Chapter II: Part 2

The quiet and sombre old quadrangle of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by the side of Merton, much as its Founder left it. Now we have come to the real dawn of the English Renaissance, a gray dawn which never became a very bright day; for in England, as in Germany and other Teutonic countries, reawakened and emancipated intellect turned to the pursuit of truth rather than of beauty, and the great movement was less a birth of literature and of art than of reformation in religion. This is the age of Grocyn, the teacher of Greek; of Linacre, the English Hippocrates; of Colet, the regenerator of education; of Sir Thomas More, who carried culture to the Chancellorship of the realm, and whose "Utopia" proclaims the growth of fresh aspirations and the opening of a new era in one way, as Rabelais did in another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI., had perhaps opened the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift of books, in which the Renaissance literature was strongly represented, and which was the germ of the University Library. Soon Erasmus will visit Oxford and chant in elegant Latin the praises of the classical and cultured circle which he finds there. Now rages the war between the humanists of the new classical learning, called the Greeks, and its opponents, the Trojans, who desired to walk in the ancient paths, and who, though bigoted and grotesque, were, after all, not far wrong in identifying heresy with Greek, since the study of the New Testament in the original was subversive of the mediaeval faith. Again, as in the cases of Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a statesman-prelate turns in old age from the distractions of State to found a house of learning. Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, was the chief counsellor and diplomatist of Henry VII., in whose service he had no doubt passed anxious hours and trodden dark paths. It may have been partly for the good of his soul that he proposed to found a house in Oxford for the reception of young monks from St. Swithin's Priory in Winchester while studying in Oxford. He was diverted from that design, and persuaded to found a College instead, by his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who is represented as saying, "What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihoods for a company of bussing monks whose end and fall we ourselves may live to see? No, no. It is more meet, a great deal, that we should have care to provide for the increase of learning and for such as by their learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth." Supposing the prognostication embodied in these words genuine, they show that to an enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable. The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the highest classical elegance. They elaborate throughout the metaphor of a bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects of his lectures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin authors is given, and who is to keep "barbarism," that mortal sin in the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional, tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a Professor, but its guides in interpreting Scripture are not to be the mediaeval textbooks, such as Aquinas and the Master of the Sentences, but the Greek and Latin Fathers, including the daring Origen and Augustine the favourite of Luther. The Readers are to lecture not to the College only, but to the University at large, a new provision, connecting the College with the University, which hardly took effect till very recent times. One of the first Readers was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis Vives, whose appointment bespoke the cosmopolitan character of the humanist republic of letters. The statutes were signed by the Founder with a trembling hand eight months before his death, so that only in imagination did he see his literary bees at work.

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Yonder to the south is Tom Tower, where hangs the great bell, which, "swinging slow with sullen roar," was heard by Milton at Forest Hill. It was tolled a hundred and one times for the hundred and one students of Wolsey's House. The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not of Wolsey but of Wren. Around the great quadrangle over which it rises are seen the lines for cloisters which were never built. The balustrade on the top of the quadrangle is an alien work of modern times. The Church of St. Frydeswide's Monastery does duty as the College Chapel, in place of the grand Chapel in the perpendicular style, which, had the Founder's plan taken effect, would have stood there. Moreover, that which should have been wholly a College is made to serve and to expend a part of its power as the Chapter of the Diocese of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which has been productive of strained relations between occupants of the See and Heads of the College. Ample and noble are the courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his magnificence is the great Hall, the finest room, barring Westminster Hall, in England, and filled with those portraits of _Alumni_, which, notwithstanding the frequency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest tapestry with which hall was ever hung. But it all falls short of Wolsey's conception. Had Wolsey's conception been fulfilled, Ipswich would have been a nursery of scholars for Cardinal College, as Winchester was for New College, and Eton for King's College, Cambridge. The Cardinal was an English Leo X. in morals, tastes, perhaps in beliefs; a true Prince, not of the Church but of the Renaissance. For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a refreshment to turn from public life, full, as it must have been, of care and peril for the Vizier of a headstrong and capricious despot, to the calm happiness of seeing his great College rise, and gathering into it the foremost of teachers and the flower of students. But in the midst of his enterprise the sky of the Renaissance became overcast with clouds, and the storm of religious revolution, which had long been gathering, broke. Forewarnings of the storm Wolsey had received, for he had found that in opening his gates to the highest intellectual activity he had opened them to free inquiry and to heterodoxy. Himself, too, had set the example of suppressing monasteries, though he did this not for mere rapine or to gorge his parasites, but to turn useless and abused endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all but drew his foundation down with him in his fall. The tyrant and his minions were builders of nothing but ruin. Christ Church, as at last it was called, was threatened with confiscation and destruction, but was finally spared in its incomplete condition, appropriated by Henry as his own foundation, and dedicated to the honour of the king, whose portrait, in its usual attitude of obtrusive self-conceit, occupies in the Hall the central place, where the portrait of the Cardinal should be. The Cardinal's hat, on the outer wall of the house, is left to speak of the true Founder. That the College was to be called after its Founder's name, not, like the Colleges of Wykeham and Waynflete, after the name of a Saint, seems a symptom of the pride which went before Wolsey's fall.

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Now come upon the hapless University forty years of religious revolution, the monuments of which are traces of destruction and records of proscription. All the monastic houses and houses for monastic novices were forfeited to the Crown, and their buildings were left desolate, though, from the ruins of some of them, new Colleges were afterwards to rise. Libraries which would now be priceless, were sacked and destroyed because the illumination on the manuscripts was Popish. It was the least to be deplored of all the havoc, that the torn leaves of the arid tomes of Duns Scotus were seen flying about the quadrangle of New College, while a sporting gentleman of the neighbourhood was picking them up to be used in driving the deer. There is a comic monument of the religious revolution in the coffer shrine at Christ Church, in which the dust of Catherine, wife of the Protestant Doctor, Peter Martyr, is mingled with that of the Catholic Saint, Frydeswide. Catholicism, in its hour of triumph under Mary, had dug up the corpse of the heretic's concubine and buried it under a dung-hill. Protestantism, once more victorious, rescued the remains, and guarded against a repetition of the outrage, in case fortune should again change, by mingling them with those of the Catholic Saint. A more tragic memorial of the conflict is yonder recumbent cross in Broad Street, close to the spot, then a portion of the town ditch, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died. Bocardo, the prison over the neighbouring gate of the city, from the window of which Cranmer, then confined there, witnessed the burning of Latimer and Ridley, was pulled down at the beginning of this century. The Divinity School, Christ Church Cathedral, and St. Mary's Church witnessed different scenes of the drama. St. Mary's witnessed that last scene, in which Cranmer filled his enemies with fury and confusion by suddenly recanting his recantation, and declaring that the hand which had signed it should burn first. College archives record the expulsion, readmission, and re-expulsion of Heads and Fellows, as victory inclined to the Protestant or Catholic side. So perished the English Renaissance. For the cultivation of the humanities there could be no room in a centre of religious strife.

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Fatal bequests of the religious war were the religious tests. Leicester, as Chancellor, introduced subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles to keep out Romanists; King James, that to the three articles of the Thirty-sixth Canon to keep out Puritans. These tests, involving scores of controverted propositions in theology, were imposed on the consciences of mere boys. The Universities were thus taken from the nation and given to the State Church, which, in the course of time, as dissent from its doctrines gained ground, came to be far from identical with the nation.

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In the first lull, however, new Colleges arose, partly out of the ruins of the monastic houses of the past. Trinity College, of which the quiet old quadrangle is curiously mated with a fantastic Chapel of much later date, was founded out of the ruin of Durham College, a Benedictine House. Its Founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was one of that group of highly educated lay statesmen, eminent both in the councils of kings and among the patrons of learning, which succeeded the great Prelates of the Middle Ages. He was a Catholic, as his statutes show; but a liberal Catholic, not unfriendly to light, though little knowing perhaps whither it would lead him. Among his friends was Sir Nicholas Bacon, who bequeathed to him the splendid whistle, then used to call servants, which is seen round his neck in his portrait. Another of his friends was Pole, who showed his intellectual liberality by recommending him to enjoin in his statutes the study of Greek. St. John's College, again, rose out of the wreck of a Bernardine House. The Founder was not a statesman or a prelate, but a great citizen, Sir Thomas White, sometime Lord Mayor of London, who had amassed wealth in trade, and made a noble use of it. White also was of the olden faith. That the storm was not over when his College was founded is tragically shown by the fate of Campion, who, when White was laid in the College Chapel, preached the funeral sermon, and afterwards becoming a Jesuit and an emissary of his Order, was brought to the rack and to the scaffold. There was also a great secession of Fellows when the final rupture took place between Rome and Elizabeth. In the group of cultivated Knights and statesmen, who patronised learning and education, may be placed Sir William Petre, the second Founder of Exeter College, whose monument is its old quadrangle, and Sir Thomas Bodley, whose monument is the Bodleian Library. If Petre and Bodley were Protestants, while Pope and White were Catholics, the difference was rather political than religious. In religion the public men changed with the national government, little sharing the passions of either theological party.

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Jesus, whose old quadrangle, chapel, and hall belong to early Stuart times, was the first distinctly Protestant College. This its name, in contrast with Colleges named after Saints, denotes. The second Protestant College was Wadham, the buildings of which stand in their pristine beauty, vying with Magdalen, perhaps even excelling it in the special air of a house of learning, and proving that to be interesting and impressive it is not necessary to be mediaeval. At the same time Wadham shows how long the spirit of the Middle Ages clung to Oxford; for the style of the Chapel is anterior by a century and a half to the date. Here we have a conscious desire, on the part of the architect, to recall the past. The Founder, Sir Nicholas Wadham, was a wealthy Western land-owner. We may dismiss the tradition that his first design was to found a College of Roman Catholic priests in Italy, and his second to found a Protestant College at Oxford, as at most significant of the prolonged wavering of the religious balance in the minds of a number of the wealthier class. The statutes were, in the main, like those of the mediaeval Colleges, saving in making the Fellowship terminable after about twenty-two years, thus more clearly designating the College as a school for active life. The prohibition of marriage was retained, not as an ascetic ordinance, but as a concomitant of the College system. In the mediaeval Colleges it was not necessary to extend the prohibition to the Heads, who, being priests, were bound to celibacy by the regulations of their Order; but marriage being now permitted to the clergy generally, the prohibition was in the statutes of Wadham expressly extended, in the interest of the College system, to the Head. Hence it is an aspersion on the reputation of Dame Dorothy Wadham, who, after her husband's death, carried out his design, and whose effigy kneels opposite that of her loving lord in the old quadrangle, to say that she was in love with the first Warden, and because he would not marry her, forbade him by statute to marry any other woman.

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These foundations, followed by that of Pembroke and the building of the South quadrangle of Merton, of the South quadrangle of Lincoln, of the West front of St. John's, of the quadrangle and hall of Exeter, of part of the quadrangle of Oriel, of the West quadrangle of University College, as well as of the Bodleian Library, the Schools' quadrangle, the Convocation House, and of the gateway of the Botanic Garden, prove that, though the old University system, with its scholastic exercises, had become hollow, there was life in Oxford, and the interest of patrons of learning was attracted to it during the period between the Reformation and the Rebellion. It was also felt to be a centre of power. Elizabeth twice visited it, once in the heyday of her youthful glory, and again in her haggard decline. On the first occasion she exerted with effect those arts of popularity which were the best part of her statesmanship. On both occasions she was received with ecstatic flattery and entertained with academical exercises at tedious length, and plays, to our taste not less tedious, performed in College Halls. Her successor could not fail to exhibit himself in a seat of learning, where he felt supreme, and, to do him justice, was not unqualified, to shine. To his benignity the University owes the questionable privilege of sending two members to the House of Commons, whereby it became entangled in political as well as in theological frays.

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Great changes, however, had by this time passed or were passing over the University. As in former days the Halls had absorbed the Chamberdekyns, so the Colleges had now almost absorbed the Halls. They did this, not by any aggression, but by the natural advantages of wealth, their riches always increasing with the value of land, and by their reputation. Most of them, in addition to the members on the foundation, took students as boarders, and they got the best and wealthiest. Universities, losing their pristine character as marts of available knowledge, and becoming places of general education, ceased, by a process equally natural, to be the heritage of the poor and became the resort of the rich. The mediaeval statutes of the Colleges still limited the foundations to the poor, but even these in time, by cunning interpretation, were largely evaded. Already in the later Middle Ages Oxford had received, and, it seems, too complacently received, young scions of the aristocracy and gentry, the precursors of the noblemen and the silk-gowned gentleman-commoners of a later day. The Black Prince had been for a short time at Queen's College. In the reign of Henry VI., George Neville, the brother of the King-maker, had celebrated the taking of his degree, a process which was probably made easy to him, with banquets which lasted through two days on a prodigious scale. At the same time and for the same causes the system of College instruction grew in importance and gradually ousted the lectures of University Professors. Fellows of Colleges were not unwilling to add to their Commons and Livery the Tutor's stipend. Thus the importance of the College waxed while that of the University waned, and the College Statutes became more and more collectively the law of the University. These Statutes were mediaeval and obsolete, but they were unalterable, the Heads and Fellows being sworn to their observance, and there being no power of amendment, since the Visitor could only interpret and enforce. Thus the mediaeval type of life and study was stereotyped and progress was barred. The Fellowships having been originally not teacherships or prizes, but aids to poor students, the Founders deemed themselves at liberty in regulating the elections to give free play to their local and family partialities, and the consequence was a mass of preferences to favoured counties or to kin. With all these limitations, the teaching body of the University was now practically saddled. Even the restrictions to particular schools--as to Winchester in the case of New College, to Westminster, which had been substituted for Wolsey's Ipswich, in the case of Christ Church, and to Merchant Tailors' School in the case of St. John's--were noxious, though in a less degree, albeit their bad influence might be redeemed by some pleasant associations. Worst of all, however, in their effect were the restrictions to the clerical Order. This meant little in the Middle Ages, when all intellectual callings were clerical, when at Oxford gownsman and clerk, townsman and laic, were convertible terms. Wykeham, Foxe, and Wolsey themselves were thorough laymen in their pursuits and character, though they had received the tonsure, were qualified, if they pleased, to celebrate mass, and derived their incomes from bishoprics and abbeys. But the Reformation drew a sharp line between the clerical and the other professions. The clergyman was henceforth a pastor. The resident body of graduates and the teaching staff of Oxford belonging almost exclusively to the clerical profession, the studies and interests of that profession now reigned alone. Whatever life remained to the University was chiefly absorbed in theological study and controversy. This was the more deplorable as theology, in the mediaeval sense, was a science almost as extinct as astrology or alchemy. Oxford was turned into the cock-pit of theological party. At the same time she was bound hand and foot to a political faction, because her clergymen belonged to the Episcopal and State Church, the patrons and upholders of which, from political motives, were the Kings and the Cavaliers, or, as they were afterwards called, the Tories. Cambridge suffered like Oxford, though with some abatement, because there, owing to the vicinity of a great Puritan district, high Anglicanism did not prevail, and, for reasons difficult to define, the clergy altogether were less clerical. Newton was near forfeiting his Fellowship and the means of prosecuting his speculations because he was not in Holy Orders. Luckily, a Lay Fellowship fell just in time. Let Founders, and all who have a passion for regulating the lives of other people, for propagating their wills beyond the reach of their foresight, and for grasping posterity, as it were, with a dead hand, take warning by a disastrous example.

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As the Colleges became the University, their Heads became the governors of the University. They formed a Board called the Hebdomadal Council, which initiated all legislation, while the executive was the Vice-Chancellorship, which, though legally elective, was appropriated by the Heads, and passed down their list in order. With a single exception, the Headships were all clerical, and they were almost always filled by men of temperament, to say the least, eminently conservative. Thus academical liberty and progress slept.

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On the eve of another great storm we have a pleasant glimpse of Oxford life and study in Clarendon's picture of Falkland's circle, at Great Tew, within ten miles of Oxford, whither, he says, "most polite and accurate men of that University resorted, dwelling there as in a College situated in a purer air, so that his was a University bound in a less volume, whither his intellectual friends came not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in conversation." This indicates that, while study was going on, liberal inquiry was also on foot. But clouds again gathered, the storm again came, and once more from the ecclesiastical quarter. The triumph of the Reformation, the accession of a Protestant Queen, and the Chancellorship of Leicester, who, for politic purposes, played the Puritan, had been attended by a general expulsion or secession of the Romanising party, which left the University for a time in the hands of the Calvinists and Low Churchmen. Hooker, the real father of Anglicanism, had, for a time, studied Church antiquity in the quiet quadrangle of Corpus, but he had come into collision with Puritanism, and had, for a time, been driven away by it. Perhaps its prevalence may have ultimately inclined him to exchange the University for a far less congenial sphere. The clergy, however, of an Episcopal Church, and one which laid claim to Apostolical succession, was sure in time to come round to High Church doctrine. To High Church doctrine the clergy of Oxford did come round under the leadership of Laud, University Preacher, Proctor, President of St. John's College, and afterwards Chancellor of the University. Of Laud there are several memorials at Oxford. One is the inner quadrangle of St. John's College, ornamented in the style of Inigo Jones, where the Archbishop and Chancellor, in the noontide of his career, received with ecstasies of delight, ecclesiastical, academical, and political, his doomed king and master with the fatal woman at Charles's side. Another is a fine collection of oriental books added to the Bodleian Library. A third and more important is the new code of statutes framed for the reformation of the University by its all-powerful Chancellor. A fourth is the statue of the Virgin and Child over the porch of St. Mary's Church, which, as proof of a Romanising tendency, formed one of the charges against the Archbishop, though it was really put up by his Chaplain. The fifth is the headless corpse which lies buried in the Chapel of St. John's College, whither pious hands conveyed it after the Restoration. Laud was a true friend of the University and of learned men, in whom, as in Hales, he respected the right of inquiry, and to whom he was willing to allow a freedom of opinion which he would not allow to the common herd. He was not so much a bigot as a martinet. It was by playing the martinet in ecclesiastical affairs that he was brought into mortal collision with the nation. In the code of statutes which by his characteristic use of autocratic power he imposed on Oxford the martinet is betrayed; so is the belief in the efficacy of regulation. We see the man who wrecked a kingdom for the sake of his forms. Nor had Laud the force to deliver University education from the shackles of the Middle Ages and the scholastic system. But the code is dictated by a genuine spirit of reform, and might have worked improvement had it been sustained by a motive power.

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The period of the Civil War is a gap in academical history. Its monuments are only traces of destruction, such as the defacement of Papistical images and window paintings by the Puritan soldiery, and the sad absence of the old College plate, of which two thousand five hundred ounces went to the Royal mint in New Inn Hall, only a few most sacred pieces, such as the Founder's drinking-horn at Queen's, and the covered cup, reputed that of the Founder, at Corpus, being left to console us for the irreparable loss. Exeter College alone seems to have shown compunction; perhaps there had remained in her something of the free spirit for which in the days of Wycliffe she had been noted. Art and taste may mourn, but the University, as a centre of Episcopalianism, had little cause to complain; for the war was justly called the Bishops' war, and by the Episcopal Church and the Queen, between them, Charles was brought to the block. Oxford was bound by her ecclesiasticism to the Royal cause, and she had the ill luck to be highly available as a place of arms from her position between the two rivers, while she formed an advanced post to the Western country in which the strength of the King's cause lay. During those years the University was in buff and bandolier, on the drill ground instead of in the Schools, while the Colleges were filled with the exiled Court and its ghost of a Parliament. Traces of works connecting the two rivers were not long ago to be seen, and tradition points to the angle in the old city wall under Merton College as the spot where Windebank, a Royalist officer, was shot for surrendering his post. There was a reign of garrison manners as well as of garrison duties, and to the few who still cared for the objects of the University, even if they were Royalists, the surrender of the city to the Parliament may well have been a relief.

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Then came Parliamentary visitation and the purge, with the inevitable violence and inhumanity. Heads and Fellows, who refused submission to the new order of things, were turned out. Mrs. Fell, the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, deposed for Royalism, refused to quit the Deanery, and at last had to be carried out of the quadrangle, venting her wrath in strong language as she went, by a squad of Parliamentary musketeers. But the Puritans put in good men: such as Owen, who was made Dean of Christ Church; Conant, who was made Rector of Exeter; Wilkins, who was made Warden of Wadham; and Seth Ward, the mathematician, who was made President of Trinity College. Owen and Conant appear to have been model Heads. The number of students increased. Evelyn, the Anglican and Royalist, visiting Oxford, seems to find the academical exercises, and the state of the University generally, satisfactory to his mind. He liked even the sermon, barring some Presbyterian animosities. Nor did he find much change in College Chapels. New College was "in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the scrupulosity of the times." The Chapel of Magdalen College, likewise, was "in pontifical order," and the organ remained undemolished. The Protectorate was tolerant as far as the age allowed. Evelyn was cordially received by the Puritan authorities and hospitably entertained. Puritanism does not seem to have been so very grim, whatever the satirist in "The Spectator" may say. Tavern-haunting and swearing were suppressed. So were May-poles and some innocent amusements. But instrumental music was much cultivated, as we learn from the Royalist and High Church antiquary Anthony Wood, from whom, also, we gather that dress, though less donnish, was not more austere. Cromwell, having saved the Universities from fanatics who would have laid low all institutions of worldly learning, made himself Chancellor of Oxford, and sought to draw thence, as well as from Cambridge, promising youths for the service of the State. Even Clarendon admits that the Restoration found the University "abounding in excellent learning," notwithstanding "the wild and barbarous depopulation" which it had undergone; a miraculous result, which he ascribes, under God's blessing, to "the goodness and richness of the soil, which could not be made barren by all the stupidity and negligence, but choked the weeds, and would not suffer the poisonous seeds, which were sown with industry enough, to spring up." Puritanism might be narrow and bibliolatrous, but it was not obscurantist nor the enemy of science. We see this in Puritan Oxford as well as in Puritan Harvard and Yale. In Puritan Oxford the scientific circle which afterwards gave birth to the Royal Society was formed. Its chief was Warden Wilkins, and it included Boyle, Wallis, Seth Ward, and Wren. It met either in Wilkins's rooms at Wadham, or in those of Boyle. Evelyn, visiting Wilkins, is ravished with the scientific inventions and experiments which he sees. On the stones of Oxford, Puritanism has left no trace; there was hardly any building during those years. There were benefactions not a few, among which was the gift of Selden's Library.

Upon the Restoration followed a Royalist proscription, more cruel, and certainly more lawless, than that of the Puritans had been. All the good Heads of the Commonwealth era were ejected, and the Colleges received back a crowd of Royalists, who, during their exclusion, had probably been estranged from academical pursuits. Anthony Wood himself is an unwilling witness to the fact that the change was much for the worse. "Some Cavaliers that were restored," he says, "were good scholars, but the majority were dunces." "Before the War," he says in another place, "we had scholars who made a thorough search in scholastic and polemical divinity, in humane learning and natural philosophy, but now scholars study these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the University. Their aim is not to live as students ought to do, temperate, abstemious, and plain in their apparel, but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparel and long periwigs." Into the Rectorship of Exeter, in place of the excellent Conant, was put Joseph Maynard, of whom Wood says, "Exeter College is now much debauched by a drunken Governor; whereas, before, in Doctor Conant's time, it was accounted a civil house, it is now rude and uncivil. The Rector is good-natured, generous, and a good scholar, but he has forgot the way of College life, and the decorum of a scholar. He is much given to bibbing, and when there is a music meeting in one of the Fellow's chambers, he will sit there, smoke, and drink till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings by the junior Fellows." This is not the only evidence of the fact that drinking, idling, and tavern-haunting were in the ascendant. Study as well as morality, having been the badge of the Puritan, was out of fashion. Wilkins's scientific circle took its departure from Oxford to London, there to become the germ of the Royal Society. The hope was gone at Oxford of a race of "young men provided against the next age, whose minds, receiving the first impressions of sober and generous knowledge, should be invincibly armed against all the encroachments of enthusiasm." The presence of the merry monarch, with his concubines, at Oxford, when his Parliament met there, was not likely to improve morals. Oxford sank into an organ of the High Church and Tory party, and debased herself by servile manifestos in favour of government by prerogative. Non-conformists were excluded by the religious tests, the operation of which was more stringent than ever since the passing of the Act of Uniformity. The love of liberty and truth embodied in Locke was expelled from Christ Church; not, however, by the act of the College or of the University, but by Royal warrant, though Fell, Dean of Christ Church, bowed slavishly to the tyrant's pleasure; so that Christ Church may look with little shame on the portrait of the philosopher, which now hangs triumphant in her Hall. The Cavaliers did not much, even in the way of building. The Sheldonian Theatre was given them by the Archbishop, to whom subscriptions had been promised, but did not come in, so that he had to bear the whole expense himself. He was so deeply disgusted that he refused ever to look upon the building.

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Over the gateway of University College stands the statue of James II. That it should have been left there is a proof both of the ingrained Toryism of old Oxford, and of the mildness of the Revolution of 1688. Obadiah Walker, the Master of the Colleges, was one of the political converts to Roman Catholicism, and it was in ridicule of him that "Old Obadiah, Ave Maria," was sung by the Oxford populace. A set of rooms in the same quadrangle bears the trace of its conversion into a Roman Catholic Chapel for the king. It faces the rooms of Shelley. Reference was made the other day, in an ecclesiastical lawsuit, to the singular practice which prevails in this College, of filing out into the ante-chapel after the sacrament to consume the remains of the bread and wine, instead of consuming them at the altar or communion table. This probably is a trace of the Protestant reaction which followed the transitory reign of Roman Catholicism under Obadiah Walker. All are familiar with the Magdalen College case, and with the train of events by which the most devoutly royalist of Universities was brought, by its connection with the Anglican Church and in defence of the Church's possessions, into collision with the Crown, and arrayed for the moment on the side of constitutional liberty. After the Revolution the recoil quickly followed. Oxford became the stronghold of Jacobitism, the scene of treasonable talk over the wine in the Common Room, of riotous demonstrations by pot-valiant undergraduates in the streets, of Jacobite orations at academical festivals, amid frantic cheers of the assembled University, of futile plotting and puerile conspiracies which never put a man in the field. "The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse." But the troop of horse was not called upon to act. There was a small Hanoverian and constitutional party, and now and then it scored a point against its adversaries, who dared not avow their disloyalty to the reigning dynasty. A Jacobite Proctor, having intruded into a convivial meeting of Whigs, they tendered him the health of King George, which, for fear of the treason law, he was fain to drink upon his knees.

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In the early part of the eighteenth century there was some intellectual life in Christ Church, to which Westminster still sent up good scholars, and which was the resort of the nobility, in whom youthful ambition and desire for improvement might be stirred by the influences of political homes, and the prospects of a public life. Dean Aldrich was a scholar and a virtuoso. The spire of All Saints' Church is a soaring monument of his taste, if not of his genius, for architecture. In the controversy with Bentley about the Epistles of Phalaris, Christ Church, though she was hopelessly in the wrong, showed that she had some learning and some interest in classical studies. Otherwise the eighteenth century is a blank, or worse than a blank, in the history of the University. The very portraits on the College walls disclose the void of any but ecclesiastical eminence. That tendency to torpor, which, as Adam Smith and Turgot have maintained, is inherent in the system of endowments, fell upon Oxford in full measure. The Colleges had now, by the increase in value of their estates, become rich, some of them very rich. The estates of Magdalen, Gibbon tells us, were thought to be worth thirty thousand pounds a year, equivalent to double that sum now. Instead of being confined to their original Commons and Livery, the Heads and Fellows, as administrators of the estate, were now dividing among themselves annually large rentals, though they failed to increase in equal proportion the stipends of the Scholars and others who had no share in the administration. The statutes of mediaeval Founders had become utterly obsolete, and were disregarded, notwithstanding the oath taken to observe them, or observed only so far as they guarded the interest of sinecurists against the public. Nor were any other duties assumed. A few of the Fellows in each College added to their income by holding the tutorships, the functions of which they usually performed in the most slovenly way, each Tutor professing to teach all subjects, while most of them knew none. In the Common Room, with which each of the Colleges now provided itself, the Fellows spent lives of Trulliberian luxury, drinking, smoking, playing at bowls, and, as Gibbon said, by their deep but dull potations excusing the brisk intemperance of youth. Even the obligation to residence was relaxed, and at last practically annulled, so that a great part of the Fellowships became sinecure stipends held by men unconnected with the University. About the only restriction which remained was that on marriage. Out of this the Heads had managed to slip their necks, and from the time of Elizabeth downwards there had been married Heads, to the great scandal of Anthony Wood and other academical precisians, to whom, in truth, one lady, at least, the wife of Warden Clayton of Merton, seems to have afforded some grounds for criticism by her usurpations. But in the case of the Fellows, the statute, being not constructive, but express, could not be evaded except by stealth, and by an application of the aphorism then current, that he might hold anything who would hold his tongue. The effect of this, celibacy being no longer the rule, was to make all the Fellows look forward to the benefices, of a number of which each College was the patron, and upon which they could marry. Thus devotion to a life of study or education in College, had a Fellow been inclined to it, was impossible, under the ordinary conditions of modern life. Idleness, intemperance, and riot were rife among the students, as we learn from the novels and memoirs of the day. Especially were they the rule among the noblemen and gentlemen-commoners, who were privileged by their birth and wealth, and to whom by the servility of the Dons every license was allowed. Some Colleges took only gentlemen-commoners, who paid high fees and did what they pleased. All Souls' took no students at all, and became a mere club which, by a strange perversion of a clause in their statutes, was limited to men of high family. The University as a teaching and examining body had fallen into a dead swoon. Few of the Professors even went through the form of lecturing, and the statutory obligation of attendance was wholly disregarded by the students. The form of mediaeval disputations was kept up by the farcical repetition of strings of senseless syllogisms, which were handed down from generation to generation of students. The very nomenclature of the system had become unmeaning. Candidates for the theological degree paced the Divinity School for an hour, nominally challenging opponents to disputation, but the door was locked by the Bedel, that no opponent might appear. Examinations were held, but the candidates, by feeing the University officer, were allowed to choose their own examiners, and they treated the examiner after the ordeal. The two questions, "What is the meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University College?" comprised the examination upon which Lord Eldon took his degree. A little of that elegant scholarship, with the power of writing Latin verses, of which Addison was the cynosure, was the most of which Oxford could boast. Even this there could hardly have been had not the learned languages happened to have formed an official part of the equipment of the clerical profession. Of science, or the mental habit which science forms, there was none. Such opportunities for study, such libraries, such groves, a livelihood so free from care could scarcely fail, now and then, to give birth to a learned man, an Addison, a Lowth, a Thomas Warton, an Elmsley, a Martin Routh.

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The Universities being the regular finishing schools of the gentry and the professions, men who had passed through them became eminent in after life, but they owed little or nothing to the University. Only in this way can Oxford lay claim to the eminence of Bishop Butler, Jeremy Bentham, or Adam Smith, while Gibbon is her reproach. The figures of Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose ponderous twin statues sit side by side in the Library of University College, were more academical, especially that of Lord Stowell, who was Tutor of his College, and held a lectureship of Ancient History. Here and there a Tutor of the better stamp, no doubt, would try to do his duty by his pupils. A rather pathetic interest attaches to Richard Newton, who tried to turn Hart Hall into a real place of education, and had some distinguished pupils, among them Charles Fox. But the little lamp which he had kindled went out in the uncongenial air. On the site, thanks to the munificence of Mr. Baring, now stands Hertford College. Johnson's residence at Pembroke College was short, and his narrative shows that it was unprofitable, though his High Church principles afterwards made him a loyal son and eulogist of the University. One good effect the interdiction of marriage had. It kept up a sort of brotherhood, and saved corporate munificence from extinction by the private interest of fathers of families. As the College revenues increased, building went on, though after the false classical fashion of the times and mostly for the purpose of College luxury. Now rose the new quadrangle of Queen's, totally supplanting the mediaeval College, and the new buildings at Magdalen and Corpus. A plan is extant, horrible to relate, for the total demolition of the old quadrangle of Magdalen, and its replacement by a modern palace of idleness in the Italian style. To this century belong Peckwater and Canterbury quadrangles, also in the classical style, the first redeemed by the Library which fills one side of the square, and which has a heavy architectural grandeur as well as a noble purpose. To the eighteenth century we also mainly owe the College gardens and walks as we see them; and the gardens of St. John's, New College, Wadham, Worcester, and Exeter, with the lime walk at Trinity and the Broadwalk--now unhappily but a wreck--at Christ Church, may plead to a student's heart for some mitigation of the sentence on the race of clerical idlers and wine-bibbers, who, for a century, made the University a place, not of education and learning, but of dull sybaritism, and a source, not of light, but of darkness, to the nation. It is sad to think how different the history of England might have been had Oxford and Cambridge done their duty, like Harvard and Yale, during the last century.

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At the end of the last or beginning of the present century came the revival. At the end of the last century Christ Church had some brilliant classical scholars among her students, though the great scene of their eminence was not the study but the senate. The portraits of Wellesley and Canning hang in her Hall. In the early part of the present century the general spirit of reform and progress, which had been repressed during the struggle with revolutionary France, began to move again over the face of the torpid waters. Eveleigh, Provost of Oriel, led the way. At his College and at Balliol the elections to Fellowships were free from local or genealogical restrictions. They were now opened to merit, and those two Colleges, though not among the first in wealth or magnificence, attained a start in the race of regeneration which Balliol, being very fortunate in its Heads, has since in a remarkable manner maintained. The examination system of Laud had lacked a motive power, and had depended, like his policy, on his fiat instead of vital force. There was no sufficient inducement for the examiner to be strict or for the candidate to excel. The motive power was now supplied by a list of honours in classics and mathematics, and among the earliest winners in the first class in both schools was Robert Peel.

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Scarcely, however, had the University begun to awake to a new life, when it was swept by another ecclesiastical storm, the consequence of its unhappy identification with clericism and the State Church. The liberal movement which commenced after the fall of Napoleon and carried the Reform Bill, threatened to extend to the religious field, and to withdraw the support of the State from the Anglican Church. This led the clergy to look out for another basis, which they found in the reassertion of High Church and sacerdotal doctrines, such as apostolical succession, eucharistical real presence, and baptismal regeneration. Presently the movement assumed the form of a revival of the Church of the Middle Ages, such as High Church imagination pictured it, and ultimately of secession to Rome. Oxford, with her mediaeval buildings, her High Church tradition, her half-monastic Colleges, and her body of unmarried clergy, became the centre of the movement. The Romanising tendencies of Tractarianism, as from the "Tracts for the Times" it was called, visible from the first, though disclaimed by the leaders, aroused a fierce Protestant reaction, which encountered Tractarianism both in the press and in the councils of the University. The Armageddon of the ecclesiastical war was the day on which, in a gathering of religious partisans from all sections of the country which the Convocation House would not hold, so that it was necessary to adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre, Ward, the most daring of the Tractarian writers, after a scene of very violent excitement, was deprived of his degree. This was the beginning of the end. Newman, the real leader of the movement, though Pusey, from his academical rank, was the official leader, soon recognised the place to which his principles belonged, and was on his knees before a Roman Catholic priest, supplicating for admission to the Church of Rome. A ritualistic element remained, and now reigns, in the Church of England; but the party which Newman left, bereft of Newman, broke up, and its relics were cast like drift-wood on every theological or philosophical shore. Newman's poetic version of mediaeval religion, together with the spiritual graces of his style and his personal influence, had for a time filled the imaginations and carried away the hearts of youth, while the seniors were absorbed in the theological controversy, renounced lay studies, and disdained educational duty except as it might afford opportunities of winning youthful souls to the Neo-Catholic faith. Academical duty would have been utterly lost in theological controversy, had it not been for the Class List, which bound the most intellectual undergraduates to lay studies by their ambition, and kept on foot a staff of private teachers, "coaches," as they were called, to prepare men for the examinations, who did the duty which the ecclesiastical Fellows of the University disdained. The Oxford movement has left a monument of itself in the College founded in memory of Keble, the gentle and saintly author of "The Christian Year." It has left an ampler monument in the revival of mediaeval architecture at Oxford, and the style of new buildings which everywhere meet the eye. The work of the Oxford Architectural Society, which had its birth in the Neo-Catholic movement, may prove more durable than that movement itself. Of the excess to which the architectural revival was carried, the new Library at University College, more like a mediaeval Chapel than a Library, is a specimen. It was proposed to give Neo-Catholicism yet another monument by erecting close to the spot where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died for truth, the statue of Cardinal Newman, the object of whose pursuit through life had been, not truth, but an ecclesiastical ideal. Of the reaction against the Tractarian movement the monument is the memorial to the Protestant martyrs Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the subscription for which commenced among the Protestants who had come up to vote for the condemnation of Ward, and which Tractarians scornfully compared to the heap of stones raised over the body of Achan.

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