Chapter III: Part 3

Here ended the reign of ecclesiasticism, of the Middle Ages, and of religious exclusion. The collision into which Romanising Oxford had been brought with the Protestantism of the British nation, probably helped to bring on the revolution which followed, and which restored the University to learning, science, and the nation. The really academical element in the University invoked the aid of the national government and Legislature. A Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the University and its Colleges was appointed, and though some Colleges closed their muniment rooms, and inquiry was obstructed, enough was revealed in the Report amply to justify legislative reform and emancipation. An act of Parliament was passed which set free the University and Colleges alike from their mediaeval statutes, restored the University Professoriate, opened the Fellowships to merit, and relaxed the religious tests. The curriculum, the examination system, and the honour list were liberalised, and once more, as in early times, all the great departments of knowledge were recognised and domiciled in the University. Science, long an exile, was welcomed back to her home at the moment when a great extension of her empire was at hand. Strictly professional studies, such as practical law and medicine, could not be recalled from their professional seats. Elections to Fellowships by merit replaced election by local or school preferences, by kinship, or by the still more objectionable influences which at one time had been not unfelt. Colleges which had declined the duty of education, which had been dedicated to sinecurism and indolence, and whose quadrangles had stood empty, were filled with students, and once more presented a spectacle which would have gladdened the heart of the Founder. A Commission, acting on a still more recent Act of Parliament, has carried the adaptation of Oxford to the modern requirements of science and learning further than the old Commission, which acted in the penumbra of mediaeval and ecclesiastical tradition, dared. The intellectual Oxford of the present day is almost a fresh creation. Its spirit is new; it is liberal, free, and progressive. It is rather too revolutionary, grave seniors say, so far as the younger men are concerned. This is probably only the first forward bound of recovered freedom, which will be succeeded in time by the sober pace of learning and scientific investigation. Again, as in the thirteenth century, the day of Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, Oxford is a centre of progress, instead of being, as under the later Stuarts, the stronghold of reaction. Of the College revival, the monuments are all around in the new buildings, for which increasing numbers have called, and which revived energy has supplied. Christ Church, New College, Magdalen, Merton, Balliol, Trinity, University have all enlarged their courts, and in almost every College new life has been shown by improvement or restoration. Of the reign of mediaevalism the only trace is the prevalence in the new buildings of the mediaeval style, which architectural harmony seemed to require, though the new buildings of Christ Church and Trinity are proofs of a happy emancipation from architectural tradition. The University revival has its monument in the new examination Schools in High Street, where the student can no longer get his degree by giving the meaning of Golgotha and the name of the Founder of University College. There are those who, like Mark Pattison, look on it with an evil eye, regarding the examination system as a noxious excrescence and as fatal to spontaneous study and research; though they would hardly contend that spontaneous study and research flourished much at Oxford before the revival of examinations, or deny that since the revival Oxford has produced the fruits of study and research, at least to a fair extent. The restoration of science is proclaimed by the new Museum yonder; a strange structure, it must be owned, which symbolises, by the unfitness of its style for its purpose, at once the unscientific character of the Middle Ages, and the lingering attachment of Oxford to the mediaeval type. Of the abolition of the religious tests, and the restoration of the University to the nation, a monument is Mansfield College for Congregationalists, a vision of which would have thrown an orthodox and Tory Head of a College into convulsions half a century ago. Even here the mediaeval style of architecture keeps its hold, though the places of Catholic Saints are taken by the statues of Wycliffe, Luther, John Knox, Whitefield, and Wesley. By the side of Mansfield College rises also Manchester College for Independents, in the same architectural style. Neither of them, however, is in the Oxford sense a College; both are places of theological instruction.

* * * * *

On the North of the city, where fifty years ago stretched green fields, is now seen a suburb of villas, all of them bespeaking comfort and elegance, few of them overweening wealth. These are largely the monuments of another great change, the removal of the rule of celibacy from the Fellowships, and the introduction of a large body of married teachers devoted to their profession, as well as of the revival of the Professorships, which were always tenable by married men. Fifty years ago the wives of Heads of Houses, who generally married late in life if they married at all, constituted, with one or two officers of the University, the whole female society of Oxford. The change was inevitable, if education was to be made a profession, instead of being, as it had been in the hands of celibate Fellows of Colleges, merely the transitory occupation of a man whose final destination was the parish. Those who remember the old Common Room life, which is now departing, cannot help looking back with a wistful eye to its bachelor ease, its pleasant companionship, its interesting talk and free interchange of thought, its potations neither "deep" nor "dull." Nor were its symposia without important fruits when such men as Newman and Ward, on one side, encountered such men as Whately, Arnold, and Tait, on the other side, in Common Room talk over great questions of the day. But the life became dreary when a man had passed forty, and it is well exchanged for the community that fills those villas, and which, with its culture, its moderate and tolerably equal incomes, permitting hospitality but forbidding luxury, and its unity of interests with its diversity of acquirements and accomplishments, seems to present the ideal conditions of a pleasant social life. The only question is, how the College system will be maintained when the Fellows are no longer resident within the walls of the College to temper and control the younger members, for a barrack of undergraduates is not a good thing. The personal bond and intercourse between Tutor and pupil under the College system was valuable as well as pleasant; it cannot be resigned without regret. But its loss will be compensated by far superior teaching. Half a century ago conservatism strove to turn the railway away from Oxford. But the railway came, and it brings, on summer Sundays, to the city of study and thought not a few leaders of the active world. Oxford is now, indeed, rather too attractive; her academical society is in danger of being swamped by the influx of non-academical residents.

* * * * *

The buildings stand, to mark by their varying architecture the succession of the changeful centuries through which the University has passed. In the Libraries are the monuments of the successive generations of learning. But the tide of youthful life that from age to age has flowed through college, quadrangle, hall, and chamber, through University examination-rooms and Convocation Houses, has left no memorials of itself except the entries in the University and College books; dates of matriculation, which tell of the bashful boy standing before the august Vice-Chancellor at entrance; dates of degrees, which tell of the youth putting forth, from his last haven of tutelage, on the waves of the wide world. Hither they thronged, century after century, in the costume and with the equipments of their times, from mediaeval abbey, grange, and hall, from Tudor manor-house and homestead, from mansion, rectory, and commercial city of a later day, bearing with them the hopes and affections of numberless homes. Year after year they departed, lingering for a moment at the gate to say farewell to College friends, the bond with whom they vowed to preserve, but whom they were never to see again, then stepped forth into the chances and perils of life, while the shadow on the College dial moved on its unceasing round. If they had only left their names in the rooms which they had occupied, there would be more of history than we have in those dry entries in the books. But, at all events, let not fancy frame a history of student life at Oxford out of "Verdant Green." There are realities corresponding to "Verdant Green," and the moral is, that many youths come to the University who had better stay away, since none get any good and few fail to get some harm, saving those who have an aptitude for study. But the dissipation, the noisy suppers, the tandem-driving, the fox-hunting, the running away from Proctors, or, what is almost as bad, the childish devotion to games and sports as if they were the end of existence, though they are too common a part of undergraduate life in the University of the rich, are far from being the whole of it. Less than ever are they the whole of it since University reform and a more liberal curriculum have increased, as certainly they have, industry and frugality at the same time. Of the two or three thousand lamps which to-night will gleam from those windows, few will light the supper-table or the gambling-table; most will light the book. Youthful effort, ambition, aspiration, hope, College character and friendship have no artist to paint them,--at least as yet they have had none. But whatever of poetry belongs to them is present in full measure here.

INDEX.

Addison, Joseph, 136.

Aldrich, Henry, 128.

Alfred (King), 24, 51.

All Souls' College, 67 _et sq._

Amusements, mediaeval, 43.

Antiquity, apparent, of the buildings, 3.

Architectural revival at Oxford, 147, 148.

Aristotle, 31.

Ashmolean Museum, 24.

Augustinians, 35.

_Aulae_, 39.

Bacon, Roger, 32, 33, 37.

Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 91.

Balliol College, 50;
intellectual revival in, 141.

Baring, T. C., 138.

Benedictines, 35.

Bentham, Jeremy, 137.

Bentley, Richard, 129.

Black Prince, the, 100.

Bocardo, 88.

Bodleian Library, 19, 20, 21, 97.

Bodley, Sir Thomas, 20, 93.

Bologna, University of, 29.

Botanic Garden, 97.

Boyle, Charles, 119.

Bradwardine, Thomas, 31.

Brasenose College, 67 _et sq._, 74, 75.

Broadwalk, the, 140.

Brome, Adam de, 52.

Buildings, dates of, 3 _et sq._

Butler, Bishop, 137.

Cardinal College, 83.

Carmellites, 35.

Celibacy enjoined on Heads of Colleges, 96;
effects of its withdrawal, 132, 133.

Chamberdekyns, 39, 99.

Charles I. at Oxford, 113, 114.

Charles II. at Oxford, 123.

Chicheley, Archbishop, 70, 71.

Christ Church Cathedral, 35.

Christ Church College, 80 _et sq._;
intellectual revival in, 128, 129, 140, 141.

Cistercians, 35.

Civil War, Oxford in the time of the, 112 _et sq._

Clarendon, Earl of, 18, 107.

Clarendon Building, 18, 19.

Clarendon Press, 19.

Class Lists, 142.

Clayton, Thos., wife of, 132.

Clerical profession, dominance of, 104.

Colet, John, 76.

College life, 9 _et sq._

Colleges, administration and government of, 9 _et sq._;
growing importance of, 99 _et sq._;
the present intellectual revival in the, 152 _et sq._

Commemoration, 15.

Common Room life, 157.

Commons, 49.

Commonwealth, Oxford in the time of the, 114 _et sq._

Conant, John, 116.

Congregation, 8.

Convocation, 8.

Convocation House, 13, 14, 97.

Corpus Christi College, 75.

Cranmer, Archbishop, 88, 89.

Cromwell, Oliver, Chancellor of Oxford, 118.

Degrees, manner of conferring, 13.

Disputation, stress laid upon, 30.

Divinity School, 14.

Dominicans, 36.

Duns Scotus, 31.

Durham College, 91.

Egglesfield, Robert, 52.

Eldon, Lord, 135, 137.

Elizabeth (Queen), 98.

Elmsley, Peter, 136.

Erasmus, D., 76.

"Essays and Reviews," authors of, 24.

Eton, 59.

Eveleigh, John, 141.

Evelyn, John, 116, 119.

Examinations, 21, 22.

Examination system, the, 153, 154.

Examination-rooms. _See_ Schools.

Exeter College, 50, 53 _et sq._

Faculties, 28.

Falkland, Viscount, 107.

Fawkes's (Guy) lantern, 21.

Fell, John, 124.

Fellows, 46.

Fellowships, 102.

Fleming, Bishop, 68.

Founders, portraits of, 21.

Foxe, Bishop, 77.

Franciscans, 36.

Frydeswide, St., 87.

Gibbon, Edward, 137.

Gladstone, W. E., 22.

Graduation. _See_ Degrees.

Great Hall of the University, the, 51.

Great Tew, 107.

Grocyn, William, 76.

Grosseteste, Robert, 38, 44.

Halls, 39, 98, 99.

Hart Hall, 137.

Hebdomadal Council, 106.

Hertford College, 138.

High Church Traditions at Oxford, 144 _et sq._

Hooker, Richard, 108.

Houses, monastic, 50.

Humanists, the, 77.

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 20, 76.

Inception, 31.

Jacobitism at Oxford, 127, 128.

James I., 22, 98.

James II., statue of, 125.

Jesus College, 94.

Jews at Oxford in the Middle Ages, 42.

Johnson, Samuel, at Oxford, 138.

Keble, John, 147.

Keble College, 147.

Laud, Archbishop, 109 _et sq._

Leicester, Earl of, 108.

Lime Walk at Trinity College, the, 140.

Linacre, Thomas, 76.

Lincoln College, 67 _et sq._

Livery, 49.

Locke, John, 124.

Lowth, Robert, 136.

Magdalen College, 67 _et sq._, 72 _et sq._, 130.

Magdalen College Case, 126.

Manchester College, 155.

Manning, H. E., 24.

Mansfield College, 155.

Marisco, Adam de, 44.

Martyr, Catherine, 87.

Maynard, Joseph, 121.

Mendicant Orders, 36.

Merton, Walter de, 44, 45.

Merton College, 45 _et sq._

Mob Quad, 45.

Monastic Orders, 35.

Monastic Oxford, 35.

Monasteries, 35, 37, 50, 53.

Montfort, Simon de, 37, 38.

More, Sir Thomas, 76.

Museum, the Ashmolean. _See_ Ashmolean.

Museum, the University, 153, 154.

Neo-Catholicism. _See_ Tractarianism.

Neville, George, 101.

Newman, J. H., 14, 24, 145, 148.

New College, 55 _et sq._

Newton, Isaac, 105.

Newton, Richard, 137.

Non-conformists excluded, 123.

Ockham, 31.

Oldham, Hugh, 78.

Oriel College, 50, 52.

Osney Abbey, 35.

Owen, John, 116.

Oxford (the name), derivation of, 2.

Oxford Architectural Society, 147.

Oxford (the city), situation of, 1;
environs of, 1, 2;
of the 13th century, 27 _et sq._

Oxford (the University),
administration and government of, 7 _et sq._, 106 _et sq._;
origin and growth of, 25 _et sq._;
political proclivities of, 28, 37, 105;
in the 18th century, 130 _et sq._;
in the 19th century, 140 _et sq._;
intellectual revival of, in the present day, 152.

Oxford Movement, the. _See_ Tractarianism.

Oxford University Commissions (1850 and 1876), 149, 151.

Papacy, the, and the Universities, 34, 37.

Paris, University of, 27, 34.

Pattison, Mark, 70.

Pembroke College, 97.

Peel, Robert, 142.

Petre, Sir William, 93.

Philippa, Queen, 52.

Philosophy, Scholastic, early addiction to, 30.

Pope, Cardinal, 92.

Pope, Sir Thomas, 91.

Portraits of Founders, 21.

Press, the University (_see also_ Clarendon Press), 19.

Proctors, 10, 13, 14.

Professors, 10.

Protectorate, the. _See_ Commonwealth.

Puritanism and Oxford, 115 _et sq._

Pusey, E. B., 24, 145.

Queen's College, 50, 52.

Radcliffe, Dr. John, 23.

Radcliffe Library, 23.

Reformation, influence of, on Oxford, 108, 110.

Religious tests, 90.

Renaissance, the Mediaeval, 23.

Restoration, the, and Oxford, 120 _et sq._

Revolution, the (1688), and Oxford, 125, 127.

Richard III. at Oxford, 73, 74.

Rotheram, Bishop, 69.

Routh, Martin, 136.

Royal Commissions. _See_ Oxford University Commissions.

Royal Society, The, 119 _et sq._

St. Frydeswide's Church, 35.

St. John's College, 92.

St. Mary of Winton, College of, 56.

St. Mary's Church, 15, 24.

St. Michael's Church, 25.

Salerno, University of, 27.

Scholars, 46 _et sq._

Schools, the, 21.

Schools, the new examination, 153.

Sermons, University, 24.

Sheldon, Archbishop, 14.

Sheldonian Theatre, 14, 15, 124, 125.

Smith, Adam, 137.

_Socii_, 46.

Sports, 162.

Statutes, fettering influence of, 101, 102;
disregarded, 130.

Stowell, Lord, 137.

Student life, mediaeval, 39 _et sq._, 63 _et sq._

Students, mediaeval, 39, 41 _et sq._;
their affrays with the townspeople, 41, 42;
their amusements, 43.

Suburbs of Oxford, 156 _et sq._

Teachers, the first, at Oxford, 28.

Tests. _See_ Religious tests.

Theology, 32.

Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, 73.

Tom Tower, 81.

Tractarianism, 145 _et sq._

Trinity College, 91.

"Trojans, The," 77.

Turner's picture of Oxford, 2.

Tutors, 9.

Undergraduate life, modern, 162, 163.

Universities, rise of, in Europe, 27.

University College, 51.

University Gallery, 21.

"Verdant Green," 162.

Vice-Chancellorship, the, 106.

Vives, Juan Luis, 81.

Wadham, Dorothy, 96.

Wadham, Sir Nicholas, 95.

Wadham College, 94.

Walker, Obadiah, 126.

Ward, Seth, 116.

Ward, W. G., 145.

Warton, Thomas, 136.

Waynflete, Bishop, 72, 73.

Wellington, Duke of, his inauguration as Chancellor, 17.

Wesley, John, 70.

White, Sir Thomas, 92, 93.

Wilkins, John, 116, 119, 122.

William of Durham, 50.

William of Wykeham, 55 _et sq._

Winchester School, 58.

Windebank, Thos., 114.

Wolsey, Cardinal, 59, 81, 82 _et sq._

Wood, Anthony (_quoted_), 120, 121.

Worcester College, 35.

Wren, Christopher, 3, 82.

Wycliffe, John, 54.

Wykeham. _See_ William of Wykeham.

End of Project Gutenberg's Oxford and Her Colleges, by Goldwin Smith