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
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHARM OF OXFORD ***
This eBook was produced by Philip H Hitchcock
About the online edition.
Italics are represented as /italics/.
THE CHARM OF OXFORD
by
J. WELLS, M.A.
Warden of Wadham College, Oxford
Illustrated by
W. G. BLACKALL
Second Edition (Revised)
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON
KENT & CO., LTD., 4 STATIONERS'
HALL COURT : : LONDON, E.C.4
Copyright
First published 1920
Second edition 1921
"'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.
[Plate 1. Christ Church : The Cathedral from the Garden]
THE CHARM OF OXFORD
PREFACE
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.
WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD,
April 1920.
CONTENTS
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
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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 [End papers]
INTRODUCTION
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.
[Plate II, St. Mary's Spire]
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.
RADCLIFFE SQUARE
"Like to a queen in pride of place, she wears
The splendour of a crown in Radcliffe's dome."
L. JOHNSON.
[Plate III. View of Radcliffe Square]
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.
THE BROAD STREET
"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.
[Plate IV. Sheldonian Theatre, etc., Broad Street]
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.
BALLIOL COLLEGE
"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.
[Plate V. Balliol College, Broad Street Front]
MERTON COLLEGE
"I passed beside the reverend walls
In which of old I wore the gown."
TENNYSON.
[Plate VI. Merton College : The Tower]
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/.
[Plate VII. Merton College : The Library Interior]
MERTON LIBRARY
"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.
ORIEL COLLEGE
"Here at each coign of every antique street
A memory hath taken root in stone,
Here Raleigh shone."
L. JOHNSON.
[Plate VIII. Oriel College and St. Mary's Church]
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.
QUEEN'S COLLEGE
"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.
[Plate IX. High Street]
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."
NEW COLLEGE (1) FOUNDER AND BUILDINGS
"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.
[Plate X. New College : The Entrance Gateway]
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.
[Plate XI. New College : The Tower]
NEW COLLEGE (2) HISTORY
"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/.
LINCOLN COLLEGE
"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.
[Plate XII. Lincoln College : The Chapel Interior]
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."
MAGDALEN COLLEGE (1) SITE AND BUILDINGS
"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.
MAGDALEN COLLEGE (2) HISTORY
"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.
[Plate XIV. Magdalen College : The Open-Air Pulpit]
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.
BRASENOSE COLLEGE
"Of the colleges of Oxford, Exeter is the most
proper for western, Queen's for northern, and
Brasenose for north-western men."
FULLER, /Worthies/.
[Plate XV. Bresenose College, Quadrangle and Radcliffe Library]
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."
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
"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.
[Plate XVI. Corpus Christi College : The First Quadrangle]
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.
CHRIST CHURCH (1) THE CATHEDRAL
[Plate XVII. Christ Church : The Cathedral from the Meadows]
"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.
CHRIST CHURCH (2) THE HALL STAIRCASE
"And love the high-embowed roof
With antique pillars massy proof."
MILTON
[Plate XVIII. Christ Church : The Hall Staircase]
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."
[Plate XIX. Christ Church : The Hall Interior]
CHRIST CHURCH (3) "TOM" TOWER
"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.
[Plate XX. Christ Church: "Tom" Tower]
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."
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
[Plate XXI. St. John's College : Garden Front]
"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.
WADHAM COLLEGE (1) THE BUILDINGS
"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.
[Plate XXII. Wadham College : The Chapel from the Garden]
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.
WADHAM COLLEGE (2) HISTORY
"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.
[Plate XXIII. Wadham College : The Hall Interior]
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.
HERTFORD COLLEGE
"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.
[Plate XXIV. Hertford College : The Bridge]
ST. EDMUND HALL
"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.
[Plate XXV. St. Peter-in-the-East Church and St. Edmund Hall]
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.
IFFLEY MILL
"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.
[Plate XXVI. Iffley : The Old Mill]
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.
Printed in Great Britain.
Letterpress by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh.
Plates engraved and printed by Henry Stone & Son, Ltd., Banbury.
[OXFORD FROM THE EAST (End papers)]
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Charm of Oxford, by J. Wells
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHARM OF OXFORD ***
***** This file should be named 13245.txt or 13245.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
https://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/2/4/13245/
This eBook was produced by Philip H Hitchcock
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
https://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
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
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
[email protected]. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at https://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit https://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
https://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
