the same block is seen. The old University "schools" lay just inside the city wall, and Broad Street, which is there represented, occupies the site of the ditch, which ran on the north of the wall. This picture is a fitting supplement to the last, for the Sheldonian Theatre on the right of it and the Clarendon Building in the background may claim rank even with the Bodleian and the Radcliffe as the University's special buildings.
The Sheldonian celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary only last year (1919), when the music which had been performed at its opening was performed once more. It is a building interesting from many points of view. Architecturally it marks the first complete flowering of the genius of Sir Christopher Wren. He was only thirty-seven when it was completed, and had been previously known rather as a man of science than as an architect; he was Oxford's Professor of Astronomy; but Archbishop Sheldon chose him to build a worthy meeting place for his University, even as at the same time he was being called by the king to prepare plans for rebuilding London after the Great Fire.
The very existence of the Sheldonian marks the development of University ideas. The simple piety—or was it the worldliness?—of Pre-Reformation Oxford had seen nothing unsuitable in the ceremonies of graduate Oxford and the ribaldries of undergraduate Oxford taking place in the consecrated building of St. Mary's; but the more sober genius of Anglicanism was shocked at these secular intrusions, and Sheldon provided his University with a worthy home, where its great functions have been performed ever since.
The building is a triumph of construction; it is doubtful if so large an unsupported roof can be found elsewhere; but Wren is not to be held responsible for the outside ugly flat roof, which was put on 100 years ago, because it was said, quite falsely, that Wren's roof was unsafe. That architect had set himself the problem of getting the greatest number of people into the space at his disposal, and he managed to fit in a building that will hold 1,500. It was also intended for the Printing Press of the University, but was only used in that way for a short time, as in 1713 Sir John Vanbrugh put up the Clarendon Building, to house this department of University activity. The "heaviness" of Vanbrugh's buildings was a jest even in his own time; someone wrote as an epitaph for him
"Lie heavy on him. Earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee."
Blenheim Palace, his greatest work, is indeed a "heavy load." But the same criticism can hardly be brought against the columned portico, which forms a fine ending for the Broad Street. Vanbrugh's building was superseded in its turn, when the increasing business of the Oxford Printing Press was moved to the present building in 1830.
Since then, all kinds of University business have been carried on in the old Printing Press. The University Registrar and the University Treasurer (his style is "Secretary of the University Chest") have their offices there; the Proctors exercise discipline from there; the various University delegacies and committees meet there. And another side of Oxford life, not yet (in January 1920) fully recognized as belonging to the University, has found a home there; the top floor has been for twenty years past the centre of women's education in Oxford, a position elevated indeed, for it is up more than fifty stairs, but commodious and dignified when reached at last.
Perhaps the Clarendon Building has gained in lightness of effect by being contrasted with the clumsy mass of the Indian Institute, which forms the background of our picture. The nineteenth century proudly criticized the taste of the eighteenth; but it may well be doubted if any building in Oxford of the earlier and much-abused century is more inartistic and inappropriate than "Jumbo's Joss House," which used to rouse the scorn and anger of the late Professor of History, Edward A. Freeman.
No Oxford colleges are in this picture, though a small part of Exeter, one of Sir Gilbert Scott's least happy erections in Oxford, appears on the right, and a little piece of Trinity on the left; the last-named is the college of Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, better known as "Q," one of the most delightful of Oxford's minor poets. The opening lines of his poem, "Alma Mater,"
"Know ye her secret none can utter,
Hers of the book, the tripled crown?
Still on the spire the pigeons flutter,
Still by the gateway flits the gown,
Still in the street from corbel and gutter
Faces of stone look down,"
may well have been inspired by this very scene in the Broad, for the grim faces of stone that surround the Sheldonian are one of the features and the puzzles of Oxford. Are they the Roman Emperors, or the Greek Philosophers, or neither? It does not matter, for they are unlike anything in heaven or in earth, and yet they are loved by all true Oxford men for their uncompromising ugliness, which has been familiar to so many generations.
"For the house of Balliol is builded ever
By all the labours of all her sons,
And the great deed wrought and the grand endeavour
Will be hers as long as the Isis runs."
F. S. BOAS
The story is told of the old Greek admirals, after their victory at Salamis over the Persian king, that, when invited to name the two most deserving commanders, they each put their own name first, and then one and all put the Athenian Themistocles second. If a vote, on these principles, were taken in Oxford as to which was the best college, there is little doubt that Balliol would secure most of the second votes.
It is one of the three oldest colleges, and actually has been in occupation of its present site longer than any other of our Oxford foundations—for more than six centuries and a half. Yet its greatness is but a thing of yesterday compared to the antiquity of Oxford, and it is fitting that a college which has come to the front in the nineteenth century should be mainly housed in nineteenth century buildings.
Balliol has indeed ceased to be the "most satisfactory pile and range of old lowered and gabled edifices," which Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in the "fifties" of the last century. The painful imitation of a French chateau, the work of Sir Alfred Waterhouse, which forms the main part of our picture, was put up about 1868 (mainly by the munificence of Miss Hannah Brackenbury), and only the old hall and the library, which lie behind, remain of Pre-Reformation Balliol.
In the background of our picture (Plate V) can be seen the Fisher Building, known to all Balliol men for the still existing inscription, "Verbum non amplius Fisher," which tradition says was put up at the dying request of the eighteenth-century benefactor.
While it is true that the pre-eminence of Balliol is a growth of the nineteenth century, yet the college can count among its worthies one of the greatest names in English mediaeval history, that of John Wycliffe. He was probably a scholar of Balliol, and certainly Master for some years about 1360. But he left the college for a country living, and his time at Balliol is not associated with either of his most important works—his translation of the Bible or his order of "Poor Preachers." While at Balliol, he was rather "the last of the Schoolmen" than "the first of the Reformers."
The modern greatness of Balliol is due to the fact that the college awoke more rapidly from the sleep of the eighteenth century than most of Oxford, and as early as 1828 threw open its scholarships to free competition. Hence even as early as the time of Dr. Arnold at Rugby, a "Balliol scholarship" had become "the blue riband of public-school education." It has now passed into popular phraseology to such an extent that lady novelists, unversed in academic niceties, confer a "Balliol scholarship" on their heroes, even when entering Cambridge.
Balliol has known how to take full advantage of its opportunity. Governed by a series of eminent masters, especially Dr. Scott of Greek dictionary fame, and Professor Jowett, the translator of Plato and the hero of more Oxford stories than any other man, it has been ready to adapt itself to every new movement. While the governing bodies of other colleges in the middle of the last century were too often looking only to raising their own fellowships to the highest possible point, the Balliol dons were denying their own pockets to enrich and strengthen their college.
Hence, undoubtedly, Balliol for a long time past has had a lion's share of Oxford's great men; two Archbishops of Canterbury, Tait and Temple, the present Archbishop of York, Cardinal Manning, a Prime Minister in Mr. Asquith, a Speaker in Lord. Peel, two Viceroys of India in Lord Lansdowne and Lord Curzon, poets like Clough, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, these are only some of the more outstanding names. It is this which makes Balliol Hall so particularly interesting to the ordinary man; knowledge of present-day affairs, not of history, is all that is needed to appreciate its array of portraits.
Nor has Balliol been unmindful of the social movements of our time. It is the chosen home of the Workers' Educational Association in Oxford, and in Arnold Toynbee it produced one of the pioneers and martyrs of modern social progress. Truly Balliol has much more to show to the visitor than its ultra-modern front on the Broad would promise.
The street, on which Balliol looks out, is associated with the most famous scene of Oxford history; the stone with a cross in the middle of the road marks the traditional site of the burning of the bishops, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, although their memorial has been erected 200 yards further north in St. Giles', and though antiquarians argue (probably correctly) that the actual pyre was a little further south, in fact, behind the present row of Broad Street houses.
But it is the living activity of the college, not the sad memories of the street in front, that gives the interest to the picture. The intellectual life of the Balliol men has been well described by Professor J. C. Shairp, whose verses on "Balliol Scholars" are likely to be remembered by Oxford in long days to come for their associations, if not for their poetic merits. He describes what a privilege it is "to have passed," with men who became famous afterwards,
"The threshold of young life,
Where the man meets, not yet absorbs, the boy,
And ere descending to the dusky strife,
Gazed from clear heights of intellectual joy
That an undying image left enshrined."
This will come home to many, as they think on their happy Oxford days when they had life all before them, even though their contemporaries have not become archbishops like Temple or poets like Matthew Arnold.
"I passed beside the reverend walls
In which of old I wore the gown."
TENNYSON.
Merton is not only the oldest college in Oxford, it is also, as is claimed on the monument of the founder, Walter de Merton, in his Cathedral of Rochester, the model of "omnium quotquot extant collegiorum." Peterhouse, the first college at Cambridge, which was founded (1281) seven years later than Merton, had its statutes avowedly copied from those of its Oxford predecessor.
So important a new departure in education calls for special notice. It is interesting to see how the English college system grew out of the long rivalry between the Regular and the Secular clergy which was so prominent in the mediaeval church. The Secular clergy, who had in their ranks all the "professional men" of the day, civil servants, architects, physicians, as well as, those devoted to religious matters in the strict sense, were always jealous of the monks and the friars, who, living by a "rule" in their communities, were much less in sympathy with English national feelings than the Seculars, who lived among the laity. Hence the growing influence of the Regular Orders, especially of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, in thirteenth-century Oxford, excited the alarm of a far-seeing prelate like Walter de Merton. There was a real danger that the most prominent and best of the students might be drawn into the great new communities, which were rapidly adding to their learning and their piety the further attractions of great buildings and splendid ceremonial.
The founder of Merton had the same purpose as the founder of the College of the Sorbonne at Paris, a slightly earlier institution (1257). He intended that his college should rival the houses of the Dominicans and the Franciscans. These friaries were in the southern part of Oxford, and have completely perished, leaving behind only the names of two or three mean streets; but the college system which Walter de Merton founded has grown with the growth of Oxford and of England, and is to-day as vigorous and as useful as ever.
Walter de Merton provided his fellows with noble buildings, at once for their common life and for their own private accommodation, and also with endowments sufficient to enable them to live in comfort, free from anxiety; most important of all, he gave them powers of self-government, so that they might recruit their own numbers and carry out for themselves the objects prescribed by him in his Statutes.
In this great foundation then the three characteristic features of a college are found—a common life, powers of self-government, with the right of choosing future members, and endowments that enable religion and learning to flourish, free from more pressing cares. It is these features which distinguish the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and which have determined their history.
Walter de Merton definitely prescribed that none of the fellows who benefited by his foundation should be monks or friars; to take the vows involved forfeiture of a fellowship. He also especially urged on the members of his society that, when any of them rose to "ampler fortune" (uberior fortuna) , they should not forget their alma mater .
The founder died in 1277, so that none of the college buildings were complete in his time, except perhaps the treasury, which, with its high-pitched roof of stone, lies in the opposite corner of the Mob Quad to that shown in our picture. Why the Quad is called "The Mob Quad," nobody knows. As was fitting, the chapel was the first part of the college to be finished—about 1300—and it is a splendid specimen of early Geometrical Gothic; it retains a little of the old glass, given by one of the early fellows.
The north side of the Mob Quad, which is shown in our picture, is very little later than the Chapel, and the whole of the Quad was finished before 1400; the rooms in it have been the homes of Oxford men for more than five centuries. It is sad to think that so unique a building was almost destroyed in the middle of the nineteenth century, by the zeal of "reformers"; it was actually condemned to be pulled down, to make way for modern buildings, but, fortunately, there was an irregularity in the voting. Mr. G. C. Brodrick, then a young fellow, later the Warden of the college, insisted on the matter being discussed again at a later meeting, and at this the Mob Quad was saved by a narrow majority. "He will go to Heaven for it," as Corporal Trim said of the English Guards, who saved his broken regiment at Steinkirk.
The "reformers" of Merton had to be content with cutting down their beautiful "Grove" and spoiling the finest view in Oxford by erecting the ugliest building which Mid-Victorian taste inflicted on the University.
In the old buildings which so narrowly escaped destruction may have lived John Wycliffe, who is claimed as a fellow of Merton in an almost contemporary list; his activity in Oxford belongs rather to the later time, when he was Master of Balliol. His is one of the outstanding names in English history; the success of Merton in producing great men of a more ordinary kind can be judged from the fact that between 1294 and 1366 six out of the seven Archbishops of Canterbury were Merton men.
In the great period of the seventeenth century, Merton had the distinction of being one of the few colleges which were Parliamentarian in sympathy. Hence the Warden was deposed by King Charles, who installed in his place a really great man, William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. But the king did more harm than good to the college; it was turned into lodgings for Queen Henrietta Maria and her court, and ladies were intruded and children born within college walls. These proceedings were respectable, though unusual; but the college was even more humiliated by the visit of Charles II, who installed there, among other court ladies, the notorious Duchess of Cleveland. The college, however, with the Revolution, returned to less courtly views, and its Whig connection found an honourable representative in Richard Steele, the founder of the Tatler . It is not surprising that so cheerful a gentleman left Oxford without a degree, but "with the love of the whole society." The college register specially notes his gift of his Tatler ; he was acting on the sound rule, by no means so universally followed as it ought to be, that Oxford authors should present their books to their college library.
Merton, as has been said, is the "type" college, if one may thus apply a scientific term; hence it is fitting that to it belong the two men to whom perhaps Oxford owes most. Thomas Bodley was a fellow and lecturer in Greek there, before he left Oxford for diplomacy, and accumulated that wealth which he used to endow the oldest and the most fascinating, if not the largest, of British libraries. And among the men who have gained from "the rare books in the public library" a way to a "perfect elysium," none better deserves remembrance than the Mertonian, Antony Wood, whose monument stands in Merton Chapel, but who has raised monumentum aere perennius to himself, in his History of the University of Oxford and his Athenae Oxonienses .
"Hail, tree of knowledge! thy leaves fruit; which well
Dost in the midst of Paradise arise,
Oxford, the Muses' paradise,
From which may never sword the blest expel.
Hail, bank of all past ages! where they lie
To enrich, with interest, posterity."
COWLEY.
"The appearance of the library" (at Merton), says the great Cambridge scholar, J. Willis Clark, in his Care of Books , "is so venerable, so unlike any similar room with which I am acquainted, that it must always command admiration."
He classes it with the libraries at Oxford of Corpus, St. John's, Jesus, and Magdalen, and he regretfully adds that no college library in his own University has retained the same old features as these have done. But none of the four can compare with Merton, either in antiquarian interest or in picturesqueness; it stands in a class by itself.
The Library was built by the munificence of Bishop Reed of Chichester between 1377 and 1379; the dormer windows, however (seen in Plate VII), are later in date. The bookcases in the larger room were made in 1623; one of the original half cases, however, was spared, that nearest to the entrance on the north side, and this is the most interesting single feature in the whole library. It need hardly be said that the reading-desk in early times was actually attached to the bookcase; the library then was a place to read in, not one from which books were taken to be read. The books were to be kept "in some common and secure place," and they were "chained in the library chamber for the common use of the fellows" (J. W. Clark).
The old case that has been retained still has its chained books, and traces of the arrangement for chains can be seen in the other cases. Merton was one of the last libraries in Oxford to keep its books in chains; these were only removed in 1792; in the Bodleian the work had been begun a generation earlier (in 1757).
Not all books, however, were chained; by special arrangements in old college statutes, some of them were allowed out to the fellows. The register of Merton contains interesting entries as to how the books were distributed, e.g. on August 26, 1500, "choice was made of the books on philosophy; it was found there were in all 349 books, which were then distributed." This was a large number: at King's, Cambridge, less than half a century before, there were only 174 books on all subjects, and in the Cambridge University Library in 1473, only 330.
If a book was borrowed, great precautions were taken; the Warden of Merton in 1498 had to obtain the leave of the college to take out a book which he wanted; then, "in the presence of the four seniors," he received his book, depositing two volumes of St. Jerome's Commentaries as pledges for its safe return. A similar ceremony, with a similar entry in the register, marked the replacement of the book in the library. Though printing was already beginning to multiply books, yet then, and for long after, a book was a most valuable possession. The features of these venerable tomes are well described by Crabbe:
"That weight of wood, with leathern coat o'erlaid,
Those ample clasps, of solid metal made,
The close pressed leaves, unclosed for many an age,
The dull red edging of the well-filled page,
On the broad back the stubborn ridges rolled,
Where yet the title shines in tarnished gold,
These all a sage and laboured work proclaim,
A painful candidate for lasting fame."
Such books are numbered by hundreds in every college library, and it is only too true of them that:
"Hence in these times, untouched the pages lie
And slumber out their immortality."
The reception of such a book in a library was an event, and the record of one gift occupies six whole lines in the Merton Register; its donors are named as "two venerable men," and the entry sweetly concludes, "Let us, therefore, pray for them."
The library, problem, acute everywhere, is perhaps especially so in a college library. How can it keep pace with the multiplicity of studies? How should it deal with books indispensable for a short time, perhaps for one generation, and then superseded? Even apart from the question of the cost of purchase, the amount of space available is small, considering modern needs. These problems and such as these have not yet been solved by college librarians; but the college library, quite apart from the books in it, is an education in itself. The old days of neglect are past, the days reflected in the scandalous story—told of more than one college—about the old fellow who was missing for two months, and, after being searched for high and low, was found hanging dead in the college library. Now the libraries everywhere are being used continually, and men can realize in them, perhaps better than anywhere else, how great the past of Oxford has been, and can form some idea of the labours of forgotten generations, which have made the University what it was and what it is.
Every library has its treasures, to show the present generation how beautiful an old book can be which was produced in days when its production was not a mere publisher's speculation, but the work of a scholar seeking to promote knowledge and advance the cause of Truth. And it does not require much imagination for a student, in a building like Merton Library, to conjure up the picture of his mediaeval predecessor, sitting on his hard wooden bench, with his chained MSS. volume on the shelf above, and poring over the crabbed pages in the unwarmed, half-lighted chamber. If the picture brings with it the thought of the transitoriness of human endeavour, and if the words of the Teacher seem doubly true, "Of making of books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh," yet in the fresh life of young Oxford, such reflections are only salutary; pessimism, despair of humanity, are not vices likely to flourish among undergraduates in the healthy society of modern colleges.
Those only, it might be said, can properly reform the present who understand the past, and it is perhaps the spirit of the Merton Library, at once old and new, which has inspired the statesmen whom Merton has sent to take part in the government of Britain during the last half-century. Lord Randolph Churchill, the founder of Tory democracy, his present-day successor in the same role, Lord Birkenhead, and the ever young Lord Halsbury are men of the type which Walter de Merton wished to train, "for the service of God in Church and State," men who champion the existing order, but who are willing to develop and improve it on the old lines.
"Here at each coign of every antique street
A memory hath taken root in stone,
Here Raleigh shone."
L. JOHNSON.
It is a curious coincidence that three of the most troubled reigns of English history have been marked by double college foundations in Oxford. That of Henry VI, in spite of constant civil war, threatening or actual, saw the beginnings of All Souls' and of Magdalen; the short and sad reign of Mary Tudor restored to Oxford Trinity and St. John's; and in an earlier century the ministers of Edward II, the most unroyal of our Plantagenet kings, gave to Oxford Exeter and Oriel. The king himself was graciously pleased to accept the honour of the latter foundation, and his statue adorns the College Quad, along with that of Charles I, in whose day the whole College was rebuilt. The front may be compared architecturally with those of Wadham and of University, which date from about the same period (the first part of the seventeenth century), when, under the fostering care of Archbishop Laud, Oxford increased greatly in numbers, in learning, and in buildings. Though Oriel has neither the bold sweep of University nor the perfect proportions of Wadham, it yet is a pleasing building, at least in its front.
Like New College, Oriel is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and, also like New College, the name of "St. Mary's" early gave way to a popular nickname. The College at once on its foundation received the gift of a tenement called "L'Oriole," which occupied its present site, and its name has displaced the real style of the College in general use.
It is only fitting that, as in our picture, St. Mary's Church should be combined with Oriel, for the founder was Vicar of St. Mary's, and the presentation to that living has ever since been in the hands of the College. It was as a Fellow of Oriel that Newman became, in 1828, Vicar of St. Mary's, from the pulpit of which, during thirteen years, he moulded all that was best in the religious life of Oxford. The glorious spire of the church was still new when the College was founded.
Oriel and its chapel are among the places for religious pilgrimage in Oxford. As Lincoln draws from all parts of the world those who reverence the name of John Wesley, so the Oxford Movement and the Anglican Revival had their starting-point, and for some time their centre, in Oriel. The connection of the College with the Movement was not in either case a mere accident; the Oxford Revival, at any rate, was profoundly influenced by the personality of Newman, and Newman, both by attraction and by repulsion, was largely what Oriel made him. Among those who were with him at the College were Archbishop Whately, whose Liberalism repelled him, Hawkins, the Provost, whose views on "Tradition" began to modify the Evangelicalism in which he had been brought up, Keble, whose Christian Year did more for Church teaching in England than countless sermons, Pusey, already famous for his learning and his piety, who was to give his name to the Movement, and, slightly later, Church, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's, the historian of the Movement, and Samuel Wilberforce, who, as Bishop of Oxford, was to show how profoundly it would increase the influence of the English Church.
Such a combination of famous names at one time is hardly found in the history of any other college, and it would be easy to add others hardly less known, who were also members of the same body at that famous time. Hero-worshippers can still see the rooms where these great men lived, and the Common Room in which they met and argued, in the days when Oxford did less teaching and had more time for talking and for thinking than the busy, hurrying ways of the twentieth century allow. But Oriel has many other associations besides those of the Oxford Movement. Walter Raleigh, the most fascinating of Elizabethans, was a student there, and probably in Oxford met the great historian of travel and discovery, Richard Hakluyt (a Christ Church man), whose influence did so much to bring home to Oxford the wonders of the strange worlds beyond the seas. It was probably also through his connection with Oriel that Raleigh made the acquaintance of Harriot, who shared in his colonial ventures in Virginia, and who became the historian of that foundation, so full of importance as the beginning of the new England across the Atlantic. It was only fitting that the Raleigh of the nineteenth century, Cecil John Rhodes, should also be an Oriel man, who was never weary of acknowledging what he owed to Oxford, and who showed his faith in her by his works. The Rhodes' Foundation expends his millions in bringing scholars to Oxford from the whole world; already its influence has been great during its twenty years of existence; what it will be in the future, only the future can show. If Mr. Rhodes gave his millions to the University, he gave his tens of thousands to his old College. The result on the High Street is—to put it gently—not altogether happy; but perhaps time may soften the lines of Mr. Champney's somewhat uninspired front, though it is not likely to quicken interest in the statues of the obscure provosts which adorn it.
"The building, parent of my young essays,
Asks in return a tributary praise;
Pillars sublime bear up the learned weight,
And antique sages tread the pompous height."
TICKELL.
Queens's is one of the six oldest colleges in Oxford, and is far on to celebrating its sexcentenary, but it has purged itself of the Gothic leaven in its buildings more completely than any other Oxford foundation. It does not even occupy its own old site, for the building originally lay well back from the High Street. It was only the "civilities and kindnesses" of Provost Lancaster which induced the Mayor and Corporation of Oxford, in 1709, to grant to Queen's College "for 1,000 years," "so much ground on the High Street as shall be requisite for making their intended new building straight and uniform." And so the most important of "the streamlike windings of the glorious street" was in part determined by a corrupt bargain between "a vile Whig" (as Hearne calls this hated Provost) and a complaisant mayor. But much of the credit for the beauty of this part of the High must also be given to the architect of University College (seen in Plate IX on the left), who, whether by skill or by accident, combined at a most graceful angle the two quads, erected with an interval of some eighty years between them (1634 and 1719).
A man must, indeed, be a Gothic purist who would wish away the stately front quadrangle of Queen's, designed by Wren's favourite pupil, Hawkmoor, while the master himself is said to be responsible for the chapel of the College, the most perfect basilican church in Oxford.
If Queen's has been revolutionary in its buildings, it has been singularly tenacious of old customs. Its members still assemble at dinner to the sound of the trumpet (blown by a curious arrangement after grace has been said); it still keeps up the ancient and honoured custom of bringing in the boar's head—"the chief service of this land"—for dinner on Christmas Day; while on New Year's Day, the Bursar still, as has been done for nearly 600 years, bids his guests "take this and be thrifty," as he hands each a "needle and thread," wherewith to mend their academic hoods; the aiguille et fil is probably a pun on the name of the founder, Robert Eglesfield. The College at these festivities uses the loving, cup, given it by its founder, perhaps the oldest piece of plate in constant use anywhere in Great Britain; five and a half centuries of good liquor have stained the gold-mounted aurochs' horn to a colour of unrivalled softness and beauty.
Robert Eglesfield was almoner of the good Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III, and, like Adam de Brome, the founder of Oriel, he, too, commended his college to a royal patron. Ever since his time, the "Queen's College" has been under the patronage of the Queen's consort of England, and the connection has been duly acknowledged by many of them, especially by Henrietta Maria, the evil genius of Charles I, and by Queen Caroline, the good genius of George II. Her present Gracious Majesty, too, has recognized the college claim. The Queens Regnant have no obligations to the college, but Queen Elizabeth gave it the seal it still uses, and good Queen Anne was a liberal contributor to the rebuilding of the college in her day; her statue still adorns the cupola on the front to the High.
No doubt it was the royal connection which brought to Queen's, if tradition may be trusted, two famous warrior princes, the Black Prince and Henry V; though it is at least doubtful whether the Queen's poet, Thomas Tickell, Addison's flattering friend, had any authority for the picture he gives of their college life. He describes them as:
"Sent from the Monarch's to the Muses' Court,
Their meals were frugal and their sleeps were short;
To couch at curfew time they thought no scorn,
And froze at matins every winters morn."
The College has an interesting portrait of the great Henry, which may be authentic; but that of the Black Prince, which adorns the college hall, is known to have been painted from a handsome Oxford butcher's boy, in the eighteenth century. While we condemn the lack of historic sense in the Provost and Fellows of that day, we may at least acquit them of any intention of pacificist irony in their choice of a model.
Queen's has had better poets than Tickell on its rolls, but, by a curious chance, the two most eminent—Joseph Addison and William Collins—were both tempted away from their first college by the superior wealth and attractions of Magdalen.
The old local connections which were such a marked feature in the statutes of founders, and which so profoundly influenced Oxford down to the Commission of 1854, have been almost swept away at other colleges; but at Queen's they have always been strongly maintained. It has been, and is, emphatically, a north-country college. Not the least important factor in maintaining this tradition has been the great benefaction of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, fondly and familiarly known to all Queen's men as "Lady Betty." Steele wrote of her when young, that to "love her was a liberal education"; this may have been flattery, but her bounty, at any rate, has given a "liberal education" to hundreds of north-country men, who come up from the twelve schools of her foundation to her college at Oxford.
It is interesting to note in Modern Oxford, attempts to re-establish those local connections, which the wisdom of our ancestors established, and which the self-complacency of Victorian reformers "vilely cast away."
"There the kindly fates allowed
Me too room, and made me proud,
Prouder name I have not wist,
With the name of Wykehamist."
L. JOHNSON.
Among the "Founders" of Oxford colleges, three stand out pre-eminent —all three bishops of Winchester and great public servants. If Wolsey has undisputed claims for first place, there can be little doubt that, in spite of the great public services of Bishop Foxe, the Founder of Corpus, the second place must be assigned to William of Wykeham, "sometime Lord High Chancellor of England, the sole and munificent founder of the two St. Mary Winton colleges." Others, beside Wykehamists, hear with pleasure the magnificent roll of the titles of the Founder of New College, when one of his intellectual sons occupies the University pulpit, and gives thanks for "founders and benefactors, such as were William of Wykeham."
In Oxford, without doubt, his great claim to be remembered will be held to be his college with the school at Winchester, which he linked to it. But he was also a reformer and a champion of Parliamentary privilege in the days when the "Good Parliament" set to work to check the misgovernment of Edward III in his dotage, and, as an architect, he is equally famous as having given to Windsor Castle its present shape, and as having secured the final triumph of the Perpendicular style by his glorious nave at Winchester.
William of Wykeham is a very striking instance of what is too often Forgotten—viz., that in the Mediaeval Church all professional men, and not simply spiritual pastors, found their work and their reward in the ranks of the clergy. As "supervisor of the king's works," he earned the royal favour, which, after sixteen years of service, rewarded him with the rich bishopric of Winchester. Such a career and such a reward seem to modern ideas incongruous, even as they did to John Wycliffe, his great contemporary, who complained of men being made bishops because they were "wise in building castles." But many forms of service were needed to create England; Wykeham and Wycliffe both have a place in the roll of its "Makers." At all events, if Wykeham obtained his wealth by secular service, he spent it for the promoting of the welfare of the Church, as he conceived it. The purpose of his two colleges was to remedy the shortness of clergy in his day, and to assist the militia clericalis , which had been grievously reduced pestilentiis, guerris et aliis mundi miseriis (an obvious reference to the Black Death).
New College was planned on a scale of magnificence which far exceeded any of the earlier colleges. It was emphatically the "New College," [1] and its foundation (it was opened in 1386) marks the final triumph of the college system.
[1] The popular name has entirety displaced its official style. Rather more than a generation ago, an historically minded Wykehamist tried to revive the proper style of his college, and headed all his letters "The College, of St. Mary of Winchester, Oxford." The result was disastrous for him; the replies came to the Vicar of St. Mary's, to St. Mary's Hall, to Winchester, anywhere but to him; and very soon practical necessity overcame antiquarian, propriety.
Its Warden was to have a state corresponding to that of the great mitred abbots; the stables, where he kept his six horses, on the south side of New College Lane (to be seen in Plate X on the right), show, by their perfect masonry, how well the architect-bishop chose his materials and how skilfully they were worked.
The entrance tower, in the centre of the picture, with its statues of the Blessed Virgin and of the Founder in adoration below on her left, was the abode of the Warden; but his lodgings, still the most magnificent home in Oxford, extended in both directions from the tower.
Behind this front lay Wykeham's Quad, nestling under the shadow of the towering chapel and hall on the north side. Here also, as in the stables, the technical knowledge of the Founder is seen; his "chambers," after more than 500 years, have still their old stone unrenewed; while the third story, added 300 years later on (1674-5), has had to be entirely refaced.
But it is in the public buildings, and especially in the chapel, that the greatness of Wykeham, as an architect, is best seen. In spite of the destructive fanaticism of the Reformation, and the almost equally destructive "restorations" of the notorious Wyatt, and of Sir Gilbert Scott (who inexcusably raised the height of the roof), the chapel still is indisputably the finest in Oxford. And its glass may challenge a still wider field. The eight great windows in the ante-chapel, dating from the Founder's time, rival the glories of the French cathedrals; the windows of the chapel proper, whatever be thought of their artistic success, are a unique instance of what English glass-makers could do in the eighteenth century; and Sir Joshua Reynolds' west window (the outside of which is seen in the centre of the next picture) has at all events the suffrages of the majority, who agree with Horace Walpole that it is "glorious," and that "the sun shining through the transparencies has a magic effect." It must be added, however, that Walpole soon changed his mind, and was very severe on Sir Joshua's "washy virtues," which have been compared to "seven chambermaids."
Not the least interesting feature of the Founder's chapel is its detached bell-tower, seen in the next picture, on the north side of the cloisters. He obtained leave to place this on the city wall, a large section of which the College undertook to maintain-thus adding a permanent charm to their own garden.
The magnificence of the Founder Bishop is well seen in his splendid crozier, bequeathed to him by his college, and still preserved on the north side of the chapel. The results of his work, for Oxford and for learning, will be briefly told of in the next chapter.
"Round thy cloisters, in moonlight,
Branching dark, or touched with white:
Round old chill aisles, where, moon-smitten,
Blanches the Orate, written
Under each worn old-world face."
L. JOHHSON.
William of Wykeham's College had other marked features besides its magnificent scale. Previous colleges had grown; at New College everything was organized from the first. As the great architectural History of Cambridge says: "For the first time, chapel, hall, library, treasury, the Warden's lodgings, a sufficient range of chambers, the cloister, the various domestic offices, are provided for and erected without change of plan." The chapel especially gave the model for the T shape, a choir and transepts without a nave, which has become the normal form in Oxford. The influence of Wykeham's building plan may be traced elsewhere also—at Cambridge and even in Scotland.
In these well-planned buildings, definite arrangements were made for college instruction, as opposed to the general teaching open to the whole University; special informafores were provided, who were to supervise the work of all scholars up to the age of sixteen. This marks the beginning of the Tutorial System, which has ever since played so great a part in the intellectual life of England's two old Universities.
Wykeham's scholars all came from Winchester, and were supposed to be pauperes , but as one of the first, Henry Chichele, afterwards Henry V's Archbishop of Canterbury and the Founder of All Souls', was a son of the Lord Mayor of London, it is obvious that the qualification of "poverty" was interpreted with some laxity. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that others than Wykehamists were admitted as scholars.
The fact that a mere boy was elected to a position which provided for him for life was not calculated to stimulate subsequent intellectual activity, and Wykehamists themselves have been among the first to say that the intellectual distinction of the great bishop's beneficiaries has by no means corresponded to the magnificence of the foundation or the noble intentions of the Founder. Antony Wood records in the seventeenth century that there was already an "ugly proverb" as to New College men—"Golden scholars, silver Bachelors, leaden Masters, wooden Doctors," "which is attributed," he goes on, "to their rich fellowships, especially to their ease and good diet, in which I think they exceed any college else."
The nineteenth century has changed all this; the small and close college of pre-Commission days has become one of the largest and most intellectual in the University; but Winchester men in their Oxford college fully hold their own in every way against the scholars from the world outside, who are now admitted to share with them the advantages of Wykeham's foundation.
The bishop's careful provision, however, of good teaching at his school and in his college bore good fruit at first, whatever may have been the result later. If Corpus is especially the college of the revival of learning, New College had prepared the way, and the first Englishman to teach Greek in Oxford was the New College fellow, William Grocyn, whom Erasmus called the "most upright and best of all Britons." From the same college, about the same time, came the patron of Erasmus, Archbishop Warham, of whose saintly simplicity and love of learning he gives so attractive a picture. Warham was not forgetful of his old college, and presented the beautiful "linen fold" panelling which still adorns the hall.
At the time of the Reformation, New College was especially attached to the old form of the faith, and it has been maintained that the dangerous lowness of the wicket entrance in the Gate Tower was due to the deliberate purpose of the governing body, who resolved that everyone who entered the college, however Protestant his views, should bow his head under the statue of the Blessed Virgin above. At any rate, one New College man in the seventeenth century attributed his perversion to "the lively memorials of Popery in statues and pictures in the gates and in the chapel of New College."
Certain it is that under Elizabeth, after the purging of the college from its recusant fellows, who contributed a large share of the Roman controversialists to the colleges of Louvain and Douai, Wykeham's foundation sank, as has been said, into inglorious ease for two centuries. Yet, during this period, it had the honour of producing two of the Seven Bishops who resisted King James II's attack on the English Constitution—one of them the saintly hymn writer, Thomas Ken. And to the darkest days of the eighteenth century belongs the most famous picture of the ideal Oxford life: "I spent many years, in that illustrious society, in a well-regulated course of useful discipline and studies, and in the agreeable and improving commerce of gentlemen and of scholars; in a society where emulation without envy, ambition without jealousy, contention without animosity, incited industry and awakened genius; where a liberal pursuit of knowledge and a genuine freedom of thought was raised, encouraged, and pushed forward by example, by commendation, and by authority." These were the words of Bishop Lowth, whose great work on The Poetry of the Hebrews was delivered as lectures for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford.
The spirit of Oxford has never been better described, and even that bitter critic, the great historian Gibbon, admits that Lowth practised what he preached, and that he was an ornament to the University in its darkest period. Of the days of Reform a forerunner was found in Sydney Smith, the witty Canon of St. Paul's.
The names of New College men famous for learning or for political success, during the last half-century, are too recent to mention, but it is fitting to put on record that to New College belongs the sad distinction of having the longest Roll of Honour in the late War. It has lost about 250 of its sons, including four of the most distinguished young tutors in Oxford; History and Philosophy, Scholarship and Natural Science are all of them the poorer for the premature loss of Cheesman and Heath, Hunter and Geoffrey Smith; their names are familiar to everyone in Oxford, and they would have been familiar some day to the world of scholars everywhere. Dis aliter visum est .
"This is the chapel; here, my son,
Thy father dreamed the dreams of youth,
And heard the words, which, one by one,
The touch of life has turned to truth."
NEWBOLT.
The name of Lincoln College recalls a fact familiar to all students of ecclesiastical history, though surprising to the ordinary man—viz., that Oxford, till the Reformation, was in the great diocese of Lincoln, which stretched right across the Midlands from the Humber to the Thames. This fact had an important bearing on the history of the University; its bishop was near enough to help and protect, but not near enough to interfere constantly. Hence arose the curious position of the Oxford Chancellor, the real head of the mediaeval University and still its nominal head; though an ecclesiastical dignitary, and representing the Bishop, the Oxford Chancellor was not a cathedral official, but the elect of the resident Masters of Arts. How important this arrangement was for the independence of the University will be obvious.
The ecclesiastical position of Oxford is responsible also for the foundation of four of its colleges; both Lincoln and Brasenose, colleges that touch each other, were founded by Bishops of Lincoln; Foxe and Wolsey, too, though holding other sees later, ruled over the great midland diocese.
Richard Fleming, the Bishop of Lincoln, who founded the college that bears the name of his see, was in some ways a remarkable man. When resident in Oxford, he had been prominent among the followers of John Wycliffe and had shared his reforming views; but he was alarmed at the development of his master's teaching in the hands of disciples, and set himself to oppose the movement which he had once favoured. He founded his "little college" with the express object of training "theologians" "to defend the mysteries of the sacred page against those ignorant laics, who profaned with swinish snouts its most holy pearls." It is curious that Lincoln's great title to fame—and it is a very great one—is that its most distinguished fellow was John Wesley, the Wycliffe of the eighteenth century.
The connection of Oxford and Lincoln College with Wesley and his movement is no accidental one, based merely on the fact that he resided there for a certain time. Humanly speaking, Wesley's connection with Lincoln was a determining factor in his spiritual and mental development, and it was while he was there that his followers received the name of "Methodists," a name given in scorn, but one which has become a thing of pride to millions. Wesley was a fellow of Lincoln for nine years, from 1726 to 1735. During the most impressionable years of a man's life—he was only twenty-three when he was elected fellow—he was developing his mental powers by an elaborate course of studies, and his spiritual life by the careful use of every form of religious discipline which the Church prescribed. A college, with its daily services and its life apart from the world, rendered the practice of such discipline possible. It was because Wesley and his followers, his brother Charles, George Whitefield and others, observed this discipline so carefully that they obtained their nickname. It is with good reason that Lincoln Chapel is visited by his disciples from all parts of the world; it has been little altered since his time, his pulpit is still here, and the glass and the carving which make it very interesting, if not beautiful, are those which he saw daily.
The chapel is the memorial of the devotion to Lincoln of another churchman, more successful than Wesley from a worldly point of view, but now forgotten by all except professed students of history. John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln from 1621 to 1641, was the last ecclesiastic who "kept" the Great Seal of England. He had the misfortune to differ from Laud on the Church Question of the day, and was prosecuted before the Star Chamber for subornation of perjury, and heavily fined. There seems no doubt that he was guilty; but it was to advocacy of moderation and to his dislike of the king's arbitrary rule that he owed the severity of his punishment. Whatever his moral character, at all events he gave his college a beautiful little chapel, which is often compared to the slightly older one at Wadham; that of Lincoln is much the less spacious of the two, but in its wood carvings, at any rate, it is superior.
Lincoln had the ill-fortune, in the nineteenth century, to produce the writer of one of those academic "Memoirs," which reveal, with a scholar's literary style, and also with a scholar's bitterness, the intrigues and quarrels that from time to time arise within college walls. Mark Pattison is likely to be remembered by the world in general because he is said to have been the original of George Eliot's "Mr. Casaubon"; in Oxford he will be remembered not only for the "Memoirs," but also as one who upheld the highest ideal of "Scholarship" when it was likely to be forgotten, and who criticized the neglect of "research." The personal attacks were those of a disappointed man; the criticisms, one-sided as they were, were certainly not unjustified.
A university should certainly exist to promote learning, and Mark Pattison, with all his unfairness, certainly helped its cause in Oxford. But a university exists also for the promotion of friendships among young men, and for the development of their social life. Of this duty, Oxford has never been unmindful, and perhaps it is in small colleges like Lincoln that the flowers of friendship best flourish. It is needless to make comparisons, for they flourish everywhere; but it is appropriate to quote, when writing of one of the smaller Oxford colleges, the verses on this subject of a recent Lincoln poet (now dead); they will come home to every Oxford man:
"City of my loves and dreams,
Lady throned by limpid streams;
'Neath the shadow of thy towers,
Numbered I my happiest hours.
Here the youth became a man;
Thought and reason here began.
Ah! my friends, I thought you then
Perfect types of perfect men:
Glamour fades, I know not how,
Ye have all your failings now,"
But Oxford friendships outlast the discovery that friends have "failings"; as Lord Morley, who went to Lincoln in 1856, writes: "Companionship (at Oxford) was more than lectures"; a friend's failure later (he refers to his contemporary, Cotter Morison's Service of Man ) "could not impair the captivating comradeship of his prime."
"Where yearly in that vernal hour
The sacred city is in shades reclining,
With gilded turrets in the sunrise shining:
From sainted Magdalene's aerial tower
Sounds far aloof that ancient chant are singing,
And round the heart again those solemn memories bringing."
ISAAC WILLIAMS.
Macaulay was too good a Cambridge man to appreciate an Oxford college at its full worth; but he devotes one of his finest purple patches to the praise of Magdalen, ending, as is fitting, "with the spacious gardens along the river side," which, by the way, are not "gardens." Antony Wood praises Magdalen as "the most noble and rich structure in the learned world," with its water walks as "delectable as the banks of Eurotas, where Apollo himself was wont to walk." To go a century further back, the Elizabethan, Sir John Davies, wrote:
"O honeyed Magdalen, sweete, past compare
Of all the blissful heavens on earth that are."
Such praises could be multiplied indefinitely, and they are all deserved.
The good genius of Magdalen has been faithful to it throughout. The old picturesque buildings on the High Street, taken over (1457) by the Founder, William of Waynflete, from the already existing hospital of St. John, were completed by his munificence in the most attractive style of English fifteenth century domestic architecture; Chapel and Hall, Cloisters and Founder's Tower, all alike are among the most beautiful in Oxford. When classical taste prevailed, the architectural purists of the eighteenth century were for sweeping almost all this away, and had a plan prepared for making a great classic quad; but wiser counsels, or lack of funds, thwarted this vandalistic design, and only the north side of the new quad was built, to give Magdalen a splendid specimen of eighteenth century work, without prejudice to the old. And in our own day, the genius of Bodley has raised in St. Swithun's Quad a building worthy of the best days of Oxford, while the hideous plaster roof, with which the mischievous Wyatt had marred the beauty of the hall, was removed, and a seemly oak roof put in its place. It is a great thing to be thankful for, that one set of college buildings in Oxford, though belonging to so many periods, has nothing that is not of the best.
But the great glory of Magdalen has not yet been mentioned. This is, without doubt, its bell tower, which, standing just above the River Cherwell, is worthily seen, whether from near or far. A most curious and interesting custom is preserved in connection with it. Every May morning, at five o'clock (in Antony Wood's time the ceremony was an hour earlier), the choir mounts the tower and sings a hymn, which is part of the college grace; in the eighteenth century, however, the music was of a secular nature and lasted two hours. The ceremony has been made the subject of a great picture by Holman Hunt, and has been celebrated in many poems; the sonnet of Sir Herbert Warren, the present President, may be quoted as worthily expressing something of what has been felt by many generations of Magdalen men:
"Morn of the year, of day and May the prime,
How fitly do we scale the steep dark stair,
Into the brightness of the matin air,
To praise with chanted hymn and echoing chime,
Dear Lord of Light, thy sublime,
That stooped erewhile our life's frail weeds to wear!
Sun, cloud and hill, all things thou fam'st so fair,
With us are glad and gay, greeting the time.
The College of the Lily leaves her sleep,
The grey tower rocks and trembles into sound,
Dawn-smitten Memnon of a happier hour;
Through faint-hued fields the silver waters creep:
Day grows, birds pipe, and robed anew and crowned,
Green Spring trips forth to set the world aflower."
The tower was put to a far different use when, in the Civil War, it was the fortress against an attack from the east, and stones were piled on its top to overwhelm any invader who might force the bridge.
Tradition connects this tower with the name of Magdalen's greatest son, Thomas Wolsey, who took his B.A. about 1486, at the age of fifteen, as he himself in his old age proudly told his servant and biographer, Cavendish. Certainty he was first Junior and then Senior Bursar for a time, while the tower was building, 1492-1504. But the scandal that he had to resign his bursarship for misappropriation of funds in connection with the tower may certainly be rejected.
On the right of Magdalen Bridge, looking at the tower, as we see it in the picture, stretches Magdalen Meadow, round which run the famous water walks. The part of these on the north-west side is especially connected with Joseph Addison, who was a fellow at Magdalen from 1697 to 1711. He was elected "demy" (at Magdalen, scholars bear this name) the first year (1689) after the Revolution, when the fellows of Magdalen had been restored to their rights, so outrageously invaded by King James. This "golden" election was famous in Magdalen annals, at once for the number elected—seventeen—and for the fame of some of those elected. Besides the greatest of English essayists, there were among the new "demies," a future archbishop, a future bishop, and the high Tory, Henry Sacheverell, whose fiery but unbalanced eloquence overthrew the great Whig Ministry, which had been the patron of his college contemporary.
Magdalen Meadow preserves still the well-beloved Oxford fritillaries, which are in danger of being extirpated in the fields below Iffley by the crowds who gather them to sell in the Oxford market.
Of the part of the College on the High Street, the most
interesting portion is the old stone pulpit (shown in Plate XIV). The connection of this with the old Hospital
of St. John is still marked by the custom of having the University
sermon here on St. John the Baptist's Day; this was the invariable
rule till the eighteenth century, and the pulpit (Hearne says) was
"all beset with boughs, by way of allusion to St. John Baptist's
preaching in the wilderness." Even as early as Heame's time,
however, a wet morning drove preacher and audience into the chapel,
and open-air sermons were soon given up altogether, only to be
revived (weather permitting) in our own day.
The chapel lies to the left of the pulpit, and is known all the
world over for its music; there are three famous choirs in
Oxford—those of the Cathedral, of New College, and of
Magdalen, and to the last, as a rule, the palm is assigned. It is
to Oxford what the choir of King's is to Cambridge; but the chapel
of Magdalen has not
"The high embowed roof
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light"
of the "Royal Saint's" great chapel at Cambridge.
"Sing sweetly, blessed babes that suck the breast
Of this sweet nectar-dropping Magdalen,
Their praise in holy hymns, by whom ye feast,
The God of gods and Waynflete, best of men,
Sing in an union with the Angel's quires,
Sith Heaven's your house."
SIR J. DAVIES.
Magdalen College was founded by William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, who had been a faithful minister of Henry VI. He had served as both Master and Provost of the King's own college at Eton (and also as Master of Winchester College before), and from Eton he brought the lilies which still figure in the Magdalen shield. As a member of the Lancastrian party, he fell into disgrace when the Yorkists triumphed, but he made his peace with Edward IV, whose statue stands over the west door of the chapel, with those of St. Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist, St. Swithun (Bishop of Winchester), and the Founder. And the Tudors were equally friendly to the new foundation; Prince Arthur, Henry VIII's unfortunate elder brother, was a resident in Magdalen on two occasions, and the College has still a splendid memorial of him in the great contemporary tapestry, representing his marriage with Catharine of Aragon.
To the very early days of Magdalen belongs its connection with the Oxford Reform Movement and the Revival of Learning. Both Fox and Wolsey, successively Bishops of Winchester, and the munificent founders of Corpus and of Cardinal (i.e. Christ Church) Colleges, were members of Waynflete's foundation) and so probably was John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, whose learning and piety so impressed Erasmus. "When I listen to my beloved Colet," he writes in 1499, "I seem to be listening to Plato himself"; and he asks—why go to Italy when Oxford can supply a climate "as charming as it is healthful" and "such culture and learning, deep, exact and worthy of the good old times ?" Erasmus' praise of Oxford climate is unusual from a foreigner; the more usual view is that of his friend Vives, who came to Oxford soon after as a lecturer at the new college of Corpus Christi; he writes from Oxford: "The weather here is windy, foggy and damp, and gave me a rough reception."
Colet's lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, perhaps delivered in Magdalen College, marked an epoch in the way of the interpretation of Holy Scripture, by their freedom from traditional methods and by their endeavour to employ the best of the New Learning in determining the real meaning of the Apostle. To the same school as Colet in the Church belonged Reginald Pole, Archbishop in the gloomy days of Queen Mary, the only Magdalen man who has held the See of Canterbury.
Elizabeth visited the College, and gently rebuked the Puritan tendencies of the then President, Dr. Humphrey, who carried his scruples so far as to object to the academical scarlet he had to wear as a Doctor of Divinity, because it savoured of the "Scarlet Woman." "Dr. Humphrey," said the queen, with the tact alike of a Tudor sovereign and of a true woman, "methinks this gown and habit become you very well, and I marvel that you are so strait-laced on this point—but I come not now to chide." This President complained that his headship was "more payneful than gayneful," a charge not usually brought against headships at Oxford.
In the seventeenth century, Magdalen was, for a short time, the very centre of England's interest. James II, in his desire to force Roman Catholicism on Oxford, tried to fill the vacant Presidency with one of his co-religionists. His first nominee was not only disqualified under the statutes, but was also a man of so notoriously bad a character that even the king had to drop him. Meanwhile, the fellows, having waited, in order to oblige James, till the last possible moment allowed by the statutes, filled up the vacancy by electing one of their own number, John Hough. When the king pronounced this election irregular and demanded the removal of the President and the acceptance of his second nominee, the fellows declared themselves unable thus to violate their statutes, even at royal command, and were accordingly driven out. The "demies," who were offered nominations to the fellowships thus rendered vacant, supported their seniors, and, in their turn, too, were driven out; they had showed their contempt for James' intruded fellows by "cocking their hats" at them, and by drinking confusion to the Pope. When the landing of William of Orange was threatening, James revoked all these arbitrary proceedings, but it was too late; he had brought home, by a striking example, to Oxford and to England, that no amount of past services, no worthiness of character, no statutes, however clear and binding, were to weigh for a moment with a royal bigot, who claimed the power to "dispense" with any statutes. The "Restoration" of the Fellows on October 25, 1688, is still celebrated by a College Gaudy, when the toast for the evening is jus suum cuique .
Hough remained President for thirteen years, during most of which time he was bishop—first of Oxford and then of Lichfield. He finally was translated to Worcester, where he died at the age of ninety-three, after declining the Archbishopric of Canterbury. His monument, in his cathedral, records his famous resistance to arbitrary authority.
Magdalen in the eighteenth century has an unenviable reputation, owing to the memoirs of its most famous historian, Edward Gibbon, who matriculated, in 1752, and who describes the fourteen months which elapsed before he was expelled for becoming a Roman Catholic, "as the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." The "Monks of Magdalen," as he calls the fellows, "decent, easy men," "supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder." It should be added that Gibbon was not quite fifteen when he entered the College, and that his picture of it is no doubt coloured by personal bitterness. But its substantial justice is admitted. Certainly, nothing could be feebler than the Vindication of Magdalen College , published by a fellow James Hurdis, the Professor of Poetry; his intellectual calibre may perhaps be gauged from the exquisite silliness of his poem, "The Village Curate," of which the following lines, addressed to the Oxford heads of houses, are a fair specimen:
"Ye profound
And serious heads, who guard the twin retreats
Of British learning, give the studious boy
His due indulgence. Let him range the field,
Frequent the public walk, and freely pull
The yielding oar. But mark the truant well,
And if he turn aside to vice or folly,
Show him the rod, and let him feel you prize
The parent's happiness, the public good."
Magdalen might fairly claim that a place so beautiful as it is, justifies itself by simply existing, and the perfection of its buildings and the beauty of its music must appeal, even to our own utilitarian age. But it has many other justifications besides its beauty; its great wealth is being continually applied to assist the University by the endowment of new professorships, especially for the Natural Sciences, and to aid real students, whether those who have made, or those who are likely to make, a reputation as researchers. It is needless to mention names: every Oxford man and every lover of British learning knows them.
For the world in general, which cares not for research, the success of the College under its present President, Sir Herbert Warren, himself at once a poet and an Oxford Professor of Poetry, will be evidenced by its increase in numbers and by its athletic successes. They will judge as our King judged when he chose Magdalen for the academic home of the Prince of Wales. The Prince, unlike other royal persons at Magdalen and elsewhere, lived (1912-14) not in the lodgings of the President, or among dons and professors, but in his own set of rooms, like any ordinary undergraduate. He showed, in Oxford, that power of self-adaptation which has since won him golden opinions in the great Dominion and the greater Republic of the West.
"Of the colleges of Oxford, Exeter is the most
proper for western, Queen's for northern, and
Brasenose for north-western men."
FULLER, Worthies.
Brasenose college is in the very centre of the University, fronting as it does on Radcliffe Square, where Gibbs' beautiful dome supplies the Bodleian with a splendid reading-room. And this site has always been consecrated to students; where the front of Brasenose now stands ran School Street, leading from the old Scholae Publicae , in which the disputations of the Mediaeval University were held, to St. Mary's Church.
It was from this neighbourhood that some Oxford scholars migrated to Stamford in 1334, in order to escape one of the many Town and Gown rows, which rendered Mediaeval Oxford anything but a place of quiet academic study. They seem to have carried with them the emblem of their hall, a fine sanctuary knocker of brass, representing a lion's head, with a ring through its nose; this knocker was installed at a house in Stamford, which still retains the name it gave, "Brasenose Hall." The knocker itself was there till 1890, when the College recovered the relic (it now hangs in the hall). The students were compelled by threats of excommunication to return to their old university, and down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Oxford men, when admitted to the degree of M.A., were compelled to swear "not to lecture at Stamford."
The old "King's Hall," which bore the name of "Brasenose," was transformed into a college in 1511 by the munificence of our first lay founder, Sir Richard Sutton; he shared his benevolence, however, with Bishop Smith, of Lincoln. The College celebrated, in 1911, its quatercentenary in an appropriate way, by publishing its register in full, with a group of most interesting monographs on various aspects of the College history.
The buildings are a good example of the typical Oxford college; the Front Quad, shown in our picture, belongs to the time of the Founders, but the picturesque third story of dormer windows, which give it a special charm, dates from the reign of James I, when all colleges were rapidly increasing their numbers and their accommodation. Of the rest of the buildings of Brasenose, the chapel deserves special notice, for it was the last effort of the Gothic style in Oxford, and it was actually finished in the days of Cromwell, not a period likely to be favourable to the erection of new college chapels.
Brasenose (or B.N.C., as it is universally called) has produced a prime minister of England in Henry Addington, whom the college record kindly describes as "not the most distinguished" statesman who has held that position: but a much better known worthy is John Foxe, the Martyrologist, whose chained works used to add a grim charm of horror to so many parish churches in England; the experiences of the young Macaulay, at Cheddar, are an example which could be paralleled by those of countless young readers of Foxe, who, however, did not become great historians and are forgotten. Somewhat junior to Foxe, at B.N.C., was Robert Burton, the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy , who found both his lifework as a parish vicar, and his burial-place in Oxford.
But these names, and the names of many other B.N.C. worthies, hardly attain to the first rank in the annals of England's life. The distinguishing features of the College have long been its special connection with the Palatine counties, Lancashire and Cheshire, and its prominence in the athletic life which is so large a part of Oxford's attraction. To the connection with Lancashire, B.N.C. owes the name of its college boat, "The Child of Hale"; for John Middleton, the famous, giant, who is said to have been 9 ft. 3 in. high (perhaps measurements were loose when James I was king), was invited by the members of his county to visit the College, where he is said to have left a picture of his hand; this the ever curious Pepys paid 2s. to see. A more profitable connection between Lancashire and B.N.C. is the famous Hulmeian endowment, which is almost a record instance of the value of the unearned increment of land to a learned foundation.
The rowing men of Brasenose are as famous as the scholars of Balliol. The poet parodist, half a century ago, described her as:
"Queen of the Isis wave,
Who trains her crews on beef and beer,
Competitors to brave,"
and the lines written in jest were a true compliment. The young manhood of England had maintained its vigour by its love of athletics, and has learned, in the discipline of the athletic club, how to obey and also how to command. Hence it was fitting that to B.N.C. should fall the honour of giving to Britain her greatest soldier in the Great War; Lord Haig of Bemerside was an undergraduate member of the College in the 'eighties of the last century, and the College has honoured him and itself by making him an Honorary Fellow.
Most Oxford colleges have their quaint and distinctive customs; that of Brasenose was certainly not inappropriate to the character that has just been sketched. Every Shrove Tuesday some junior member of the College presented verses to the butler in honour of Brasenose ale, and received a draught in return. The custom is recorded by Hearne more than two hundred years ago, and may well be older, though, as the poet of the Quatercentenary sadly confessed, its attribution to King Alfred—
"Our woven fantasy of Alfred's ale,
By conclusive cut of critic dry,
Is shredded clean away."
The most distinguished poet who thus commemorated the special drink of England and of B.N.C. was Reginald Heber, bishop and hymn-writer, who composed the verses in 1806; the compositions have been collected and published at least three times. When the old brew-house was pulled down to make room for the New Quad, the College gave up brewing its own beer, and its poets ceased to celebrate it; but the custom was revived, as has been said, in 1909. It may be permitted to a non-Brasenose man to quote and echo the patriotic expressions of the versifier of 1886:
"Shall Brasenose, therefore, fail to hold her own?
She nerves herself, anew, for coming strife,
Her vigorous pulses beat with strength and life.
Courage, my brothers! Troubles past forget!
On to fresh deeds! the gods love Brasenose yet."
"But still the old quadrangle keeps the same,
The pelican is here;
Ancestral genius of the place, whose name
All Corpus men revere."
J. J. C., in "The Pelican Record," 1700.
Corpus is emphatically, before all other colleges in Oxford, the college of the Revival of Learning; its very foundation marked the change from the old order of things to the new. Its Founder, Bishop Foxe, of Winchester, was one of the great statesman-prelates to whom mediaeval England owed so much, and he had a leading share in arranging the two royal marriages which so profoundly affected the history of our country, that of Henry VII's daughter, Margaret, with the King of Scotland, and that of his son, afterwards Henry VIII, with Catharine of Aragon.
After a life spent "in the service of God" "in the State," rather than "in the Church," Foxe resolved to devote some of his great wealth to a foundation for the strengthening of the Church. His first intention was to found a college for monks, but, fortunately for his memory and for Oxford, he followed the advice of his friend, Bishop Oldham, of Exeter, who told him, in words truly prophetic, that the days of monasteries were past: "What, my lord, shall we build housed for a company of buzzing 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." In the next generation the monasteries were all swept away, while Foxe's College remains a monument of the Founder's pious liberality and of his friend's wise prescience.
Corpus was the first institution in England where definite provision was made for a teacher of the Greek Language, and Erasmus hailed it with enthusiasm; in a letter to the first President of the new college, he definitely contrasts the conciliatory methods of Reformers in England with the more violent methods of those in Germany, and counts Foxe's foundation, which he compares to the Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes, among "the chief glories of Britain."
Foxe, however, did not confine his benefactions to classical studies, important as these were. He imported a German to teach his scholars mathematics, and the scientific tastes of his students are well illustrated by the picturesque and curious dial, still in the centre of his College Quad, which was constructed by one of them in the reign of Elizabeth. It is well shown in our picture, as are also Foxe's charming low buildings, almost unaltered since the time of their Founder.
But it has been on the humanistic, rather than on the scientific, side that Corpus men have specially distinguished themselves. The first century of the College existence produced the two great Elizabethan champions of Anglicanism. Bishop Jewel, whose "Apology" was for a long period the great bulwark of the English Church against Jesuit attacks, had laid the foundations of his great learning in the Corpus Library, still—after that of Merton—the most picturesque in Oxford; he often spent whole days there, beginning an hour before Early Mass, i.e. at 4 a.m., and continuing his reading till 10 p.m. "There were giants on the earth in those days." Even more famous is the "judicious Hooker," who resided in the college for sixteen years, and only left it when, by the wiles of a woman, he, "like a true Nathanael who feared no guile" (as his biographer, Isaac Walton, writes), was entrapped into a marriage which "brought him neither beauty nor fortune." The first editor of his great work, The Ecclesiastical Polity , was a Corpus man, and it was only fitting that the Anglican Revival of the nineteenth century should receive its first impulse from the famous Assize Sermon (in 1833) of another Corpus scholar, John Keble.
Corpus has been singularly fortunate in its history, no doubt because its Presidents have been so frequently men of mark for learning and for character. Even in the dark period of the eighteenth century it recovered sooner than the rest of the University, and one of its sons records complacently that "scarcely a day passed without my having added to my stock of knowledge some new fact or idea." A charming picture of the life of the scholars of Corpus at the beginning of the last century is given in Stanley's Life of Arnold ; for the famous reformer of the English public-school system was at the College immediately after John Keble, whom he followed as fellow to Oriel, on the other side of the road. It need hardly be added that in those days an Oriel Fellowship was the crown of intellectual distinction in Oxford.
Bishop Foxe had set up his college as a "ladder" by which, "with one side of it virtue and the other knowledge," men might, while they "are strangers and pilgrims in this unhappy and dying world," "mount more easily to heaven." Changing his metaphor he goes on, "We have founded and raised up in the University of Oxford a hive wherein scholars, like intelligent bees, may, night and day, build up wax to the glory of God, and gather honeyed sweets for their own profit and that of all Christian men." So far as it is given to human institutions to succeed, his college has fulfilled his aims.
"Those voiceless towers so tranquil seem,
And yet so solemn in their might,
A loving heart could almost deem
That they themselves might conscious be
That they were filled with immortality."
F. W. FABER.
The east end of Oxford Cathedral, shown both in the frontispiece (Plate I) and Plate XVII, probably contains the oldest buildings, above ground, in Oxford. Inside the cathedral can clearly be seen traces of three round arches, which may well be part of the church founded by St. Frideswyde in the eighth century. That princess, according to the tradition, the details of which are all pictured by Burne-Jones in the east window of the Latin Chapel, having escaped by a miracle the advances of too ardent a suitor, founded a nunnery at Oxford. The nunnery, which was later transferred to Canons, was undoubtedly the earliest institution in Oxford, and in its cloisters, in the second decade of the twelfth century, we hear of students gathering for instruction. It was this old monastery, which Wolsey, with his reforming zeal, chose as the site of his great Cardinal College, and the chapel of the old foundation was to serve for his new one, until such time as a great new chapel, rivalling in splendour that of King's College at Cambridge, had been built on the north side of Tom Quad. This new chapel never got beyond the stage of foundations; and hence the old building has continued to serve the college till this day, having been made also the cathedral of the new diocese of Oxford, which was founded by King Henry VIII. Wolsey may, perhaps, be credited with the fine fan tracery of the choir roof, but he certainly swept away three bays of the nave in order to carry out his ambitious building plans, and only one of these three bays has been restored in the nineteenth century.
Wolsey's action at Christ Church was significant. Men felt that the days of monasteries were past, and the Church was ready to welcome and to extend the New Learning. But his changes were a dangerous precedent; as Fuller says with his usual quaintness: "All the forest of religious foundations in England did shake, justly fearing the King would finish to fell the oaks, seeing the Cardinal began to cut the underwood." Henry, however, when he swept away the monasteries, spared his great minister's work; modifying it, however, as has just been said, by associating the newly-founded college with the diocese of Oxford, now formed out of the unwieldy See of Lincoln.
The cathedral is the smallest in England, but contains many features of special interest; its most marked peculiarity is the great breadth of the choir, due to the addition of two aisles on the north side; these were built to gain more room for the worshippers at the shrine of St. Frideswyde. Another feature of architectural interest is the spire, which is one of the earliest in England. But perhaps even more interesting is the wonderful series of glass windows, which give good examples of almost every English style from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. And for once the moderns can hold their own; the Burne-Jones windows of the choir (not, however, the Frideswyde window, already mentioned) are particularly beautiful.
The hand of the "restorer" has been active at Christ Church, as elsewhere in Oxford; Gilbert Scott took on himself to remove a fine fourteenth-century window from the east end of the choir, and to substitute the Norman work shown in Plate I. The effect is admittedly good, but it may be questioned whether it be right to falsify architectural history in this way.
Oxford Cathedral has great associations apart from the college to which it belongs. It was to it that Cranmer was brought to receive the Pope's sentence of condemnation, and in the cloisters the ceremony of his degradation from the archbishopric was carried out. Almost a century later the Cathedral was the centre of the religious life of the Royalist party; when Charles I made his capital in Oxford and his home in Christ Church, and when the Cavaliers fought to the war-cry of "Church and King." It is not surprising that, when the Parliamentarians entered Oxford, the windows of the Cathedral were much "abused"; that so much old glass was spared was probably due to the local patriotism of old Oxford men.
In the next century it was to Christ Church that Bishop Berkeley, the greatest of British philosophers, retired to end his days, and to find a burial-place; and, during the long life of Dr. Pusey, the Cathedral of Oxford was a place of pilgrimage, as the living centre of the Oxford movement.
In the back of the picture (Plate XVII), behind the Cathedral, rises the square tower, put up by Mr. Bodley to contain the famous Christ Church peal of bells (now twelve in number), familiar through Dean Aldrich's famous round, "Hark, the bonny Christ Church bells." When the tower was erected, it was the subject of much criticism, especially from the witty pen of C. L. Dodgson, the world-famous creator of Alice in Wonderland . The opening paragraph is a fair specimen:
"Of the etymological significance of the new belfry, Christ Church.
"The word 'belfry' is derived from the French ' bel — beautiful, meet,' and from the German ' frei —free, unfettered, safe.' Thus the word is strictly equivalent to 'meat-safe,' to which the new belfry bears a resemblance so perfect as almost to amount to coincidence."
Others saw in the uncompromising squareness of the new tower a subtle compliment to the Greek lexicon of Liddell, who then was Dean. But in spite of the wits, who resented any innovation in so famous a group of buildings, Bodley's tower is a fine one, and really enhances the effect of Tom Quad.
"And love the high-embowed roof
With antique pillars massy proof."
MILTON
When Wolsey began to build what he intended to be the most splendid college in the world, the first part to be finished was the dining-hall, with the kitchen. The wits of the time made very merry at this: their epigram Egregium opus! Cardinalis iste instituit collegium et absolvit popinam may be rendered:
"Here's a fine piece of work! Your Cardinal
A college plans, completes a guzzling-hall."
Certainly the hall of Christ Church is the finest "popina" which has ever been abused by envious critics; its size and magnificence place it easily first among the halls of Oxford, and its great outline stands conspicuous in all views of Oxford from the south, whether by day, or when by night, to quote M. Arnold's "Thyrsis":
"The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall"
shines afar. And the kitchen, a perfect cube in shape, is worthy
of the hall which it feeds, and is, perhaps, more appreciated by
many of Oxford's visitors; for the taste for meringues is more
common than that for masterpieces of portraiture. The report to
Wolsey, in 1526, by his agent, the Warden of New College, is still
true; the kitchen is "substantially and goodly done, in such manner
as no two of the best colleges in Oxford have rooms so goodly and
convenient."
The approach to the hall, seen in Plate XVIII,
is later than Wolsey's work, but is fully worthy of him. The
beautiful fan tracery, which hardly suffers by being compared with
Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster, was put up, extraordinary as it
may seem, in the middle of the seventeenth century, by the elder
Dean Fell; all we know of its origin is that it was the work of
"Smith, an artificer of London," surely the most modest architect
who ever designed a masterpiece. The staircase itself is later, the
work of the notorious Wyatt, who for once meddled with a great
building without spoiling it.
The history of Christ Church is very largely the history of the University of Oxford. It is still our wealthiest and largest foundation, although the disproportion between it and other colleges is by no means so great as it once was; and, thanks to its having been ruled by a series of famous and energetic deans, its periods of inglorious inactivity have been fewer than those of most other colleges. The roll of deans contains such names as those of John Owen, the most famous of Puritan preachers, John Fell, theologian and founder of the greatness of the Oxford Press, Henry Aldrich, universally accomplished as scholar, logician, musician, architect, Francis Atterbury, Jacobite and plotter, Cyril Jackson, who ruled Christ Church with a rod of iron, and who ranks first among the creators of nineteenth-century Oxford, Thomas Gaisford and Henry George Liddell, great Greek scholars. It seems that a college gains something by having its head appointed from outside; the Dean at Christ Church is appointed by the Crown.
The importance of Christ Church is especially seen in its hall, through its collection of portraits. It is not only that this is superior to that of any one other college; it may well be doubted if the combined efforts of all the colleges could produce a collection equal to that of Christ Church in artistic merit, or superior to it in historical importance. The prime ministers of England, of whom Christ Church claims twelve (nine of them in the last century), are represented among others by George Grenville, the unfortunate author of the Stamp Act, George Canning, who called "the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old," and W. E. Gladstone; among the eight Christ Church men who have been Governor-Generals of India, the Marquess Wellesley stands out pre-eminent; Christ Church has sent five archbishops to Canterbury and nine to York; there is a portrait in the hall of Wake, the most famous of the holders of the See of Canterbury. Lord Mansfield's picture worthily represents the learning and impartiality of the English Bench. But even more interesting than any of those already mentioned are the portraits of John Locke, who was philosopher enough to forgive Christ Church for obeying James II and expelling him, of William Penn, presented, as was fitting, by the American state that bears his name, of John Wesley and of Dr. Pusey, whose names will be for ever associated with the two greatest of Oxford's religious movements. And it may well be hoped that C. L. Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll") will delight children for many generations to come, as he has delighted those of the last half-century, by his Alice and her "Adventures."
An interest, rather historical than personal, attaches to the group portrait that occupies a position of honour over the fireplace; it represents the three Oxford divines—John Fell (already mentioned), Dolben, who later was Archbishop of York, and Allestree, afterwards Provost of Eton, who braved the penal law against churchmen by reading the forbidden Church Service daily all through the time of the Commonwealth.
Nowhere, so much as in Christ Church, is the poet's description of Oxford appropriate; her students may:
"Stand, in many an ancient hall,
Where England's greatest deck the wall,
Prelate and Statesman, prince and poet;
Who hath an ear, let him hear them call."
"Those twins of learning, which he raised in you,
Ipswich and Oxford, one of which fell with him;
The other, though unfinished, yet so famous,
So excellent in art, and still so rising,
That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue."
SHAKESPEARE, Henry VIII.
Oxford is described by Matthew Amold as,
"Beautiful city, with her dreaming spires,"
yet it is for her towers, especially, that she is famous. Glorious as St. Mary's is, it certainly does not surpass Magdalen Tower; and it may well be doubted whether the genius of Wren has not excelled both Magdalen and St. Mary's in "Tom" Tower. Gothic purists, of course, do not like it. There is a well-authenticated story of a really great architect who, in the early days of the twentieth century, was asked to submit a scheme for its repair; after long delay he sent in a plan for an entirely new tower on correct Gothic lines, because (as he wrote) no one would wish to preserve "so anomalous a structure" as Tom Tower. The world, however, does not agree with the minute critics; it is easy to find fault with the details of "Tom," but in proportion, in dignity, in suitability to his position, the greatest qualities that can be required in any building, "Tom" is pre-eminent. This is the more to be wondered at, as the tower was erected a century and a half after the great gateway which it crowns.
The genius of Wolsey had planned a magnificent front, but only a little more than half of it was completed when Henry VIII ended the career of his greatest servant, and altered the plans of the most glorious college in Europe. It was not till the period just before the Civil War that the northern part of the front of Christ Church was built by the elder Dean Fell, and the work was only completed when his son, the famous Dr. Fell, doomed to eternal notoriety by the well-known rhymes about his mysterious unpopularity, employed Wren to build the gate tower. Yet the whole presents one harmonious design, worthy of the most famous of Oxford founders and of the greatest of British architects. It is fitting that it should be Wolsey's statue which adorns the gate—a statue given by stout old Jonathan Trelawny, one of the Seven Bishops, whose name is perpetuated by the refrain of Hawker's spirited ballad, which deceived even Macaulay as to its authenticity:
"And must Trelawny die?
Then thirty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why."
Tom Tower appeals to Oxford men through more than one of their senses; it is a most conspicuous object in every view; and in it is hung the famous bell, "Great Tom," the fourth largest bell in England, weighing over seven tons. This once belonged to Osney Abbey, when it was dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, and bore the legend:
"In Thomae laude resono Bim Bom sine fraude."
It was transplanted to Christ Church in the reign of Queen Mary, and at the time it was proposed to rechristen it "Pulcra Maria," in honour at once of the Queen and of the Blessed Virgin; but the old name prevailed. Every night but one, from May 29, 1684, until the Great War silenced him, Tom has sounded out, after 9 p.m., his 101 strokes, as a signal that all should be within their college walls; the number is the number of the members of the foundation of Christ Church in 1684, when the tower was finished. During the war Tom was forbidden to sound, along with all other Oxford bells and clocks, for might not his mighty voice have guided some zeppelin or German aeroplane to pour down destruction on Oxford? Few things brought home more to Oxford the meaning of the Armistice than hearing Tom once more on the night of November 11, 1918.
A patriotic tradition claims for Tom the honour of having inspired Milton's lines in "Il Penseroso":
"Hear the far-off curfew sound
Over some wide-watered, shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar."
But it is difficult to believe this; Milton's connection with Oxford does not get nearer than Forest Hill, and blow the west wind as hard as it would, it could scarcely make Tom's voice reach so far. And the "wide-watered shore" is only appropriate to Oxford in flood time, the very last season when a poet would wish to remember it.
The view in Plate XX of the tower is taken from the front of Pembroke, and must have been often admired by Oxford's devoted son, Samuel Johnson, when, as a poor scholar of Pembroke, "he was generally to be seen (says his friend. Bishop Percy) lounging at the college gate, with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with his wit and keeping from their studies."
"An English home—gray twilight poured
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep, all things in order stored,
The haunt of ancient Peace."
TENNYSON, Palace of Art.
St. John's shares with Trinity and Hertford the distinction of having been twice founded. As the Cistercian College of St. Bernard, it owed its origin to Archbishop Chichele, the founder of All Souls', and it continued to exist for a century as a monastic institution. At the Reformation it was swept away with other monastic foundations by the greed of Henry VIII, but it was almost immediately refounded, in the reign of Mary, by Sir Thomas White, one of the greatest of London's Lord Mayors. In all these respects it has an exact parallel in Trinity, which had existed as a Benedictine foundation, being then called "Durham College," and which was refounded, in the same dark period of English History, by another eminent Londoner, Sir Thomas Pope. It is characteristic of England and of the English Reformation that men, who were undoubtedly in sympathy with the old form of the Faith, yet gave their wealth and their labours to found institutions which were to serve English religion and English learning under the new order of things.
For the first generation after the Founder, St. John's was torn by the quarrels between those who wished to undo the work of the Reformation altogether, and those who wished to carry it further and to destroy the continuity of English Church tradition. The final triumph of the Anglican "Via Media" was the work, above all others, of William Laud, who came up as scholar to St. John's in 1590, and who, for most of the half century that followed, was the predominant influence in the life of the University. First in his own college and then in Oxford generally, he secured the triumph of his views on religious doctrine and order. Of these, it is not the place to speak here, nor yet of Laud's services to Oxford as the restorer of discipline, the endower and encourager of learning, the organizer of academic life, whose statutes were to govern Oxford for more than two centuries; but it is indisputable that Laud takes one of the highest places on the roll of benefactors, both to the University as a whole and to his own college.
It was fitting that one who did so much for St. John's should leave his mark on its buildings; the inner quadrangle was largely built by him, and it owes to him its most characteristic features, the two classic colonnades on its east and west sides, and the lovely garden front, one of the three most beautiful things in Oxford: the north-east corner of this is shown in Plate XXI.
Laud's building work was done between 1631 and 1635, and in 1636 Charles I and his Queen visited Oxford and were entertained in the newly-finished college. Much bad verse was written on this event, two lines of which as a specimen may be quoted from the quaintly-named poem, "Parnassus Biceps":
"Was I not blessed with Charles and Mary's name,
Names wherein dwells all music? 'Tis the same."
The part of the entertainment to royalty on which the Archbishop specially prided himself was the play of The Hospital of Lovers, which was performed entirely by St. John's men, without "borrowing any one actor." Laud goes on to observe that, when the Queen borrowed the dresses and the scenery, and had it played over again by her players at Hampton Court, it was universally acknowledged that the professionals did not come up to the amateurs—a truly surprising and somewhat incredible verdict. St. John's, however, was always strong in dramatic ability; Shirley, the last great representative of the Elizabethan tradition, was a student there, and the library has the rare distinction of having possessed longest the same copy of the works of Shakespeare; it still has the second folio, presented in 1638, by one of the fellows. St. John's connection with the lighter side of literature has lasted to our own day; the most famous of Oxford parodies is still the Oxford Spectator, which has not been surpassed by any of its many imitators in the last half century.
Other colleges, however, might challenge the supremacy of St. John's in the humours of literature.. In the richness and beauty of its garden it stands unrivalled, whether quantity or quality be the basis of comparison. It is not only that before the east front, seen in Plate XXI, stretches the largest garden in Oxford; thanks to the skill and the care of the present garden-master, the Rev. H. J. Bidder, this shows from month to month, as the pageant of summer goes on, what wealth of colour and variety of bloom the English climate can produce. It may be said to be laid out on Bacon's rule: "There ought to be gardens for all months in the year, in which severally things of beauty may be then in season"; only for "year" we naturally must read "academic year." If Bacon is right, that a garden is the "purest of human pleasures," then, indeed, St. John's should be the Oxford paradise.
"Here did Wren make himself a student home,
Or e'er he made a name that England loves;
I wonder if this straying shadow moves,
Adown the wall, as then he saw it roam."
A. UPSON.
The buildings of Wadham College have been pronounced by some
good judges to be the most beautiful in Oxford. This is not,
however, the usual opinion, nor is it my own, though, perhaps, it
might be accepted if modified into the statement that Wadham is the
most complete and perfect example of the ordinary type of college.
However that may be, there are three points as to these buildings
which are indisputable, and which are also most interesting to any
lover of English architecture. They are:
(1) Wadham is less altered than any other college in Oxford.
(2) It is the finest illustration of the fact that the Gothic style
survived in Oxford when it was being rapidly superseded
elsewhere.
(3) No building in Oxford (very few buildings anywhere) owe their
effect so completely to their simplicity and their absence of
adornment.
These three points must be illustrated in detail.
Wadham is the youngest college in Oxford, for all those that have been founded since are refoundations of older institutions (but, as its first stone was laid in 1610, it has a respectable antiquity); yet the Front Quad is completely unaltered in design, and of the actual stonework, hardly any has had to be renewed. Could the Foundress return to life, she would find the college, which was to her as a son, completely familiar.
The second point is a more important one. In the reign of Elizabeth, classical architecture was being rapidly introduced; Gothic was giving way before the style of Palladio, even as the New Learning was banishing the schoolmen from the schools. This change is markedly seen in the Elizabethan buildings at Cambridge, especially in Dr. Caius' work, so far as it has been allowed to survive in the college that bears his name. But in Oxford the old style went on for half the following century; in the great building period of the first two Stuarts the old models were still faithfully copied. It was the genius of Wren, which, by its magnificent success in the Sheldonian, ultimately caused the new style to prevail over the late Gothic, of which his own college, Wadham, is so striking an example.
In Wadham the conservative Oxford workmen were inspired by the presence of Somerset masons, whom the Foundress brought up from her own county, so rich in the splendid Gothic of the fifteenth century. Hence the chapel of Wadham (shown in Plate XXII) is to all intents and purposes the choir of a great Somerset church. So marked is the old style in its windows that some of the best authorities on architecture have maintained that the stonework of these could not have been made in the seventeenth century, but must have survived from some older building; Ferguson, the historian of architecture, when confronted with the fact that the college has still the detailed accounts showing how, week by week, the Jacobean masons worked, swept this evidence aside with the dictum—"No amount of documents could prove what was impossible." But here the "impossible" really happened.
The permanence of Gothic in Oxford is a point for professional students; the studied simplicity, which is the great secret of Wadham's beauty, concerns everyone. The effect of the garden front is produced simply by the long lines of the string-courses and by the procession of the beautifully proportioned gables. Neither here nor in any part of the college is there a piece of carved work, except in the classical screen, which marks the entry to the hall. It may be noted that at Wadham and at Clare, Cambridge, the same effect is produced by the same means; different as the two colleges are, the one Gothic, the other classical, they have a restful and complete beauty which makes them specially attractive. And this is due more than anything else to the unbroken lines of the stonework, to which everything is kept in due subordination. Clare was building during half a century; Wadham was finished in three years; but both have been fortunate in being left alone; they have not been "improved" by later additions.
The chapel at Wadham has another feature of great interest for those who visit it; the glass in it (not that in the ante-chapel) is all contemporary with the college, and is a first-rate example of the taste of early Stuart times. The apostles and the prophets of the side windows have few merits, except their age, and the fact that they illustrate what local craftsmen could do in the reign of James I; but the big east window is of a very different rank. The college authorities quarrelled with the local workmen, and introduced a foreign craftsman, Bernard van Ling from London. In our day he would have been called a "blackleg," and mobbed: perhaps, even in the seventeenth century, he needed protection, for the college built him a furnace in their garden, and he there produced the finest specimen of seventeenth century glass that Oxford can show. Even for those who are not students of glass, the Wadham windows are attractive with their two Jonahs and two whales, "The big one that swallowed Jonah, and the little one that Jonah swallowed" (to quote an old college jest).
The gardens at Wadham are famous; they have not the magnificence of St. John's or the antiquarian charm of the old walls at New College or Merton; but, for the variety and fine growth of their trees, they are unsurpassed, though the glory of these is passing. Warden Wills planted them in the days of the French Revolution, and trees have their time to fall at last, even though they long survive their planters.
"But these were merciful men, whose righteousness
hath not been forgotten. . . . Their bodies are buried
in peace; but their name liveth for evermore."
Ecclesiasticus , xliv. 10, 14.
The collection of pictures In Wadham Hall is probably the best of any college in Oxford—always, of course, excepting Christ Church. It has no single picture to be compared with the "Thomas Warton" at Trinity, or the "Dr. Johnson" at Pembroke (both excellent works of Reynolds), nor does it give so many fine examples of the work of recent artists as do Trinity or Balliol; but it makes up for these deficiencies by the number and the variety of its pictures.
Two only of the men they represent can be said to attain to the first rank among England's worthies—Robert Blake, second as an admiral only to Nelson and Oxford's greatest fighting man until the present war, and Christopher Wren, "that prodigious young scholar" (as John Evelyn calls him), who, as has been well said, would have been second only to Newton among English mathematicians had he not chosen rather to be indisputably the first of British architects. It is interesting to note that Wadham shares with All Souls' two of the greatest names in the Scientific Revival of the seventeenth century: both Wren and Thomas Sydenham, the physician, migrated from Wadham to fellowships at All Souls'.
Their connection with Wadham is part of what is probably the most interesting single episode in the college history. When the Parliament triumphed, and the King's partisans were turned out of Oxford, the Lodgings at Wadham were given to the most distinguished of her Wardens, John Wilkins, who, no doubt, owed his promotion to the fact that he was the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell. In his own day everyone knew him; he was a moderate man, who interceded for Royalist scholars under the Commonwealth, and tempered the penal laws to Non-Conformists, when later he was Bishop of Chester. He was even better known to the "philosophers" as the inventor of a universal language and as curious for every advance in Natural Science. But, in our day, he is only remembered for his connection with the Royal Society; that most illustrious body grew out of the meetings held weekly at his Lodgings and the similar meetings held in London; when later these two movements were united, Wilkins was secretary of the committee which drew up the rules for their future organization, and thus prepared the way for the Royal Charter, given to the Society in 1662. When the Royal Society celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1912, many of its members made a pilgrimage to "its cradle" (or what was, at any rate, " one of its cradles").
Wadham also produced, among other early members of the Royal Society, its historian, Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, who somehow, as "Pindaric Sprat" (he was the friend and also the editor of Abraham Cowley ), found his way into Johnson's Lives of the Poets ; he is, however, more likely to be remembered because his subserviency, when he was Dean of Westminster to James II, has earned him an unenviable place in Macaulay's gallery of Revolution worthies and unworthies. Sprat, it should be added, was an exception to the prevailing Whig tradition of
Wadham, which found a worthy exponent in Arthur Onslow, the greatest Speaker of the House of Commons, who ruled over that august body for a record period, thirty-four years (1727-1761), and formed its rules and traditions in the period when it was first asserting its claim to govern.
Two centuries later than the Royal Society days at Wadham, another group of philosophers was trained there, who thought that the views of their master, Auguste Comte, were going to make as great a revolution in human thought as the views of a Bacon or a Newton. All the leading English Positivists were at Wadham—Congreve, Beesley, Bridges, Frederic Harrison, of whom the last alone survives, to fight with undiminished vigour for the causes which he championed in Mid-Victorian days. Positivism had less influence than its adherents expected, but it powerfully affected for a time the political and the religious thought of England.
Forty years later another famous group of young men were at Wadham together. As they are all alive, it is impossible, and would be unbecoming, to estimate what their influence on English life and thought will be; but it was a curious coincidence that sent to Wadham together, in the 'nineties, Lord Birkenhead, who reached the Woolsack at the earliest age on record; Sir John Simon, who, if he had wished, could have lowered that record still further, and C. B. Fry, once a household name as the greatest of British athletes.
Three groups of Wadham men have been spoken of; one other name must be mentioned of one who stood alone at college, and for a long time in the world outside, in his attitude to the social problems of our day. Whatever may be the future of the Settlement movement, its leader, Samuel Barnett, "Barnett of Whitechapel," is not to be forgotten, for his name is associated as a pioneer and an inspiring force with every movement of educational and social advance in the latter half of the nineteenth century. M. Clemenceau, no friendly judge of the ministers of any religious body, pronounced him one of the three greatest men he had met in England. Certainly he was great, if greatness means to anticipate the problems of the future before the rest of the world sees their urgency, and to make real contributions to their solution.
It has been a feature of the history of Oxford that every college has, from time to time, come to the front as the special home and source of some movement. There has never been the overshadowing concentration of men and of wealth, which has given a more one-sided direction to the history of Cambridge. Hence the strength of the college system; every college has its traditions to live up to, its great names to cherish, and Wadham is, certainly, by no means last or least in these respects.
"Outspake the (Warden) roundly:
'The bridge must straight go down;
For if they once should get the bridge ...'"
MACAULAY, Horatius, adapted.
Academic bridges, over the Cam or elsewhere, are a great feature at Cambridge. At Oxford they were unknown till this century, when University first of all threw its modest little arch over Logic Lane; later, in 1913. the "Bridge of Sighs," which forms the subject of Plate XXIV, was completed. There was a hard struggle before leave could be obtained from the City Council for thus bridging a public thoroughfare; University only maintained their claim to a bridge by a long lawsuit, in which the college rights were firmly established by the production of charters, which went back to the reign of King John. The great opposition to the Hertford Bridge was said to be due to regard for the feelings of the old Warden of New College, who considered that it would injure the view of his college bell-tower. Whether this story be true or not, Hertford obtained its permission at last, and Sir Thomas Jackson added a new attraction to Oxford's buildings. His genius has been especially shown in triumphing over the difficulties of the Hertford site, for it was no easy thing to unite into a harmonious whole, buildings so various; his new chapel—opened in 1908—is worthy to rank with the best classic architecture in Oxford.
The variety of the Hertford buildings only reflects the chequered history of the foundations that have occupied them. As early as the thirteenth century Hart Hall stood on this site. In the eighteenth century this old hall was turned into a college by an Oxford reformer, Dr. Newton. But unfortunately Newton's endowments were not equal to his ambition, and the first Hertford College fell into such decay that finally its buildings were transferred to an entirely different foundation, Magdalen Hall. Almost immediately afterwards, old Magdalen Hall, which stood close to Magdalen College, was burned down, and the society sold their site, thus made empty, to their wealthy namesake, and migrated, in 1822, to what had formerly been Hertford College. Finally, in 1874, Magdalen Hall was re-endowed by the head of the great financial house of Baring as "Hertford College" once more.
This college then unites the traditions of two old halls, and of its own predecessor, and from all of them it derives some famous names. Hart Hall was the home of John Selden, one of the greatest of English scholars; Hertford College had an undistinguished English prime minister in Henry Pelham, and a most distinguished leader of opposition in Charles James Foxe; while Magdalen Hall was even more rich in traditions, as being the home of the translator of the Bible, William Tyndale, as the centre of Puritan strength in the Laudian days, when from its ranks were filled the vacancies all over Oxford caused by the expulsions of Royalists, and finally as having trained Lord Clarendon, famous as Charles II's minister, still more famous as the historian, whose monumental work was one of the first endowments of the Oxford Press.
All these traditions are now concentrated in the one college, and, as has been said, the buildings have been greatly extended to meet the needs of the new foundation. When Hertford College is completed according to the plans already drawn by Sir Thomas Jackson, it will reach from All Souls' to Holywell. This last northern part of its front has been delayed by the European War.
The new—or, rather, the revived—college has, as yet, hardly had time to make Oxford history, but the influence of its second Principal. Dr. Boyd, whose long reign, happily not yet over, began in 1877, has had the result of finding for Oxford new benefactors in one of the wealthiest of the London City Companies; the Drapers' magnificent gifts of the new Science Library and of the Electrical Laboratory are good instances to show that the days of the "pious founder" are not yet over.
"Or wander down an ancient street
Where mingling ages quaintly meet,
Tower and battlement, dome and gable
Mellowed by time to a picture sweet."
A. G. BUTLER.
The group of buildings, shown in Plate XXV, is not only picturesque—it also illustrates Oxford history from more than one point of view.
The apse of the Chapel of Queen's on the left belongs to a building already spoken of, which is the most perfect example of a small basilican church in Oxford. The church tower in the centre, though itself dating from the fourteenth century, is the most modern part of one of the oldest churches in Oxford, St. Peter in the East. The crypt and the chancel of this church go back to the time of the Conquest, and are probably the work of Robert d'Oili, to whom William the Conqueror gave the city of Oxford; he was first an oppressor and then a benefactor; in the former character, he built the castle keep, still standing near the station; in the latter, he was the builder, besides St. Peter, of the churches of St. Michael and of the Holy Cross; parts of his work survive in all three.
The churchyard, at all events, of St. Peter in the East, deserves a visit, lying as it does between the beautiful garden of New College and the picturesque buildings of St. Edmund Hall.
Before this last foundation is spoken of, a word must be said as to the road round which these three buildings are grouped—Queen's Lane. It survives, almost unaltered, from Pre-Reformation Oxford, and, winding as it does its narrow way between high walls, it is an interesting specimen of the "lanes" which threaded mediaeval Oxford, a city in which the High Street and, to a smaller extent, Cornmarket Street were the only real thoroughfares; the rest of the city was a network of narrow ways.
But from the historic point of view, the most interesting part of the picture is its right side, where stand the buildings of St. Edmund Hall. This is the only survival of the system of residence in the earliest University, of the Oxford which knew not the college system.
Before the days of "pious founders," the students had to provide their own places of residence, and very early the custom grew up of their living together in "halls," sometimes managed by a non-academic owner, but often under the superintendence of some resident Master of Arts, who was responsible, not for the teaching, but, at any rate in part, for the discipline of the inmates of his hall. These halls had at first no endowments and no permanent existence; they depended for their continuity on the person of their head. Gradually they became more organized; but when once the college system had been introduced, it tended, by its superior wealth and efficiency, to render the "halls" less and less important. They lost even the one element of self-government which they had once had, the right of their members to elect their own Principal; this right was usurped by the Chancellor. Hence, though five of the halls were surviving at the time of the University Commission (of 1850), all of them but St. Edmund Hall have now disappeared.
In theory, "hall" and "college" have much in common; one Cambridge college indeed has retained the name of "hall," and two of the women's colleges in Oxford have preferred to keep the old style. In practice, their difference lies in the two facts that colleges are wealthier, with more endowments, and that they are self-governing, with Fellows who co-opt to vacancies in their own body and elect their head. St. Edmund Hall has its head appointed by the fellows of Queen's, with which institution it has long been connected.
The origin of this hall is an unsolved problem: it derives its name according to one theory from Edmund Rich, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to be canonized, and probably the first recorded Doctor of Divinity at Oxford. But this theory is very doubtful, and Hearne, most famous of Oxford antiquarians, and probably the best known member of St. Edmund Hall, did not believe it. In any case, most of the buildings of the hall date long after St. Edmund, and belong to the middle of the seventeenth century. Hearne himself is sufficient to give interest to any foundation. He was a great scholar and a careful editor of the early English Chroniclers in days when learning was decaying in Oxford; even now his work as an editor is not altogether superseded. But it is not to this that he owes his fame; it is rather to the fact that he has high rank among the diarists of England, and the first place among those of Oxford. For thirty years (1705-1735) in which latter year he died, he poured into his diary everything that interested him—scholarly notes, political rumours, personal scandal, remarks on manners and customs. The 150 volumes came into the possession of his fellow Jacobite, Richard Rawlinson, the greatest of the benefactors of the Bodleian, and only now are they being fully edited; ten volumes have been issued by the Oxford Historical Society, and still there are a few more years of his life to cover. As a specimen of Hearne's style may be quoted his remarks, when the sermon on Christmas Day, 1732, was postponed till 11 a.m.
"The true reason is that people might lie in bed the longer. . . . The same reason hath made them, in almost all places in the University, alter the times of prayer, and the hour of dinner (which used to be 11 o'clock) in almost every place (Christ Church must be excepted); which ancient discipline and learning and piety strangely decay." Hearne was critical rather of past history than of present-day rumour; he records complacently (in 1706) that at Whitchurch, when the dissenters had prepared a great quantity of bricks "to erect a capacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and spoyled them all, and confounded their Babel." Hearne would by no means have approved of the Methodist principles of six members of his hall in the next generation, who were expelled for their religious views (1768). A furious controversy, with many pamphlets, raged over them, and the Public Orator of the University wrote a bulky indictment of them, which was answered by another pamphlet with the picturesque title of "Goliath Slain." Pamphleteers were more free in their language in those days than they are now.
The hall has always been a strong religious centre, and plays a very useful part in the University—by giving to poor men, seeking Holy Orders, a real Oxford education, based on the true Oxford principle of community of life.
"Thames, the best loved of all old Ocean's sons,
Of his old sire, to his embraces runs . . .
Though deep, yet clear, through gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
SIR J. DENHAM.
The subject of Plate XXVI is no longer in existence; it was burned to the ground some years ago, and has never been rebuilt—for steam has rendered unprofitable the old-fashioned water mills such as it was. Yet the very fact that Iffley Mill is no more perhaps renders it the more appropriate subject for a series of Oxford pictures. It claims a place among them, not for its beauty, picturesque though it was, but as a symbol of the open-air pursuits of Oxford, which play so large a part in the lives of her sons. And as those pursuits are so diverse, and cannot all be directly pictured, it is fitting that they should be represented by a picture which is a symbol of them all, by a picture of something no longer existing, not introduced for itself, but suggesting whole fields of varied activity, different and yet all akin.
This may be fanciful, but the part played by open-air sports in the life of Oxford is a great reality. Yet, in their present organized form, they are a feature of quite, modern times. Fifty years ago, football as a college sport in Oxford was only beginning; the men are still living, and not octogenarians, who introduced their "school games"—"Rugby," "Eton Wall game," etc.—at Oxford. Golf was left to Scotchmen, hockey to small boys, La Crosse had not yet come from beyond the Atlantic. Cricket and rowing were the only organized games, and even in these the inter-University contests are comparative novelties; the first boat race against Cambridge was rowed in 1829, and it has only been an annual fixture since 1856.
Several results followed from this. In the first place, the very sense of the word "sportsman" was different. Now it means a man who can play well some, one at least, of the games that all men play; then, it had its old meaning of a man who could shoot, or ride, or fish, or do all these.
Again, as cricket is always a game for the few, and as the rowing authorities, by the time the summer term begins, had selected their chosen followers and left the rest of the world free, there was far more walking, and consequently more knowledge of the country round the city, than is the rule now. The long rambles which play so prominent a part in Oxford biographies, such as Stanley's Life of Arnold , were still the fashion, while of those who could afford to ride, certainly many more availed themselves of the privilege than do now.
So far as games themselves were concerned, their cost was far less. College matches away from Oxford were almost unknown; college grounds, which were still quite a new thing in the middle of last century, were nearly all concentrated on Cowley Marsh, and the somewhat heavy contribution from all undergraduates, now generally collected by the college authorities in "battels" and become semi-official, was not dreamed of. Those who played paid, and the rest of the college got off easily. And games were much more games than they are now, and less of institutions; the "professional amateur," who comes up with a public school reputation to get his "blue," was almost unknown, and certainly, so far as rowing was concerned, any powerful man with broad shoulders and a sound heart was a likely candidate for the University Boat. The days were not dreamed of when the fortunes of Oxford and Cambridge on the river depended largely on the choice of a University by members of the Eton Eight.
But there is of course another side to the development of Oxford athletics. Perhaps the most important point is that play is the greatest social leveller. It is easy to attend the same lectures as a man, and even to sit at the same table with him in hall, and not to know him well, because his clothes and his accent are not quite correct. But in these days when so many games are played, and when competition is so keen, any man who can do anything gets his chance; and many are the instances every year of men who would never have made friends in their colleges outside a small circle, had not their quickness as half-backs, or their ability as slow bowlers, brought their contemporaries to recognize their merits. You cannot play with a man without knowing him, and young Oxford is democratic at heart, and when once it knows a man, it does not trouble about the non-essentials of wealth and fashion.
And again, though it may seem a paradox to say it, the amount of play in Oxford has increased the amount of work. Organized games mean physical fitness, and physical fitness means ability to get intellectual work done. Perhaps it may be argued that the absorption in athletics deadens all intellectual life, and that many Oxford men read only and discuss only the sporting news in the papers; this no doubt has a strange fascination, even for men who do not play; one of the most distinguished of Oxford statesmen of the last generation, himself so blind that he could not hit a ball, confessed to me that he always, in the summer, read the cricket news in The Times before he read anything else. But he and many other Oxford men read something else, too. And it may be maintained without question that the hard exercise, which is the fashion in Oxford, tends to keep men's bodies healthy and to raise the moral tone of the place. Oxford and Cambridge may not be what they should be in morals, but they compare very favourably in this respect with other towns.
All this seems a far cry from Iffley Mill; but Iffley means to an Oxford man, not so much the picturesque village, nor even its gem of a Norman Church that towers above the lock, but the place where Eights and Torpids start for the races. And the boating, which is so associated with the name of Iffley, is still—and long may it be so—the queen of Oxford sports. To succeed as an oar, a man has to learn to sacrifice the present to the future, to scorn delights and live laborious days, to work together with others, and to sink his individuality in the common cause. These are great qualities, and therefore in any book on Oxford, the picture, which recalls them and is their symbol, has a right to a place.
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