OXFORD
THE ILLUSTRATIONS IN THIS VOLUME WERE ENGRAVED AND PRINTED BY THE
CARL HENTSCHEL COLOURTYPE, LTD.
[Pg 5][Pg 4][Pg 3]
THE CLARENDON BUILDING, BROAD STREET
It is the Roman Doric portico of the “Building” we see rising in the centre of the picture, surmounted by a huge leaden figure, forming one of the acroteria of the pediment.
This noble piece of architecture was erected from the proceeds of the sale of copies of Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, completed in 1713.
Looking west, on the right are some old houses, beyond which lie Trinity and Balliol Colleges. [Pg 7]
OXFORD · PAINTED
BY JOHN FULLEYLOVE R.I.
DESCRIBED BY EDWARD
THOMAS · PUBLISHED BY
A. & C. BLACK · LONDON · W
Published November 1903[Pg 9]
Prefatory Note
Most of these chapters have been filled by a brief search into my recollections of Oxford. They aim, therefore, at recording my own impressions as faithfully as the resultant stir of fancy would allow. But I am also deeply and obviously indebted to several books, and in particular to the histories of Oxford by Parker, Maxwell Lyte, and Boase; to Mr. F. E. Robinson’s series of College Histories; to Reminiscences of Oxford and its companion volumes from the Clarendon Press; and, above all the rest, to Anthony à Wood, and to the Rev. Andrew Clark’s perfect editions of that writer’s Life and Times, and of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. The Editors of The Daily Chronicle, The Illustrated London News, and Crampton’s Magazine have kindly given me permission to reprint a few pages from my contributions thereto.
Contents
List of Illustrations
The illustrations in this volume were engraved and printed by the
Carl Hentschel Colourtype, Ltd.
[Pg 17]
ON ENTERING OXFORD
CHAPTER I
ON ENTERING OXFORD
Passing rapidly through London, with its roar of causes that have been won, and the suburbs, where they have no causes, and skirting the willowy Thames,—glassy or silver, or with engrailed grey waves—and brown ploughlands, elm-guarded, solitary, I approached Oxford. Nuneham woods made one great shadow on the land, one great shadow on the Thames. According to an old custom, it rained. But rain takes away nothing from Oxford save a few nice foot passengers. It transmutes the Franciscan habit of the city to a more Dominican cast; and if the foil of sky be faintly lighted, the rain becomes a visible beatitude.
One by one the churches of St. Mary the Virgin and All Saints’, and the pleasant spire of the Cathedral, appear; with the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, Tom Tower of Christ Church, and that old bucolic tower of Robert d’Oigli’s castle on the west. For a minute several haystacks, a gasometer, and the engine smoke replace them. But already that one cameo from[Pg 20] February’s hand has painted and lit and garnished again that city within the heart, which is Oxford. I think, when I see an old woodcut of a patron holding his towered foundation in his hand, about to bestow it as a gift,—as William of Wykeham is depicted, holding Winchester,—that even so Oxford gives to us the stones of church and college, the lawns and shrubs of gardens, and the waters of Isis, to be stored in the chambers of the soul—“Mother of Arts!”
Mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess
City or suburban, studious walks and shades.
So ran my thoughts and Milton’s verse; and possessed, as it is easy to become in such a place, with its great beauty, thinking of its great renown, my mind went naturally on in the channel of that same stream of verse, while I saw the Christ Church groves, the Hinksey Hills, and the grey Isis—
See there the olive grove of Academe,
Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the Summer long;
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound
Of bees’ industrious murmur, oft invites
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls
His whispering stream.
But the dark entry to the city, on the western side, suddenly changed my thoughts. It is well known. It is the most contemptible in Europe. It consists of a hoarding, a brewery, and suitable appurtenances. Of more recent date is the magnificent marmalade shop,[Pg 21] the most conspicuous building in Oxford. On the north and east the approach is not worse, consisting, as it does, of sermons in brick, arranged in perfectly successful imitation of Tooting. On the south the fields are melancholy in apprehension of a similar fate. In short, one ignorant of the city might believe that he was approaching the hub of the universe.
Then, the Norman tower appeared again, and the afforested castle mound rose up. A bell, and many bells, began to sound. The present vanished in charge of a westward-going motor car, containing three gentlemen with cigars and a lady; and the past, softer than the cooing of doves and more compelling than organ music, came with the twilight from the tower of St. Michael’s church.
At sunset or at dawn the city’s place in the world, as a beautiful thing, is clearest. Few cities look other than sad at those hours; many, unless hid in their own smoke, look cheap. Oxford becomes part of the magic of sunset and dawn,—is, as it were, gathered into the bosom of the power that is abroad. Yet, if it is one with the hills and the clouds and the silence, the human dignity of the place is also significant. The work of the ancient architect conspires with that of the sunset and of long, pregnant tracts of time; and I know not whether to thank, for the beauty of the place, its genius or perhaps the divinest series of accidents that have ever agreed to foster the forward-looking designs of men. In the days when what is admirable in Oxford was built, the builder made no pretence to[Pg 22] please his neighbour. He made what he loved. In many cases he was probably indifferent to everything else. But the genius of the place took care; and only the recent architects who have endeavoured to work in harmony with the place have failed. There is a gentle and puissant harmonising influence in Oxford which nothing can escape. I am no lover of Georgian architecture and am often blind to the power of Wren; but in Oxford I have no such incapacities; and I believe that here architecture should be judged, not as Norman or classical, as the work of Wolsey or Aldrich, but as Oxford architecture. The library at Christ Church, or any other work of the eighteenth century, seems to me as divine a thing, though as yet it lacks the complete unction of antiquity, as Mob Quad at Merton or Magdalen Tower. To pass from the Norman work of St. Peter’s in the East to the Palladianism of Peckwater quadrangle, is but to descend from one to another of the same honourable race. If certain extremely new edifices wear out a thousand years they will probably be worthy of reverence at the end of that time, and be in harmony with Merton chapel and Balliol hall at once. Nothing is so deserving, few things so exacting, of respect, from transitory men as age. Things change, and improvements are questioned or questionable; but, for me, age is as good as an improvement; and Oxford honours what is old with particular dignities and graces; under her influence the work of age is at once blander and more swift.
But this gentle tyranny,—as of the Mother of[Pg 24][Pg 23]
OXFORD, FROM THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE
On the extreme left of the picture shows the roof of the Schools; the dome of the Radcliffe Library, St. Mary’s tower and spire, and Merton tower, occupying the centre of the picture.
To the right, over part of Brasenose College, are the elm trees of the Broad Walk. In the foreground are the pinnacles and roof of the Bodleian Library.
The view is from the Cupola of the Sheldonian Theatre, looking south on a stormy day.
Christ, who, in Leonardo’s picture, unites angel and holy child and St. John with outspread hands,—is exerted not only upon the stones, but also upon the people of the place. A man may at Oxford rejoice in the company of another whom it is a self-sacrifice to meet elsewhere. He finds himself marvelling that one who was merely a gentleman in London can be interesting in Long Wall Street or on the Cherwell. The superb, expensive young man who thinks that there is “practically nobody in Oxford”—the poor, soiled scholar—the exuberant, crimson-lipped athlete, whose stride is a challenge, his voice a trumpet call—the lean and larded æsthete, busily engaged upon the quaint designs of oriental life,—all discover some point in common when they are seen together in the Schools, or on the riverside.
I was never more effectually reminded of this Oxford magic than when I heard the City Band playing opposite University one day. I was indifferent, and for the time ignorant and incapable of knowing, whether the music was that of Wagner or Sousa. It seemed to me the music of Apollo, certainly of some one grander than all grand composers. And yet, as I was informed, what I had entirely loved was from an inferior opera which every street boy can improve.
It was another music, and yet symphonious, that I heard, when I came again to Addison’s Walk at Magdalen. I stopped at Magdalen cloisters on my way[Pg 28]—
O blessed shades! O gentle cool retreat
From all th’ immoderate Heat
In which the frantic World does burn and sweat!—
Let any one who has laughed at Oxford discipline, or criticised her system of education, go there in the morning early and be abased before the solemnity of that square lawn; and should he be left with a desire to explain anything, let him take up his abode with the stony mysterious beasts gathered around that lawn. I like that grass amidst the cloisters because it is truly common. No one, I hope and believe, except a gardener, an emblem, is permitted to walk thereon. It belongs to me and to you and to the angels. Such an emerald in such a setting is a fit symbol of the university, and its privy seal.
It is still unnecessary to pass an examination before entering Addison’s walk. It is therefore unfrequented. A financier made a pretty sum one Midsummer-day by accepting gratuities from all the strangers who came to its furthest point—“a custom older than King Alfred.” But, although they are not vulgarly so called, these walks are the final school of the Platonist. It is an elucidation of the Phædo to pace therein. That periwinkle-bordered pathway is the place of long thoughts that come home with circling footsteps again and again. It is the home of beech and elm, and of whatsoever that is beautiful and wise and stately dwells among beech and elm.
More than one college history is linked with a tree. [Pg 30][Pg 29]Lincoln College reverently entreats the solitary plane
BISHOP HEBER’S TREE
To the left are seen the steps leading to the Radcliffe Library, over which appears a portion of the buildings of Brasenose College, divided by a lane from the gardens of Exeter College, in which the Bishop planted the chestnut tree named after him.
The spire of Exeter Chapel shows to the right. The iron railings surround the Radcliffe Library.
tree. William of Waynfleet commanded that Magdalen College should be built over against the oak that fell after six hundred years of life a century ago. Sir Thomas White was “warned in a dream” to build a college at a place where there stood a triple elm tree. Hence arose St. John’s College. Two hundred years ago the tree was known to exist, and there is ground for the pious belief that a scion still flourishes there.
Nowhere is green so wonderful as at Magdalen or Trinity. But their sweetness is no more than the highest expression of the privacy of Oxford. Turn aside at the gate that lies nearest your path; enter; and you will find a cloister or cloistral calm, free from wolf and ass. “The walks at these times,” said a vacation visitor, “are so much one’s own—the tall trees of Christ’s, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble or royal Benefactress (that should have been ours) whose portrait seems to smile upon their overlooked beadsman and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality; the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens where the first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple.” With a little effrontery and an English accent you may enjoy the inmost bowers of the Fellows[Pg 34] or, Si qua est ea gloria, gather fruit from the espaliers of the president. The walls are barricaded only with ivy, or wallflower, or the ivy-leaved toadflax and its delicate bells. But the stranger never learns that the seclusion of Oxford is perennial, and that only in the vacations may he suffer from what the old pun calls porta eburna. The place is habitually almost deserted, except by the ghosts of the dead. Returning to it, when friends are gone, and every one is a stranger, the echoes of our footsteps in the walls are as the voices of our dead selves; we are among the ghosts; the past is omnipotent, even terrible. Echoes, quotes Montaigne, are the spirits of the dead, and among these mouldering stones we may put our own interpretation upon that. And no one that has so returned, or that comes a reverent stranger for the first time to Oxford, can read without deep intelligence the lines which are put into the mouth of Lacordaire in “Ionica”:—
Lost to the Church and deaf to me, this town
Yet wears the reverend garniture of peace.
Set in a land of trade, like Gideon’s fleece
Bedewed where all is dry; the Pope may frown;
But, if this city is the shrine of youth,
How shall the Preacher lord of virgin souls,
When by glad streams and laughing lawns he strolls,
How can he bless them not? Yet in sad sooth,
When I would love those English gownsmen, sighs
Heave my frail breast, and weakness dims mine eyes.
These strangers heed me not—far off in France
Are young men not so fair, and not so cold,
My listeners. Were they here, their greeting glance
Might charm me to forget that I were old.
Some time ago I went into a grey quadrangle, filled[Pg 35] with gusty light and the crimson of creeper-leaves, tremulous or already in flight. A tall poplar, the favourite of the months from April to October, was pensively distributing its foliage upon the grass. There, the leaves became invisible, because of brilliant frost, and in a high attic I heard once again the laud or summons or complaint of bells. That was All Saints’; that, St. Mary’s; that, the Cathedral’s; and that was their blended after-tone, seeming to come from the sky. Each bell had its own character or mood, sometimes constant, sometimes changing with the weather of the night. One, for example, spoke out sullenly and ceased, as if to return to musing that had been painfully interrupted. Another bell seemed to take deep joy in its frequent melodious duty—like some girl seated alone in her bower at easy toil, now and then lifting her head, and with her embroidery upon her knee, chanting joys past and present and yet to come. Once again I felt the mysterious pleasure of being in an elevated Oxford chamber at night, among cloud and star,—so that I seemed to join in the inevitable motion of the planets,—and as I saw the sea of roofs and horned turrets and spires I knew that, although architecture is a dead language, here at least it speaks strongly and clearly, pompous as Latin, subtle as Greek. I used to envy the bell-ringers on days of ancient festival or recent victory, and cannot wonder that old Anthony à Wood should have noted the eight bells of Merton as he came home from antiquarian walks, and would often ring those same bells “for recreatio[Pg 36]n’s sake.” When their sound is dead it is sweet to enter that peacefullest and homeliest of churchyards, St. Peter’s in the East, overlooked by St. Edmund’s Hall and Queen’s College and the old city wall. There is a peace which only the thrush and blackbird break, and even their singing is at length merely the most easily distinguishable part of the great melody of the place. Most of the graves are so old or so forgotten that it is easy—and in Spring it is difficult not—to perceive a kind of dim reviving life among the stones, where, as in some old, quiet books, the names live again a purged and untroubled existence.
In Oxford nothing is the creation of one man or of one year. Every college and church and garden is the work of centuries of men and time. Many a stone reveals an octave of colour that is the composition of a long age. The founder of a college laid his plans; in part, perhaps he fixed them in stone. His successors continued the work, and without haste, without contempt of the future or ignorance of the past, helped the building to ascend unto complete beauty by means of its old and imperfect selves. The Benedictine Gloucester House of 1283 has grown by strange methods into the Worcester College of to-day. The Augustinian Priory site is now occupied by Wadham. St. Alban’s Hall is no more; but its lamp—“Stubbin’s moon”—is a light in a recess of Merton. Wolsey drew upon the bank of old foundations for the munificence which is still his renown. A chantry for the comfort of departed souls became a kind of scholarship.[Pg 38][Pg 37]
ST. EDMUND’S HALL
The picture shows the north wall of the Hall, pierced with windows looking on to the graveyard of St. Peter’s in the East.
The confused mass of chimneys and dormer windows give a picturesque appearance to this side of the Hall.
New College Gardens lie beyond the wall running across the picture.
Duke Humphrey’s library was the nest from which Bodley’s august collection overflowed; the very timber of the Bodleian was in part Merton’s gift. No city preserves the memory and signature of so many men. The past and the dead have here, as it were, a corporate life. They are an influence, an authority; they create and legislate to-day. Everything in the present might have been foretold, and in fact existed in some latent form, in the past, as Merlin was said to have foretold the migration of Oxford scholars from Cricklade, i.e. Greeklade. Therefore, in Oxford alone, as I walk, I seem to be in the living past. The oldest thing is not as in most places a curiosity. Since it is told of Oxford, the story is not lightly to be discredited, that Ludovicus Vives, who was sent as professor of rhetoric by Wolsey, was welcomed by a swarm of bees, and that they, “to signify the incomparable sweetness of his eloquence,” settled under the leads of his study at Corpus Christi College, and there for a hundred and thirty years continued, until they dispersed out of sorrow for the fallen Stuart family. When dawn arrives to the student, after a night among books, and the towers and spires seem to be just fresh from the acting of some stately drama; or at nightfall, when the bells ring as he comes, joyful and tired, home from the west,—then the city and all its component ages speak out, as if the past were but a fine memory, richly stored and ordered.
Once, answering the call of one of those bells that are to a scholar as a trumpet to a soldier, I found[Pg 42] myself at a service that had in it elements older than Oxford. I was surely at a Greek festival. The genial, flushed, slightly grotesque faces of the College fellows contrasted with the white children of the choir, very much as the swarthy faun with the young god in Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne.” The notes of the choristers and of the organ were moulded to finer results by the severe decorations of the carven stone around and above. When one sang alone, it was as it had been a dove floating to the windows and away, away. There were parts of the music so faint and so exquisitely blended that the twenty voices were but as the sound of a reverberating bell. A voice of baser metal read the lesson with a melancholy dignity that made the words at once pleasing and unintelligible. When the last surplice had floated past the exit, the worshippers looked a little pained and confused, as if doubting whether they had not assisted some beautiful rash heresy. Turning into High Street, I was rudely called back from a fantastic visit to Tempe, by the wind and rain of every day. The usual pageant of study and pleasure was passing up and down.
Here was a smiling gentleman, red as the opening morn, with black clothes, white tie,—one who scoffs at everything but gout. He notes in the fragrance of his favourite dishes omens of greater import than augurs used to read from sacrificial victims.
Here was a pale seraph, his eyes commercing with the sky. He has taken every possible prize. Nobody but his friends can think that he is uninteresting.[Pg 43]
Here was a little, plain-featured, gentle ascetic, one of the “last enchantments of the middle ages” that are to be seen still walking about Oxford. Five hundred years ago he might have ridden, “coy as a maid,” to Canterbury and told “the clerk of Oxford’s tale.” Now, the noises of the world are too much for him, and he murmurs among his trees—
How safe, methinks, and strong behind
These trees have I encamped my mind,
Where beauty aiming at the heart,
Bends in some tree its useless dart,
And where the world no certain shot
Can make, or me it toucheth not,
But I on it securely play,
And gall its horsemen all the day.
Bind me, ye woodbines in your twines.
Curl me about, ye gadding vines,
And oh so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place!
Here was a youth not much past seventeen. In his face the welt schmerz contends with the pride in his last bon mot. He is a wide and subtle reader; he has contributed to the halfpenny press. He has materialised spirits and moved objects at a distance. In the world, there is little left for him except repose and weak tea.
Here was one that might be a monk and might equally well be St. Michael, with flashing eyes and high white forehead that catches a light from beyond the dawn and glows. He is a splendour among men as he walks in the crowd of high churchmen, low churchmen, broad churchmen, nonconformists, and men who on Sunday wear bowler hats.[Pg 44]
Here was a shy don, married to Calliope—a brilliant companion—one who shares a wisdom as deep and almost as witty as Montaigne’s, with a few fellows of colleges, and ever murmuring “Codex.”
Here was one, watched over alike by the Muses and the Graces; honey-tongued; athletic; who would rather spend a life in deciding between the Greek and Roman ideals than in ruling Parliament and being ruled by society. He strode like a Plantagenet. When he stood still he was a classical Hermes.
Here was a Blue “with shy but conscious look”; and there the best of all Vices.
Here was a youth, with gaudy tie, who believed that he was leading a bull-dog, but showed a wise acquiescence in the intricate canine etiquette. May his dog not cease before him.
Here was a martial creature, walking six miles an hour, pensively, in his master’s gown. His beard, always blown over his shoulder, has been an inspiration to generations of undergraduates, and, with his bellying gown, gives him a resemblance to Boreas or Notus.
Probably because the able novelist has not visited Oxford, men move about its streets more naïvely and with more expression in their faces than anywhere else in the world. There you may do anything but carry a walking-stick. (As I write, fashion has changed her mind, and walking-sticks of the more flippant kinds are commonly in use.) There are therefore more unmasked faces in half of Turl Street than in the whole of the Strand. Almost every one appears to have[Pg 45] a sense of part proprietorship in the city; walks as if he were in his own garden; has no fear lest he should be caught smiling to himself, or, as midnight approaches, even singing loudly to himself. A don will not hesitate to make the worst joke in a strong and cheerful voice in the bookseller’s shop, when it is full of clever freshmen.
Yonder they go, the worldly and the unworldly, the rich and poor, high and low, proving that Oxford is one of the most democratic places in Europe. The lax discipline that broadens the horizon of the inexpert stranger is probably neither unwise nor unpremeditated. It is certainly not inconsistent with the genius of a city whose very stones may be supposed to have acquired an educative faculty, and a sweet presence that is not to be put by. No fool ever went up without becoming at least a coxcomb before he came down. In no place are more influences brought to bear upon the mind, though it is emphatically a place where a man is expected to educate himself. A man is apt to feel on first entering Oxford, and still more on leaving it, that the beautiful city is unfortunate in having but mortal minds to teach. There is a keen and sometimes pathetic sense of a great music which one cannot wholly follow, a light unapprehended, a wisdom not realised. Yet much is to be guessed at or privily understood, when we behold St. Mary’s spire, marvellously attended, and crowned, when the night is one sapphire, by Cassiopeia. And the ghosts take shape—the cowled, mitred, mail-coated, sceptred company of founders,[Pg 46] benefactors, master-masons, scholars, philosophers, and the later soldiers, poets, statesmen, and wits, and finally some one, among the rich in influence of yesterday, who embodies for one or another of us the sweetness of the place.
For me, when the first splendour of the city in my imagination has somewhat grown dim, I see in the midst and on high, a room, little wider than the thickness of its walls, which were part stone, part books; for the books fitted naturally into the room, leaving spaces only for a bust of Plato, a portrait of Sir Thomas Browne, a decanter, and a window commanding sky and clouds and stars above an horizon of many towers. There, too, is a great fire; a dowager brown teapot; with a pair of slippers,—and to get into them was no whit less magical than into the seven-league boots. I see a chair also, where a man might sit, curled, with the largest folio and be hidden. I guess at the face of the man under the folio. He was a small, shrunken, elvish figure, with a smile like the first of June often budding in a face like the last of December. In rest, that face was grim as if carved in limestone; in expression, like waters in Spring. His curled, ebony hair had a singular freshness and hint of vitality that gave the lie to his frail form and husky voice. Cut in wood, the large nose and chin, peering forward, would have served well as the figure-head of a merry ship, and to me he seemed indeed to travel on such a ship towards a land that no other man desires. His talk was ever of men, fighting, ploughing, singing; and how fair women be;[Pg 48][Pg 47]
THE UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF ST. MARY
The podium and part of one of the Doric columns of the Canterbury Gate of Christ Church show at the extreme left of the picture.
The lantern of the Radcliffe Library appears between the column and the picturesque house covered with greenery, above which rises the tower and spire of St. Mary’s, the University Church.
Between this house and a lower building—St. Mary’s Hall—runs St. Mary’s Hall Lane, emerging into “the High” opposite the porch of St. Mary’s Church.
The buildings on the extreme right of the picture are those belonging to Oriel College.
with jests and fancies that disenthroned all powers except fantasy and adventure and mirth. Out of doors, at Yarnton or Cumnor or Tew, he seemed near kinsman to the sun and the south wind, so that for a time we were one with them, with a sense of mystery and of pride. And, whether in or out of doors, he loved the night, because her hands were soft, and he found the shadows infernis hilares sine regibus, as in the world of Saturn. He would hail the morn as he saw her from a staircase window with “Sweet cousin” and such follies; and would go into the chapel on summer evenings without a candle to see prophet and apostle lit by the tender beam. He wrote, and never printed, much verse. When I look at it now, I wonder in what language it was conceived, and where the key is hidden, and by what shores and forests to-day, men speak or dream it. The verses seem to maturer eyes but as crude translations out of silence. Yet in the old days we called him sometimes the Last, sometimes the First, of the Bards, so nimble and radiant was his spirit. He seemed one that might have written Tamerlane in his youth, after a pot of sack with Shakespeare at the “Crown” in Cornmarket Street. I know not whether to call him immemorially old or young. He had touches of the golden age, and as it were a tradition from the singer who was in that ship which
First through the Euxine seas bore all the flower of Greece.
Unlike other clever people in Oxford he was brilliant [Pg 52]in early morning; would rise and talk and write at dawn,—go a-maying,—sing hunting ditties amid the snow to the leaden east and the frozen starlings, by Marston or above Wytham and Eynsham. His laugh fell upon our ears like an echo from long-forgotten, Arcadian existences; it was in harmony with the songs of thrushes and the murmur of the Evenlode. Coming into his room we expected to see a harp at his side. But where are the voices that we heard and uttered?—
Are they exiled out of stony breasts,
Never to make return?
Once more is the blackbird’s fluting a mystery save that it speaks of him, last of the Bards.
“Beautiful Mother,” he sang, to Oxford, “too old not to be sad, too austere to look sad and to mourn! Sometimes thou art young to my eyes because thy children are always young, and for a little while it was a journey to youth itself to visit thee. More often, not only art thou old and austere, but thy fresh and youthful children seem to have learned austerity and the ways of age, for love of thee, graciously apparelling their youth,—so that I have met old Lyly in Holywell, and Johnson at the Little Clarendon Street bookshop, and Newman by Iffley rose-window,—with their age taken away, by virtue of a mellower light upon thy lawns and a mellower shade under thy towers, than other cities. Or have I truly heard thee weep when the last revelry is quiet, and the scholar by his lamp sees thee as thou wast and wilt be, and the moonlight has her will with the spires and gardens?[Pg 54][Pg 53]
IFFLEY CHURCH FROM THE SOUTH-EAST
The massive Norman tower of the Church shows to the left of the picture, the chancel extending eastward to the right.
A yew tree—perhaps of the same age as the Church—covers part of the building, serving to throw into relief the remains of a cross, the shaft and base of which are ancient.
Oh, to the sad how pleasant thy age, to the joyous how admirable thy youth! Yet to the wise, perhaps, thou art neither young nor old, but eternal; and not so much beautiful as Beauty herself, masked as Cybele! And perhaps, oh sweet and wise and solemn mother, thou wilt not hear unkindly thy latest froward courtier, or at least will let him pass unnoticed, since one that speaks of thee,
“Cannot dispraise without a kind of praise.”
Or will it more delight thee to be praised in a tongue that is out of time, as thou seemest out of space and time?—
“Vive Midae gazis et Lydo ditior auro
Troica et Euphratea super diademata felix,
Quem non ambigui fasces, non mobile vulgus,
Non leges, non castra tenent, qui pectore magno
Spemque metumque domas. Nos, vilia turba, caducis
Deservire bonis semperque optare parati,
Spargimur in casus. Celsa tu mentis ab arce
Despicis errantes, humanaque gaudia rides.”
[Pg 59][Pg 58]
THE STONES OF OXFORD
TOM TOWER, CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE
The palisade enclosing the graveyard of St. Aldate’s Church is on the left; some of the buildings of Pembroke College appear to the right.
The gateway in the centre of the picture is the west entrance to Christ Church from St. Aldate’s, and leads into the Fountain Quadrangle. The tower, to the level of the finial of the ogee-headed window, is of the date of Wolsey’s foundation; the remaining part was added by Sir Christopher Wren.
CHAPTER II
THE STONES OF OXFORD
Quia lapis de pariete clamabit, et lignum,
quod inter juncturas aedificiorum est, respondebit.
Standing at Carfax, and occasionally moving a step to one side or another, I see with my eyes, indeed, the west front of Christ Church, with Tom Tower; the borders of All Saints’ and St. Mary’s; and that grim tower of St. Michael’s; and the handsome curves of High Street and St. Aldate’s, which are part of the mere good fortune of Oxford: but, especially if a dawn light recall the first dim shining, or a sunset recall the grey and golden splendour of its maturity, I may also see the past of the University unrolled again. For at Carfax I am in sight of monuments on which is implied or recorded all its history. On the south, above Folly Bridge, is the gravelly reach that formed the eponymous ford; between that and Christ Church was the old south gate; and, through Wolsey’s gateway, lies the Cathedral, speaking of St. Frideswide, the misty, original founder,—King’s daughter, virgin, martyr, saint,—and, with its newly revealed Norman crypt, which perhaps[Pg 66] held the University chest in the beginning, representative of Oxford’s piety and generosity. On the east, in the High Street, University College and St. Mary’s and Brasenose speak clearly, although falsely, of King Alfred. There, by St. Peter’s in the East, was the old east gate; and in sight of these is Merton, the fount of the collegiate idea. On the north, in Cornmarket Street, St. Michael’s marks the place of the north gate, and while it is one of the oldest, is by far the oldest-looking place in Oxford, rising up always to our surprise, like a piece of substantial night left by the dark ages, yet clothed with green in June. On the west, the Castle tower, twin made with St. Michael’s by the first Norman lord of Oxford, lies by the old west gate; and the quiet, monstrous mound beyond recalls the days of King Alfred’s daughter’s supremacy in Mercia. At Carfax itself there is still a St. Martin’s church, a descendant of the one whose bells in the Middle Ages and again in the seventeenth century, called the city to arms against the University, but long ago deprived of its insolent height of tower, because the citizens pelted the scholars therefrom.
Moved by the presence of a city whose strange beauty was partly interpreted from these vigorous hieroglyphics, mediæval and later men, who had the advantage of living before history was invented, framed for it a divine or immensely ancient origin. Even kings, or such as quite certainly existed, were deemed unworthy to be the founders. We believe now that the first mention of Oxford was as an inconsiderable[Pg 68][Pg 67]
ST. GILES’S, LOOKING TOWARDS ST. MARY MAGDALEN (SOUTH)
Some picturesque houses on the left lead to the entrance of St. John’s College, seen through the trees. Farther on appears the tower of the Church of St. Mary Magdalen in Cornmarket. The mass to the extreme right above the cab shelter is part of the west side of St. Giles’s and the houses surrounding the Taylor Institution and new Ashmolean Museum.
The posts and rails in the foreground enclose a grassed space in front of St. Giles’s Church.
The time is sunset in summer.
but progressive township in the reign of Edward the Elder, Alfred’s son: but those old lovers attributed to Alfred the restoration of a university that was in his time old and honoured; and some said that he endowed three doctors of grammar, arts, and theology, there; others, less precise than those who put the foundation of Cambridge at 4317 B.C., discovered that Oxford was founded by the Trojans who (as used to be well known) came to Britain from their burning city. But to Oxford the Trojans brought certain Greek philosophers, and at that early date illustrated the universal hospitality and independence of nationality and language that were so characteristic, before the place became a Stuart park. And as the Athenians had in their city and its attendant landscape all those natural beauties and utilities which make possible a peerless academy, so also had the Britons, says Anthony à Wood, herein agreeing with Polydore Vergil, “when by a remnant of the Grecians, that came amongst them, they or their successors selected such a place in Britain to plant a school or schools therein, which for its pleasant situation was afterwards called Bellositum or Bellosite, now Oxford.” Among these generous suppositions or dreams was the story that Apollo, at the downfall of the Olympians, flying now to Rome and now to Athens, found at last something congenial in the brown oak woods and silver waters of Oxford, and a bride in the puissant nymph of Isis; on which favoured site, as was fitting, there afterwards arose a place, with the learning and architectural beauty of Athens, the divine[Pg 72] inspiration of Delphi, and the natural loveliness of Delos....
There is, said Anthony à Wood, “an old tradition that goeth from father to son of our inhabitants, which much derogateth from the antiquity of this city—and that is: When Frideswyde had bin soe long absent from hence, she came from Binsey (triumphing with her virginity) into the city mounted on a milk-white ox betokening innocency; and as she rode along the streets, she would forsooth be still speaking to her ox, ‘Ox forth,’ ‘Ox forth’ or (as ’tis related) ‘bos perge’ (that is, ‘ox goe on,’ or ‘ox (goe on) forth’)—and hence they indiscreetly say that our city was from thence called Oxforth or Oxford.”
But there has never been composed a quite appropriately magnificent legend that could be received by the faithful as the canonical fiction for Oxford, as the Aeneid is for Rome; and now there can never be.
There is, however, still a pleasant haze (that might encourage a poet or a herald) suspended over the early history of Oxford. It is unlikely that the place was of importance in Roman times; later, its position on a river and a boundary brought it many sufferings at the hands of Dane and Saxon. But no one need fear to believe that, early in the eighth century, Didan, an under king, and his daughter Frideswide established there a nunnery and built a church of stone, now perhaps mingled with the later masonry. It was rebuilt by Ethelred in the eleventh century with a quite exceptional fineness in the Saxon workmanship; and was girdled by the churches[Pg 74][Pg 73]
CHRIST CHURCH—INTERIOR OF LATIN CHAPEL
The Shrine of St. Frideswide appears in the middle of the picture, standing in one of the eastern bays of the north wall of the choir. The north side of the Shrine is seen, together with the ancient wooden watching-chamber above.
A tomb shows between the column and the seventeenth-century reading-desk at the right of the picture, also a glimpse of the choir.
The carved oak stall front immediately under the Shrine is probably of the time of Wolsey, and part of the furniture of his choir.
To the left is the east window of the Chapel—filled with stained glass representing scenes in the life of St. Frideswide, designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart., and executed by Mr. William Morris.
The two figures represent a visitor to the shrine of the saint and a verger.
of St. Martin, St. George, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Mary the Virgin, St. Ebbe, St. Michael, and St. Peter in the East; and the last two, to one who had stood at Carfax in 1100, would still be recognised, if he visited the shadowed doorway and stern crypt of the one, and the tower of the other, though he might look in vain for what he knew in “The Seven Deadly Sins lane” and elsewhere.
Whatever learning then flourished in the city is now to be found in its architecture, in Prior Philip’s book on the miracles of St. Frideswide, and in the inestimable atmosphere of the place. We can guess that there was much that is worthy to be known, from the eloquent monkish figures of the corbels in Christ Church chapter-house; and can wistfully think of the wisdom that was uttered in Beaumont, the royal palace and learned resort, whose gardens lay at Broken Hays and near Worcester College; and in Osney Abbey, whose bells—Hautclere, Douce, Clement, Austin, Marie, Gabriel et John—made music that was known to the Eynsham abbot on May evenings, when it was a rich, calm retreat, and not as now, a shadowy outline and a sorrowful heap of stones beyond the railway station. More than the ghost of the abbey survives in the sketch of its ruined but still noble walls, in the background of that picture of its last abbot, in a window of the south choir aisle at Christ Church.
Before the Conquest Oxford had been visited by parliaments and kings; it now began to be honoured by learning and art. Olim truncus eram....[Pg 78] maluit esse deum. It had often been violated or burned; in Doomsday Book it appears as a half desolate city, despite the churches; but it had already begun, though again checked by fire that flew among the wooden houses with such ghastly ease, to assume the proportions and the grace which were fostered by William of Wykeham and a hundred of the great unknown, and in the last few years by Aldrich and Wren and Jones,—crowned by the munificence of Radcliffe,—illuminated with green and white and gold and purple by the unremembered and by Reynolds, Morris, and Burne-Jones. The Saxon work at St. Frideswide’s was superseded or veiled by the Norman architects; the fine old pillars were in part altered or replaced; and the relics of the Saint herself were transferred ceremoniously and “with all the sweet odours and spices imaginable,” to a more imposing place of rest. Upon the base of the old fortifications probably now rose the bastions of the mediæval city wall, once so formidable but now defensive only against time, and unable any longer to make history, but only poetry, as they stand peacefully and muffled with herbage in New College Gardens, or at Merton or Pembroke, or by the churchyard of St. Peter’s in the East.
The history of that age in Oxford is indistinct, and recorded events therein have a suddenness, for modern readers, which is vivid and fascinating, but to the historian at least, painful and false. And so the birth of the University, in the midst of darkness and noise, is to us to-day a melodious sudden cry. It is as if a voice,[Pg 80][Pg 79]
ST. PETER’S-IN-THE-EAST
To the extreme right of the picture, through a huge buttress on the south side of the chancel, is pierced the doorway to the twelfth-century crypt, extending some 36 feet under the chancel of the Church.
To the west of this buttress, in the angle formed by another buttress, appear the remains of a Norman arcading, broken through for the insertion of the early fifteenth-century window. The windows of the nave showing in the picture are also of this date, as is the south porch.
It will be noted that this porch has a room over it—probably the lodgings of a priest. Across the graveyard and Queen’s Lane to the west are the buildings of Queen’s College; to the immediate left of the yew tree in the centre of the picture shows the east end of the Chapel; more to the north the dome of the campanile appears.
To the extreme left of the graveyard shows a portion of the ivy-covered north wall of St. Edmund’s Hall (see other picture).
unexpectedly arose, calling—and the words are said to have been used by two poor Irish students in an ignorant and worldly land—“Here is wisdom for sale! Come, buy!” We know that famous lecturers from the continental universities came; but not with what eloquence and applause they spoke. It may confidently be surmised that there was something sweet to learned minds in the air or tradition of the place. The walls are fallen or forgotten that heard the prelusive lectures of Pullein and Vacarius; and the brilliant Franciscan house in St. Benedict’s is chiefly known by its influence in the founding of Balliol, and by the greatest schoolmen, its alumni. But if we go to the grey domestic little lodgings, with “arms and rebusses that are depicted and cut in stone over each door,” vestiges of a Benedictine scholastic house, at Worcester College, we may fancifully pierce beyond John Giffard’s foundation and the preceding Carmelites, to the earliest lovers of learning who loved Oxford too. At St. Mary’s the work of the fancy is easier and more sure. There the University books, and there a money chest, reposed. There were the highest deliberations and ceremonies. There a man was graduated, and from its porch he passed out a clerk of Oxford.
If the University was early associated with a place of holiness and beauty, still more firmly was it rooted in a becoming poverty. It had neither a roof nor a certain purse. For years it had not a name. The University was in fact but a spirit of wisdom and grace; men had heard of it and sought it; and where one or two were[Pg 84] gathered together to take advantage of it, there was her school and her only endowment. Now and then to such a group came in a legacy of books or gold. But that was a crop for which no one sowed, and before it was possible, it had been rumoured that there was something in Oxford not visible, yet very present and necessary; and scholars came with as great zeal as was ever cherished by reports of gold. They brought what in their devotion they came to seek. Thus Gerald of Wales came, and for three days read aloud his glorious book to large audiences. Every day was marked by sumptuous and generous feasts. It was, indeed, “a costly and noble act,” as he says himself, “for the authentic and ancient times of the poets were thus in some measure renewed.” Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans, and vivid men from the University of Paris, came to teach. Even then, the University quarrelled with the town over the price of victuals and rooms, and invaded the extortionate Jew. There, about the streets, walked the magnificent Franciscans, Roger Bacon and Grosseteste, and the pure and gracious and learned St. Thomas Cantelupe.
Early in the nineteenth century there was a Chancellor set over the scholars by the Bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese Oxford lay. Very soon the Chancellor was elected by the University; and the Masters in congregation could legislate, and sometimes did, although questions were often effectually decided by a popular vote among the students,—who also themselves chose by vote the heads of their hostels or halls. For there[Pg 85] were, at an early date, houses already associated with learning, and governed either by a common landlord or by a scholar of some standing and age. There a man might read, and comfort himself according to his means, and finally at night stamp up and down a passage, to warm his feet, before going to sleep in a crowded bed-chamber. On any day there was a chance that some splendid man, coming a little in the rear of his fame, would arrive in Oxford, and lecture or read a book. Should kings, or priests, or rude citizens interfere, the scholar could rusticate voluntarily—as he sometimes did—at Stamford, or Reading, or Maidstone, or Cambridge, and there, as best he might, by study and self-denial, as by a sacrament, recreate the University. The City, and until our own time the Crown, had to pay in round sums for such an insult as the hanging of several scholars; the money lined the bottom of St. Frideswide’s chest. A man with no possessions but the leaf of a manuscript, or a dagger, or a cloak, left it with the keepers of the chest as security for a loan, whether he were Welsh, or Hungarian, or Italian, or French.
An Englishman, William of Durham, who had enjoyed the University hospitality at Paris, first kindled the flame which was to be kept burning by so many afterwards, as a focus perennis for the homeless student. He left Paris after a town-and-gown quarrel, along with many French students, whom Henry III. welcomed to Oxford in 1229. William went to Rome, before returning to England, and remembered Oxford when he lay dying at Rouen—perchance reminded there of the city[Pg 86] which until fifty years ago was equal with it in ancient beauty, and has been clouded in the same way. He left in his will a sum of money to the University. It was employed in making more steadfast abodes for Oxford students; at a house, for example, that stood on the site of the bookseller’s shop opposite University College lodge. This act is counted the foundation of University College, with its original four masters, who shall be thought “most fit to advance or profit in the Holy Church and who have not to live handsomely without it in the state of Masters of Arts.”
There had previously been similar Halls, and many were afterwards founded,—Hawk Hall, Perilous Hall, Elm Hall, Winton Hall, Beef Hall, Greek Hall, Segrim Hall; in fact so large a number that half the Oxford inns are or were perversions of the old Halls; and even tradesmen who are not innkeepers now make their rich accounts among the ghosts of forgotten principals. These had not in them the necessary statutes and “great bases for eternity” which a college deserves. But henceforward there were some fortunate students who might indeed have to sing or make Latin verses in order to earn a bed, or a crust and a pot of ale, while making their way to or from Oxford; but, once there, they were sure of such a home as no other place, unless, perhaps, the place of their nativity, could give.
“It is all,” says Newman, speaking of a college, “and does all that is implied in the name of home. Youths, who have left the maternal roof, and travelled some hundred miles for the acquisition of knowledge, find an[Pg 88][Pg 87]
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE—PRIVATE GARDEN OF THE MASTER
The building to the left is the east end of the College Chapel, the entrance tower being seen over the dividing wall almost in the centre of the picture.
A bay window to the extreme right of the picture, looking over the garden, is part of the Master’s Lodging.
altera Troja and simulata Pergama at the end of their journey and their place of temporary sojourn. Home is for the youth, who knows nothing of the world, and who would be forlorn and sad, if thrown upon it. It is the refuge of helpless boyhood, which would be famished and pine away if it were not maintained by others. It is the providential shelter of the weak and inexperienced who have still to learn how to cope with the temptations which lie outside of it. It is the place of training for those who are not only ignorant, but have not yet learned how to learn, and who have to be taught, by careful individual trial, how to set about profiting by the lessons of a teacher. And it is the school of elementary studies, not of advanced; for such studies alone can boys at best apprehend and master. Moreover, it is the shrine of our best affections, the bosom of our fondest recollections, a spell upon our after life, a stay for world-weary mind and soul, wherever we are cast, till the end comes. Such are the attributes or offices of home, and like to these in one or other sense and measure, are the attributes and offices of a College in a University.”
In the unconscious preparation for such a place William of Durham was the first to leave money; the founders of Balliol the first to gather a number of scholars under one roof, with a corporate life, and as we may assume, a set of customary, unwritten laws; but Walter de Merton was the first to endow and provide with tenements and statutes a college, in all important respects, like a college of to-day,—a place even at that time standing in a genial avuncular relationship towards[Pg 92] the students, which was rich in influence and the making of endearing tradition. Perhaps the Merton treasury, still conspicuous for its steep roof and burliness, was part of the founder’s gift; and no building could have been a fitter nest of an idea which was for so long to make little of time. The Hall retains some features of the same date. Almost at once the chapel began to rise, and its light was coloured by the topmost glass just as it is to-day. In fact, Merton with its older little sister foundation of St. Alban Hall was, until the annus mirabilis of Mr. Butterfield, in itself a symbol of the origin and growth of Oxford as a collegiate university and as a place of beauty.
The royal Dervorguilla was the godmother of the kindly college life of to-day. She was the wife of the founder of Balliol, and was often in Oxford, with her honoured Franciscan, Richard of Slikeburne, to look after her sixteen scholars at Old Balliol Hall, in Horsemonger Street, now Broad Street. Close by, at the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, she devised an oratory for the Balliol men. They chose their own Principal, who presided at disputations and meals. They had breakfast and supper together, and the more comfortable of them paid anything in excess of their allowance which the expenses of the common table might demand. One poor scholar lived on the crumbs. Thus were men less often compelled to borrow from the Jews at 60 per cent on the security of their books.
While Balliol was so progressing, and University College had its statutes, and Merton already had its Hall,[Pg 94][Pg 93]
MERTON COLLEGE AND ST. ALBAN’S HALL
The entrance Quadrangle of the College is shown in the picture, to the right of which is the Warden’s residence.
The building farther to the right is the Library, the steps of which show in the immediate foreground.
St. Alban’s Hall, recently attached to Merton College, appears over the north-east corner of the Quadrangle.
the spire of the church of St. Mary the Virgin first rose against the sky. Then also the ashes of St. Frideswide were promoted to a new and more precious place of rest. The sculptor at work upon the shrine had evidently at his side the leaves of maple and crowfoot and columbine, ivy and sycamore and oak, hawthorn and bryony, from the neighbouring woods, where the saint had lain in hiding or ministered to the calamities of the poor; and perhaps the season was late autumn, for among the oak leaves are acorns, and some of the cups are empty. All these things he carved on the base of the shrine.
It was of this period that the story was told that two barefooted, hungry travellers from the west were approaching Oxford, and had come in sight of it near Cumnor, when they found a beautiful woman seated by the wayside. So beautiful was she that they knelt at her feet, “being simple men.” Salve Regina! they cried. Then, she bending forward and speaking, they were first surprised that she should speak to them; and next ventured to speak to her, and ask her name. Whereat she “raised her small golden head so that in the sun her hair seemed to flow and flow continually down,” and looked towards Oxford. There two spires and two towers could just be seen betwixt the oak trees. “My name,” she said, “is known to all men save you. It is Pulchritudo. And that,” as she pointed to the shining stones of the city, “is my home.” Those two were silent, between amazement and joy, until one said “It is our Lady!” and the other “Lo! it is Venus, and[Pg 98] she sits upon many waters yonder.” Hardly had they resumed their ordinary pace when they found an old man, seated by the wayside, very white and yet “very pleasant and alluring to behold.” So to him also the simple wayfarers knelt down. Then that old man bent forward and spoke to them with golden words, and only the one who had called the beautiful woman “Venus” dared to speak. He it was that questioned the old man about the woman and about himself. “My name is Sapientia,” he said, and “that is my home,” he continued, and looked towards Oxford, where two spires and two towers could just be seen betwixt the oak trees. “And,” he concluded solemnly, “that woman is my mother and she grows not old.” The men went their way, one saying, “It is a place of lies”; the other saying, “It is wonderful”; and when they looked back the old man and the beautiful woman had vanished. In the city they were often seen, but the two strangers could not speak with them, “for they were greatest in the city of Oxford. Some said that he was an Austin friar and she a light woman; but they are not to be believed.” And when they had dwelt in Oxford a short time and had seen “what store of pious and learned and illuminated books were in the Halls, and what costly and fine things in its churches and Convents,” the one said, “I believe that what Sapientia and Pulchritudo said was the truth”; and the other said, “Truly, the city is worthy of them both”; wherefore they dwelt there until their deaths, and found it “the most loving and lovely city” in Christendom.[Pg 100][Pg 99]
ORIEL COLLEGE
The Hall and Chapel stretch across the picture, in the centre of which appears the porch. The three niches contain figures of the Virgin and Child and Edward II. and III. under canopies.
The tower of Merton College shows above the roof of the Chapel. This, with the louvres and ogee gables, forms a picturesque sky-line.
Dervorguilla and Walter de Merton had thus made the University a father and a mother to the scholar. For a time, indeed, the principals had often to transfer their penates; the founder’s inheritors lived in scattered tenements which they changed from necessity or choice, now and then; yet they had the imperishable sentiment of home, and for some years they had little more, except in a small degree at Merton and Queen’s, since the colleges neither demanded nor provided that the scholars should study according to rule.
Under Edward II. Exeter College was founded, and linked from the beginning with the west country, by the simultaneous co-foundation of a school, and the rule that all the scholars should thence be drawn. Decent poverty and love of learning were the other qualifications of a scholar. Then followed Oriel, with Edward II. as its founder, the advowson of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin as part of its support, and its name derived from the Hall of La Oriole, which it received early, and soon afterwards occupied. Its library was the first college library; but the acquirement was technically defective, and the Fellows of Oriel could not resist the students who broke in and carried away the books. Fellows and admirers repaired the loss.
Philippa, Queen of Edward III., was joined with her chaplain in the foundation of Queen’s College “for the cultivation of Theology, to the glory of God, the advance of the Church, and the salvation of souls.” A little subtlety on the part of the founder and sentiment on the part of the queens, enabled the college to[Pg 104] exchange compliments with Anne of Bohemia, Henrietta Maria, Charlotte and Adelaide. The founder was a Cumberland man, and his college attracted a neighbour or a man who spoke with his accent or had the same traditions to become one of the fellows, equal in number with Christ and His apostles. Before and after the beginning of colleges, men from the same district made a small “new Scotland” or “new France” in Oxford streets. Thus the scholars of St. George’s and Oriel were for some time largely Welsh; at Balliol and University College there were many northerners. At all times these divisions were emphasised by conflicts with tongue and arrow and sword. Scholars overlooked their Aristotle at bloody arguments in Grove Street and Cornmarket, between North and South, Irish and Welsh and Scotch, in combinations that varied unaccountably or according to the politics of the day. You might know a scholar, as an ancient tinker remarked the other day, remembering the boxing booths of his youth, by the way he fought. The election of a chancellor, or a church wake, and an exchange of lusty oaths between men of two parties were the occasion. In later years Realists and Nominalists,—Orthodox and Wycliffites,—now and then reduced their disagreement to simple terms. Nor were the citizens with difficulty persuaded to take or make a side in the disputes, whether they encountered the scholars at inns, or as they stood on market-days,—the sellers of hay and faggots and hogs, stretching in their regular places from the East gate, in front of St. Mary’s and All Saints’, to Carfax and the[Pg 106][Pg 105]
GROVE STREET
This narrow street runs from the High Street opposite St. Mary’s Church alongside St. Mary’s Hall and Oriel College, emerging near to Merton, part of the tower of which College appears.
It contains some picturesque half-timbered buildings, some of which are shown in the picture.
Cross Inn. Once, a northern chaplain, “with other malefactors,” embattled themselves and sought out the Welshmen with bent bows, crying to the “Welsh dogs and their whelps” that an Owen or a Meredydd who looked out at his door was a dead man. The Welshmen were driven out of the city with ignominy and blood. The Northeners robbed and murdered indiscriminately, and destroyed not only books but harps, until, finding an ale-house, they were incontinently appeased. On another occasion some townsmen burst in, on a Sunday, upon a few scholars, wounding and despoiling them. The scholars spread their story and collected friends. The townsmen responded to the sound of horns and St. Martin’s bell. Countrymen from Hinksey and Headington came to the help of the unlearned. The air whistled and hummed with the flight of arrows and stones; the streets were crimsoned. But the reverend gentleman who led the learned was untimely shot down, and his cause evaporated. Some scholars fled to the country, some to sanctuary, and were comforted by the excommunication and fining of their opponents. After a similar fight the University was allowed that exemption from the city courts which it still enjoys. In fact, the disturbances earned very cheaply for the University concessions which put the citizens at a disadvantage, and emphasised distinctions, so as to cause other disturbances in turn. Henry V., himself a Queen’s College man, at last interfered with an order that scholars would only be treated as such if they were under the rule of an approved head. It was an[Pg 110] attempt to banish the wild errant scholars, often Irishmen, and to make a common type of Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford, who had been to Padua and knew Petrarch’s verse. He was one who, even in his devotion to books, did not forget the souls of his benefactors, for which he was, in the first instance, endowed to pray—
And he was not right fat, I undertake,
But looked holwe, and therto sobrely;
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office;
For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes clad in black or reed
Of Aristotle and his philosophic,
Than robës riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie;
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;
But al that he myghte of his freendes hente
On bookes and his lernynge he it spent,
And bisily gan for the soules preye
Of him that yaf hym wherewith to scoleye.
Of studie tooke he moost cure and moost heede,
Noght o word spake he moore than was neede,
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence.
Sounynge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.
But William of Wykeham, before that time, had given to New College a code of ornate and intricate rules for morals and manners, which became a legacy to the University at large; and in the first place checked the savage liberties of scholars; in the second, helped to make learning more “humane,” to make the “Arts” the “humanities.” He built a chapel for the exclusive use of the scholars of his foundation. That in itself[Pg 112][Pg 111]
NEW COLLEGE
William of Wykeham (1404) built the noble tower which stands free to the extreme right of the picture. A portion of the chapel is seen to the left of the tower, and forms, with it and the trees, a noble group.
The new retaining walls in the foreground are part of a recent addition to the College.
was an inestimable addition to the golden chain by which Oxford holds the memories of men. To the chapel they were to go every day, and there to say their Paters and Aves. Its Latin—the fittest language to be uttered amidst old architecture—and its coloured windows alone are not to-day as they were in Wykeham’s time. He built the bell-tower and the cloisters, and so gave to generations a pleasant vision, and—when dreams are on the wing—a starting-place or an eyrie for dreams. He built also a kitchen, a brewery, and a bakehouse. He stocked both a garden and a library for college use. Long before the “first tutor of the first college of the first University of the world” entered Oxford with post horses to assert his position, the Warden of New College had the use of six horses. He wore an ermine amice in chapel. He had his own palace apart. But the humblest member of the foundation had been as minutely provided for by Wykeham’s code. Above all, the scholar was not to be left to himself in his studies, but to the care of an appointed tutor. And in 1387 the new college proceeded to William of Wykeham’s quadrangle, with singing and pomp. It was the first home of scholars in Oxford, which was completely and specially fashioned for their use alone, to be
A place of friends! a place of books!
A place of good things olden!
In the next century the ideas of Walter de Merton and Dervorguilla and William of Wykeham were borrowed and developed by loving founders, architects,[Pg 116] and benefactors. The building of Lincoln College, next founded, was begun as soon as its charter was received; a chapel and a library, a hall and a kitchen, and chambers on three storys, finely and nobly built, were a matter of course. In the same way, All Souls’ front quadrangle, practically as we see it to-day, was built at once by Archbishop Chichele, the founder; and at Magdalen, which was next founded, the tower began to rise on the extreme east of the city, to salute the rising sun with its pinnacles, and on May morning, with a song of choristers.
For Oxford, the fifteenth century was an age of libraries and books. Looking back upon it, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester seems its patron saint,—donor of books to the Benedictines who lived on the site of Worcester College, and to the University,—harbinger of the Bodleian. We can still catch the savour of the old libraries at Merton where the light coloured by painted glass used to inlay the gloom under the wooden roof, or behind the quiet latticed windows above the cloisters at Christ Church. “What pleasantness of teaching there is in books, how easy, how secret,” says Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, an old Oxford man, and the giver of the first library to Oxford. “They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them, they are not asleep; if you ask and inquire of them, they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant. O[Pg 118][Pg 117]
INTERIOR OF THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY
The portion of the Library shown in the picture is a storey built above the Divinity School by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, son of Henry IV., and the spectator is looking east towards the wing added by Sir Thomas Bodley at the close of the sixteenth century.
Books cover every available inch of wall space, but the trusses of the old timbered roof are visible, as are also the more modern galleries, supported by wooden columns. These are for obtaining access to books placed high in the Library. The strands of light which bar the centre aisle are from the south windows of the building, overlooking the Fellows’ Garden of Exeter College. The windows also serve to light the “studies,” the latticed and balustered doors of which may be seen standing open at intervals (see illustration of one of these “studies”).
The cases in the immediate foreground are used for modern books.
books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully! by how many types ye are commended to learned men in the Scriptures given us by the inspiration of God!... Ye are the wells of living waters, which father Abraham first digged, Isaac digged again, and which the Philistines strive to fill up!...” Bury was a friend of Petrarch and Bradwardine, a Chancellor and Treasurer of England, and his love of books became so famous that he was reported “to burn with such a desire for books and especially old ones that it was more easy for any man to gain our favour by means of books than of money. The aumbries of the most famous monasteries were thrown open, cases were unlocked and caskets were undone, and volumes that had slumbered through long ages in their tombs wake up and are astonished.” The great discoverer’s pleasure at the university of Paris corresponds to that of visitors to Oxford in later years. “There,” he says, “are delightful libraries, more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are luxuriant parks of all manner of volumes; there are Academic meads shaken by the tramp of scholars; there are lounges of Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all Arts and Sciences, Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers; there Paul reveals the[Pg 122] mysteries.” And to complete the resemblance of Oxford to such a place, he gave all his books to “our hall at Oxford,” where the masters and scholars were to pray for his soul. The fate of his collection may have been worthy, but is mysterious. It is said to have been divided, and part of it perhaps went to Balliol. It could have found no more honourable abode than the Balliol library. From the beginning gifts of books had come in, but chiefly what was even then old-fashioned, until the middle of the fifteenth century. It was the period when Guarino at Ferrara was an inspiration to Europe. Robert Fleming was one of his pupils, and sent beautiful manuscripts to Lincoln College library; and at Lincoln books flowed in before cash. Three others of Guarino’s pupils were Balliol men: Gray, Bishop of Ely and Chancellor of the University, whose books were collected with Guarino’s help, and passed, the finest of their day, to Balliol at his death; Free, public reader of physic at Ferrara, a great benefactor of libraries, and a historian of trees and plants; and Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, splendid, eloquent, cruel; who had made golden speeches to the Pope, the Cardinals, the men of Padua; had translated Cicero; and on his return, adorned England with his learning and patronage, and shocked it with the refined cruelties of Italy. His collection of manuscripts went with Duke Humphrey’s to the University library, where a room was made for them, over the quiet Divinity School then being built between St. Mary’s and Durham Hall. Tiptoft was the most striking type of[Pg 124][Pg 123]
INTERIOR OF THE LIBRARY, ALL SOULS’ COLLEGE
At the extreme east end of the Library is a seated marble figure of Sir William Blackstone, by Bacon, the standing figure on the north side in the recess being that of Sir Christopher Codrington, the Founder of the Library, by Sir Henry Cheere.
Behind the statue is placed a case containing ancient articles discovered in excavations on the site of the College.
Book-rests and chairs for students are placed at intervals in the Library, which is nearly 200 feet long by over 30 feet wide.
Bronze busts of Fellows alternate with vases on the cornice of the upper bookcases.
The colour of this Library is especially suited to its purpose, being quiet and restful to the eye; the proportions are excellent, and help the dignity of the room.
the Renaissance, of English blood. But it was the Italian Renaissance; and after his death the direct influence of Italy was small in Oxford.
It was, however, an Italian, Vitelli, who uttered the first words of Greek in Oxford. Plato was soon to enjoy a new life there, and to be woven into the past of Oxford, as if he had really been of its children. It comes et paribus curis vestigia figit. It was an age of great, unpopular men who came and went suddenly and obscurely in Oxford, like the first lecturers of the twelfth century. They were divinely inflated with the beauty of Greek—a language always more strange and exotic and fascinating to Englishmen than Latin—and with admiration of the restorers of that beauty, Chrysoloras, Chalcondila, Politian. Grocyn, a Magdalen man, fresh from Italy, taught Greek in the hall of Exeter. Linacre, a great physician and Grecian, was Fellow of All Souls’. The refined, persuasive Colet, whose “sacred fury” in argument Erasmus praised, was also a Magdalen man, and founder of St. Paul’s school. Sir Thomas More, the most perfect, but unhappily not the most influential type of the English Renaissance, was at St. Mary Hall. Erasmus met them all in Oxford, within that old gateway of St. Mary’s College in New Inn Hall Street. As they stepped out after the symposium, one pointed to a planet in the sky:
“See how Jupiter shines; it is an omen,” said he.
“Yes,” said another, “and we have been listening to Apollo.”
For a time the Grecians were ridiculed and attacked[Pg 128] in the streets by men who called themselves Priam, Hector, and Paris, and behaved—like Trojans. In that first enthusiasm men seemed very near to the inaccessible gods. Perhaps some were disposed to follow Pico della Mirandola in pursuit of them. There was therefore a party which opposed the study of Greek as heretical; and More was withdrawn from Oxford to avoid the danger.
From the beautiful Magdalen cloisters came the men who launched Corpus Christi College, just after Erasmus had published the New Testament in Greek and the ancient Brasenose Hall had at last grown into a college. The founder gave copies of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Horace, which still survive. There was a public lecturer in Greek on the foundation. Erasmus himself applauded and prophesied liberally of its future. It was the “new college” of the Renaissance, as Wykeham’s had been of the Middle Ages. The readers were to be chosen from England or Greece or Italy. And among the first members of the college was the mystical Bavarian dialler, Nicholas Kratzer, who made a dial in Corpus garden, and that exquisite one for Wolsey, which is to be seen, in drawing, in the library. Wolsey’s own college was built over against St. Frideswide’s, part of which, together with one side of its cloisters, was destroyed to give it place. It contained the largest quadrangle and the most princely kitchen in Oxford. When Henry the Eighth spoiled the monasteries, the bells of Osney were carried to Christ Church; and one of them, over Wolsey’s gateway, does what it can to[Pg 130][Pg 129]
THE CLOISTERS, MAGDALEN COLLEGE
The Hall and Chapel of the College stretch nearly across the picture immediately in front of the spectator, the oriel window which lights the daïs of the Hall marking the division between the west end of the Hall and the east end of the Chapel.
Farther west, and closely adjoining the Chapel, at the south-west angle of the Cloisters, rises the Founder’s Tower. A gateway under the Tower leads to the Quadrangle of St. John the Baptist and the entrance to the College.
The figures above the buttresses of the Cloisters were probably not designed for their present position, but add to the picturesqueness of the Cloisters, which, it will be observed, project from the main body of the buildings.
Above the gleaming roof of the Chapel appears the beautiful bell tower of the College, detached, and built at a different angle from the Hall and Chapel, which are continued in the same line. The tower is 145 feet high, and was completed about 1505.
Men in Masters’ gowns walk and converse on the grass.
The time is late afternoon.
call the undergraduates home at nine, with a deep voice, as if it spoke through its beard, which pretends to be B flat—“Bim-bom,” as the old leonine hexameter says.
Hark! the bonny Christ Church bells—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6—
They sound so wondrous great, so wondrous sweet,
As they trowl so merrily, merrily.
Oh! the first and second bell,
That every day, at four and ten, cry,
“Come, come, come to prayers!”
And the verger troops before the Dean.
Tinkle, tinkle, ting, goes the small bell at nine,
To call the bearers home:
But the devil a man
Will leave his can
Till he hears the mighty Tom.
So runs the catch of a later Dean. At Christ Church also there was a lecturer in Greek. The dialler, Kratzer, was made mathematical professor. Wolsey’s chapel never rose above a few feet in height, and the uncompleted walls remained for a century; St. Frideswide’s became, almost at the same time, the cathedral of the newly-created see of Oxford, and the chapel of the college.
The grandiose Christ Church kitchen, which caused so much laughter because it was the Cardinal’s first contribution to his college, was in fact rather characteristic of the age that followed. It was built with the revenues of suppressed monasteries. It was almost contemporaneous with the destruction of many priceless books by reformers who were as ignorant of what is dangerous in books as a Russian censor. The shelves of Duke Humphrey’s library were denuded and sold.[Pg 134] The shrine of St. Frideswide’s, where the University had long offered reverence twice a year, was shattered; the fragments were used here and there in the buildings of the time. The relics of the saint were husbanded by a pious few in hope of a restoration; but they were finally interred with those of Peter Martyr’s wife—a significant mixture. It was the age when the University became the playground of the richer classes, and the nobleman’s son took the place of the poor scholar in a fellowship. Now men found time to dispute with Cambridge as to which university was of the greatest antiquity. The arguments put forward in Oxford were seldom more convincing than this: that Oxford was named from a ford, Cambridge from a bridge; and since the ford must have been older than the bridge, Oxford was therefore founded first. Greek for the time decayed, and the founder of Trinity College feared that its restoration was impossible in that age. As to Latin, Sir Philip Sidney, who was at Christ Church, told his brother that Ciceronianism was become an abuse among the Oxonians, “who neglected things for words.” Oxford was dignified mainly by the architecture of Christ Church; by the foundation of Trinity, St. John’s, and Jesus College, all on learned and holy ground; by the martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley, opposite Balliol; and by great names, like those of Burton and Marston at Brasenose, Peele at Broadgates Hall (Pembroke), Raleigh at Oriel, Hooker at Corpus Christi. Religion was still in the pot, and men could not confidently tell what it would turn out to be. On the one hand,[Pg 136][Pg 135]
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
It is the east front of the College we see in the picture, the library occupying the south end to the left. The garden upon which it looks is one of the most beautiful and extensive in Oxford.
Some buildings of Balliol College show to the left.
The time is late afternoon in summer.
the Earl of Leicester, as Chancellor of the University, mended and confirmed its organisation; on the other hand, John Lyly was “the fiddlestick of Oxford,” and other Magdalen men, lovers of open air, and especially in the windy forest of Shotover, slew the King’s deer. At the new college of St. John’s, fellows and presidents suffered for the old religion, and Edwin Campion was hanged; they preserved, and still preserve, the statue of St. Bernard from the old foundation to which their college succeeded. At the end of the century, the most effective Oxford man of his time, William Laud, became Fellow of St. John’s. He built a new quadrangle, and as Chancellor made of the statutes that long and many-tailed whip which every one knows. He created modern Broad Street by deleting the cottages which stood near and opposite to Trinity. The impressive, uncomfortable Convocation House was his work. Within sight of it was the library which Sir Thomas Bodley earlier in the century had built and stored. It became the calmest, most inviolate, and most learned place in Europe.
At Christ Church, Dean Duppa, the first of the improvers of Oxford, was beginning the work of destruction which the Puritans continued so well. But it was then the good fortune of several colleges to receive large additions of a simple and homely character, which did more than any others to make Oxford what it is. It was the age of the retired Lincoln College chapel, with its carved panels of perfumed cedar and rich, quaint glass; the placid garden front of Wadham, as seen through the cedar tree to-day; the front and colonnades[Pg 140] of St. John’s which look on the garden; the south end of the Exeter garden front that sees so much; the front quadrangle of University College; the hall and chapel of St. Mary’s Hall; the east end of Jesus College chapel, which was just finished when Henry Vaughan arrived; and the front quadrangle of Pembroke College, converted from Broadgates Hall by a clothier, the Earl of Pembroke, and James I., and opened with ceremonies which included a fantastic Latin oration by Sir Thomas Browne, as senior undergraduate. The architecture of Wadham is a remarkable proof of the influence of antiquity upon men and things in Oxford. The founders, in 1609, were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his wife, of Merifield in Somerset. The builders were mainly west country men, and worked in that lingering Gothic style which was still vital in Oxford, and seems to have guided the hand of Wren (if it was Wren) when he planned the fan tracery of Brasenose library. But in the building of Wadham chapel, one John Spicer and his men seem to have been haunted by the beauty of the Perpendicular churches of their native Somerset. The windows are so clear a reconstruction of this dream that an experienced judge refused to believe that they were of later date than Christ Church. Thither came a son of Sir Walter Raleigh and Robert Blake, who took opposite sides when the Civil War broke out.
There was a prelusive struggle between town and gown in the year before the war. The chancellorship of Laud had roused opposition; but the University was almost unanimous for Charles, and easily chose[Pg 142][Pg 141]
MAGDALEN TOWER AND BOTANIC GARDEN
The tower of Magdalen College is seen rising over the trees of the Botanic Garden, illumined by the last rays of the setting sun.
Beneath the poplar is one of the gate piers, and through an opening in the clipped hedge shows the basin of a fountain.
Two girls walk in the meadows.
its side, when he demanded a loan on the eve of the war.
Van Ling had just painted the windows of University College chapel. The Dean of Christ Church, or rather “Smith of London,” had just finished the airy over-traceried approach to Christ Church hall, upon which every one looks back as he steps down to the cloisters. Other work was in preparation at Christ Church. But all building suddenly ceased.
A brief visit of Parliament troops to the yet unfortified city was recorded by the shattering of the Virgin and her Child over St. Mary’s porch. After Edgehill, the King came to Oxford, and the effect was worse than the mutilation of a Virgin of stone. The University Volunteers, some armed with bows, were drilled in the quadrangle of New College and Christ Church, and skirmished in the Parks. The royal artillery lay in Magdalen Grove. New College tower and cloisters became the arsenal: New Inn Hall the mint. Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria were lodged at Merton. The Court was held at Christ Church. A Fellow of Magdalen and a Fellow of All Souls’ edited the royalist gazette, Mercurius Aulicus, “the latter pleasing more with his buffoneries.” The besieging Parliamentarians were spread about the high ground of Headington, and the low fields on the north of the city.
The greater number of scholars left Oxford, and their rooms were occupied by ladies and cavaliers. College trees were cut down for use in the defences.[Pg 146] A little war, much gallantry and coarseness, drove away learning and tranquillity, unwilling to linger for the sound of Sir John Denham’s smooth and insipid Muse, which produced Coopers Hill in 1642. The Muses were probably in hiding abroad with Lovelace and Marvell; for Milton was writing only prose, and George Wither, a Magdalen man, was a captain of Parliamentary horse at Maidstone. Yet a contemporary pamphlet says that “Robin Goodfellow” found the Muses near Eynsham. “He had not gone as far as Ensham, but he espied the nine Muses in a vintner’s porch crouching close together, and defending themselves as well as they could from the cold visitation of the winter’s night. They were extream poore, and (which is most strange) in so short an absence and distance from Oxford they were grown extreamly ignorant, for they took him for their Apollo, and craved his power and protection to support them.”
One room at Trinity College was pleasant still; for the glass of the window was richly painted with a St. Gregory. And there Aubrey received the newly-published Religio Medici, “which first opened my understanding.” He carried it to Eston with Sir Kenelm Digby. Coming back to Oxford, he bade a servant to draw the ruins of Osney “two or three ways before ’twas pulled down.”
Plague came in 1643, fire in the following year. The Cavaliers were reputed to have embezzled books from the Bodleian, which had formerly resisted, and won the respect of, Charles himself. The colleges[Pg 148][Pg 147]
MAGDALEN TOWER AND BRIDGE
The Bridge runs westward across the picture, some buildings of the Botanic Garden appearing on the extreme left.
Over the centre of the Bridge rises the fine tower of the College, while to the right above the north balustrade of the Bridge shows the roof of the Hall and Chapel.
On the ground floor of the gabled buildings are the kitchens, the upper storey being used as sets of rooms for students.
We see part of the river Cherwell.
made what some call a “friendly loan” of all their plate: it was never returned or replaced by the King. Week by week, they furnished him with labour and cash. And when the Parliamentarians entered at last, there were at Merton, for example, “no Bachelors, hardly any Scholars, and few Masters,” and the hall was untenantable. The triumph of Parliament brought with it an inquisition in Oxford, which resulted in the exile, not without force, of the greater number of heads of houses and fellows for refusal to submit. The soldiers broke the Magdalen chapel window-glass; Cromwell himself took away the college organ to Hampton Court. But “the first thing General Fairfax did, was to set a good guard of soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. He was a lover of learning, and had he not taken this special care, that noble library had been utterly destroyed.” The chief objection to the intruded fellows and heads of houses seems to have been that they were intruded and were likely to stay. As for their accomplishments, though some lacked humour, they seem to have been respectable. The undergraduates and bachelors were in the main loyal to Cromwell; and when Prince Charles was rumoured to be approaching Oxford, New College tower became a Parliament citadel, and a troop of horse was enlisted from the colleges. The old glory of religion faded; the sound of distant Latin chanted was no longer heard in Christ Church and New College. But in one house, three devoted men preserved the old religion right through the Commonwealth, constantly and without[Pg 152] molestation. Other changes made men more content. Three coffee-houses were opened in Oxford and patronised by royalists and “others who esteemed themselves virtuosi and wits.” Men who would have adorned any age came up. Christopher Wren came to Wadham, and thence to All Souls’. Evelyn revisited Oxford and found no just ground to regret the former times, ... “creation of Doctors, by the cap, ring, kiss, etc., those ancient ceremonies and institutions, as yet not wholly abolished.” At All Souls’ he heard “music, voices, and theorbos, performed by some ingenious scholars.” At New College “the chapel was in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the scrupulosity of the times,” and the chapel at Magdalen was “in pontificial order, the altar only I think turned table-wise.” Then he dined at Wadham, and wrote down an account of what he saw at the Warden’s, “that most obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins.” The transparent apiaries, hollow speaking statues, dials, waywisers, and other “artificial mathematical and magical curiosities,” which he saw, well illustrate the activities of the time in the cradle of the Royal Society.
A little after Wren came Thomas Traherne, the poet, to Brasenose, still enjoying that childhood which he praised so adeptly. We may think of him in the peaceful embowered city as having that characteristic ecstasy at the sight of common things which his lyrical prose describes. “The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to[Pg 154][Pg 153]
ALL SOULS’ COLLEGE AND THE HIGH STREET
On the right of the picture are the entrance gate and part of the south front of All Souls’ College. West of the College, and facing the narrow street leading into Radcliffe Square, shows the east end of the south aisle of St. Mary’s Church, and the white pinnacles of the Nave.
Past the porch and the new extension of Brasenose to the High Street rises the tower and spire of All Saints’, the distance being closed by the tower of St. Martin at Carfax.
everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged men seem! Immortal cherubim! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty!”
Again, books began to flow in their natural courses to the libraries. Selden’s eight thousand came to the Bodleian. Building was resumed; for Brasenose chapel was half built by the time of the Restoration.
The Restoration restored to Oxford the Church, a few excellent old men, and the morals of the siege. The august Clarendon was indeed Chancellor; but the city became a fashionable resort. Charles II., with his Queen and Castlemaine, were there in 1663, and again with the Parliament in the year of the plague. “High-thundering Jove,” runs a contemporary ballad, supposed to be spoken by London to Oxford:—
High-thundering Jove cannot withstand thy charms,
That Britain’s mighty monarch in thy arms
Canst hold so fast, and quite to overcome
The greatest potentate in Christendom.
The aim of scholars, said Anthony à Wood, “is not to live as students ought to do, viz., temperate, abstemious, and plain and grave in their apparel; but[Pg 158] to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparell and long periwigs!” There was too much punning, thought Eachard. In his inquiry into the causes of the contempt of the clergy, he is not kind to the University of the day, and asks, “Whether or not Punning, Quibbling, and that which they call Joquing, and such delicacies of wit, highly admired in some academic exercises, might not be very conveniently omitted?” The first Common Room was established at Merton soon after the Restoration. But in that age even Common Rooms seem to have been but privileged and secluded inns, and quite without the severely genial amphictyonic character of to-day. When Pepys visited Oxford he naturally found it “a very sweet place”; spent 2s. 6d. on a barber in its honour; 10s. “to him that showed us All Souls’ College and Chichley’s picture”; 2s. for seeing the Brasenose butteries and the gigantic hand of the “Child of Hale”; and having seen the Physic Garden, the hospital, and Friar Bacon’s study, concluded: “Oxford mighty fine place, well seated, and cheap entertainment.” But the cheap entertainment is now among the lost causes. A little while afterwards, Evelyn attended the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre, built by Wren. He complained of the “tedious, abusive, sarcastical rhapsody” which was permitted on that occasion to the Terræ Filius, a kind of Billingsgate Aristophanes, who half-officially represented the undergraduate aversion to sweetness and light. The university printing-[Pg 159]offic[Pg 160]e
INTERIOR OF THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE
The proceedings of Commemoration take place here, at which time the area—entered by the door to the left—is crowded by visitors.
One of the two figures is gazing at the pulpit from which the prize poems and essays of successful candidates are recited.
The axe and fasces projecting from the pulpit denote the justice of the awards.
The upper gallery is supported by wooden columns standing upon a podium partially surrounding the area, and the building altogether is one of Sir Christopher Wren’s best works.
lay under the theatre, and, says a ballad of the time—
What structure else but prides it to reveal
Treasures? which bashful this would fain conceal; ...
Spain, Gascoin, Florence, Smyrna, and the Rhine
May taste their language there, tho’ not the wine.
The Jew, Mede, Edomite, Arabian, Crete,
In those deep vaults their wandring ideoms meet,
And to compute, are in amazement hurld,
How long since Oxford has been all the world.
At Magdalen, men were planting the elms of the grove and laying out the walks round the meadow. Bishop Fell was completing the west front of Christ Church, which the Civil War had interrupted, and planting those elms in the Broad Walk that look on the Cathedral and Corpus and Merton, and, farther off, Magdalen tower. In 1680 Wren’s tower over Wolsey’s gateway at Christ Church was finished. One of the Osney bells was recast to hang therein.
The resistance of James II. fell in this coarse, frivolous, self-satisfied age. He was welcomed to Oxford by music and ceremony. The conduit “ran claret for the vulgar.” But when he adventured to force his nominee into the presidentship of Magdalen, he could not even procure a blacksmith to burst a resisting door. Again, the University stood to arms to oppose Monmouth’s rebellion, and clothed its members in scarlet coats, with scarves, and white-plumed hats; but had to be contented with the bonfires in celebration of the victory at Sedgemoor, and a full-dress parade. Not long afterwards many yards of orange ribbon made[Pg 164] the High Street gaudy with a pretence at honouring William III. But the colleges were vigorously Jacobite, and proved it by drinking the healths of the Stuarts as long as they could. Merton, Exeter, All Souls’, and Wadham were the exceptions. One example of the lighter occupations of the period is to be found in a story of somewhat earlier date, told of Dr. Bathurst, Vice-Chancellor and President of Trinity. “A striking instance of zeal for his college, in the dotage of old age, is yet remembered. Balliol College had suffered so much in the outrages of the grand rebellion, that it remained almost in a state of desolation for some years after the Restoration, a circumstance not to be suspected from its flourishing condition ever since. Dr. Bathurst was perhaps secretly pleased to see a neighbouring and once rival society reduced to this condition, while his flourished beyond all others. Accordingly, one afternoon, he was found in his garden, which then ran almost continuous to the east side of Balliol College, throwing stones at the windows with much satisfaction, as if happy to contribute his share in completing the appearance of its ruin.” I seem to find an echo of the sentiment of very different men, with a love of the old time amidst the politics and wine of the day, in Aubrey’s ejaculation: he wished that monasteries had not entirely been suppressed; for if but a few had been left, “what a pleasure ’twould have been to have travelled from monastery to monastery!” Nevertheless, the Oxford output of bishops was not decreased, and the number of quiet scholars—men like[Pg 166][Pg 165]
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
In the centre of the quadrangle rises a cylindrical dial, surmounted by a “pelican in her piety,” the badge of the Founder of the College. Behind, to the right, is the great entrance gateway and tower.
The College cat gives scale.
Hody of Wadham—was larger than one might conclude from the pages of honest Thomas Hearne, of St. Edmund Hall.
It was upon an old monastic foundation—once Gloucester College, then Gloucester Hall—that the one new eighteenth-century college was established. Gloucester Hall had numbered among its inhabitants several famous, rather odd men, like Tom Coryat and Thomas Allen, but had fallen away after the Restoration. It was, in short, almost a possession of nettles. The buildings were only kept on the edge of desolation by the Principal and two or three families in residence. The seventeenth century had made one fantastic attempt to retrieve the Hall. A colony of twenty students from the four Patriarchates of the Eastern Church was to be regularly established there. But the dreamy plan was soon parched and destroyed in the odour of scandal. After much trifling procrastination, the Greeks were succeeded by Worcester College, and a lucky poverty left the worn old buildings for a little longer untroubled. A library, a hall, and a chapel were prepared for the new society. Wide spaces of land on every side of it were retained or acquired, which afterwards gave the college a fat rent and its incomparable bosky and watered garden.
While Worcester was being founded in the conventional way, Oxford was developed by such buildings as the cloister at Corpus, the Pembroke chapel, the hall at All Souls’, the front quadrangle at Queen’s, and the little Lincoln “Grove” cottages. Then also the[Pg 170] Trinity College lime trees were planted. In most of the work of that time Dean Aldrich of Christ Church had a hand or a word. This clever and genial tutor was one of the best men of his day, and quite typical of the early eighteenth century. He seems to have been one to whom action came more naturally than dreams, if he dreamed at all; and he could easily express the many sides of his personality in a lasting way. A happy and golden mediocrity! He encouraged Boyle in the dazzling indiscretion of The Epistles of Phalaris. He wrote the enduring Oxford Logic, a smoking catch, and “Hark! the bonny Christ Church bells”; and perhaps this translation:—
If on my theme I rightly think,
There are five reasons why men drink,
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest we should be, by and by,
Or any other reason why.
The size of his architectural designs is seen in Peckwater quadrangle at Christ Church; their charm, in All Saints’, which the moon loves. Soon after his death in 1710, the stately library at Christ Church and that copious one at All Souls’ were begun.
In the year of the building of Pembroke chapel, Samuel Johnson entered the college, where they preserve his deal writing-table and china tea-pot. As Aldrich represents the early part of the century in Oxford, so Johnson represents the middle. Men are nowadays disposed to blame the cheerfulness of an age that produced a hundred immortals who do not give the true[Pg 172][Pg 171]
CHRIST CHURCH—PECKWATER QUADRANGLE
Through the opening between the west end of the College Library on the right, and some houses inhabited by Masters of the College on the left, appears the spire of the University Church of St. Mary. Part of the pediment of the buildings on the north side of Peckwater Quadrangle shows beneath.
The piece of masonry on the extreme right of the picture is part of the wall of the passage leading to Tom Quadrangle.
Two undergraduates converse to the left.
ring. The college historians often entitle one of their eighteenth-century chapters the “dark” or “iron” age; and indeed, as a “school of universal learning,” the Oxford of that day might be called in question. It was more aristocratic and exclusive, perhaps, than it had ever been, and it failed to justify itself. “What class in life”—it was a song by a fellow in a play of the period—
What class in life, tho’ ne’er so great,
With a good fellowship can compare?
And in the same play, says one, of Horace, “He was a jolly utile dulci dog, and I believe formerly might be fellow at a college.” Yet in our backward glances over Oxford history, how often do we stop when we reach that age! whether we are drinking from an old reminding tankard with the date 17—, or looking at one of its books, or living in one of the rooms which it wainscotted or furnished, heavily but how genially! “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson,” said Edwards, his college friend. “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Cheerfulness broke in pretty often in Oxford. And that was a time when there was more love of Oxford than ever before. Even the wealthy Fellows of All Souls’ (“that Eden to the fruitful mind,” as Lady Winchilsea called it at that time) never bought their college; and when one of them was taunted with the quip that Oxford was less learned than Bath, he was able to reply that it was also more fashionable. I find, too, in its love of the past, as[Pg 176] in its love of nature, something heartier, though I daresay less mystical, than our own. Johnson’s love of Pembroke is an example. He had lived there as an undergraduate only fourteen months, and there seems to have been little that was tangible, to take hold of him in so short a time. Yet when he came back long after, and heard old Camden’s grace after meat—which they still use—he was at home. It is true that men of that age could as little appreciate its blank verse as we can compose it, but there were many who could then appreciate what we can now only describe. The country (in summer)—antiquity—good living—were fine things; but when they wrote, it was theology, or morals, or inaccurate philology. There was a man, long ago with God, who after much waiting obtained a fine coveted room at New College: instead of writing a sonnet forthwith, he expressed a wish to kick some one downstairs incontinently. On one occasion, it is said, the head of a college, and a great lover of Oxford, who was jocund and recumbent after a feast, was with great circumstance invited by several wags “to accept the crown of this old and famous kingdom, since King George has resigned.” To which he slowly replied, without surprise, that “if we can hold our Court of St. James’s in this Common Room, we shall not demur.” Warton’s Companion to the Guide and Wood’s Modius Salium are full of what we should call poor Oxford humour; but I think there is sufficient indication of the laughter it caused, to make us pause in any condemnation of it as compared with our own “thoughtful mirth,” which[Pg 178][Pg 177]
THE RADCLIFFE LIBRARY, OR CAMERA BODLEIANA, FROM ALL SOULS’ COLLEGE
Across the picture runs a cloistered screen separating the green quadrangle of All Souls’ College from Radcliffe Square. Over an entrance to the College to the left rises an octangular ogee roof, protecting some beautiful wrought-iron gates.
To the right of this is the grand sweeping entablature of the Camera, bearing its majestic dome and lantern. This dome may compare with some of the finest in Europe.
The time is morning.
inspires mainly a desire to say something more mirthful and less thoughtful. And for those who care for none of these things, what sweeter or more dignified picture of quietness and study is there than at Lincoln in Wesley’s time, or at University under Scott, or Christ Church under Jackson? What handsomer than the Camera which was built in the middle of that century, or better to live in than Fisher’s buildings at Balliol? Or what inheritance more agreeable than the old bowling-greens, so happily celebrated in the Sphæristerium; or than the college gardens, which are nearly all eighteenth-century gifts? It has been said that the only movement in the eighteenth century was a very slow ascent to the nineteenth. That is not quite so, as many will agree who look at the re-fronting of University College chapel and hall, which was done when the wonderful century was reached at length. In fact, if we condemn the eighteenth century, we have to disown a large part of the nineteenth. In Oxford that is especially so. The destruction of the old chapels at Balliol and Exeter, and of the Grove at Merton, was carried out only fifty years ago; so long have the dark ages lingered in Oxford. As for the new buildings at New College, Christ Church, Merton, etc., they have been so widely condemned that it is to be presumed there is some merit in them, which an age nearer the millennium will praise.
But those works are only the less admirable and more conspicuous emblems of the nineteenth-century reformation. It had at length become possible again for[Pg 182] a man to keep his terms and take his degree without continual residence within college walls. The numbers of the University grew rapidly, and at a time when more efficient tutors and discipline made Oxford attractive to many who were neither frivolous nor rich. Oxford became, in fact, a place of education. The previous century had been conspicuous for great names and lack of system; what was achieved was due to individual endowment and energy; and the able men stood somewhat apart from their contemporaries. Wesley, for example, not only failed to make a strong party, but even to rouse an opposition of useful size. The nineteenth century, on the other hand, was a sociable one in matters of intellect. There were few lonely names. There were many groups. College after college—in a few cases before, in nearly all cases after, the first Commission—became known for their style of thought more than for their noblemen or wine. The fault of monkishness was either blotted out or exchanged for one that is more commonly pardoned to-day, nimium gaudens popularibus auris. At first, this meant an emphasis upon the distinction between college and college. It required more than a walk up Turl Street to get from Oriel to Balliol. The competition engendered by the new separate honour schools probably increased this for a time; and it was reported of one Head that, when told that Worcester College was above his own in a class list, he turned to the butler, and asked where Worcester was. But the east wind of the Commission changed all that. At the same time[Pg 184][Pg 183]
ENTRANCE GATEWAY OF HERTFORD COLLEGE AND THE RADCLIFFE LIBRARY
The gateway and wall have disappeared, this view of the Library being shut out by the new high buildings.
To the left of the picture is a part of the College, and over the gateway shows a portion of the old Schools, the majestic dome and lantern of the Radcliffe Library filling the intervening space.
A couple of undergraduates lean against the building to the left of the picture.
the friendly and often stimulating intercourse between senior and junior members of the colleges grew apace, and was no doubt encouraged by the increasing fashionableness of athletic sports, which gave a “Blue” the importance of a fellow, and a greater consciousness of importance.
In its progress towards what is most admired in modern Oxford, Balliol is the most interesting college. Nearly all other colleges have indeed acquired a more or less thorough resemblance to Balliol in its good and bad points, but no other college has been so long, so persistently, and so progressively devoted to the same ideal. Even those who do not wholly like that ideal cannot fail to admire the consistency and energy of the men who have achieved it, or could find the like to any comparable extent in colleges that cherish other affections.
But nowhere has there been an entire rupture with the past, or anything new which has not in a sense been laid reverently upon the foundations of the old. If one could see Keble College without its buildings, it might well seem to be not the youngest of the colleges. So, too, with Hertford College, which is indeed but the rejuvenation of the old homes of Hobbes, Selden, and Matthew Hale: it has doffed knee-breeches and periwig, and even those perhaps unwillingly, since its fellowships are lifelong for the celibate. And in the architecture of Oxford, some of the most novel effects of last century were produced by work in the same spirit of reverence for the past. Here, a[Pg 188] window received back its casements again; there, a fine roof was rescued from its burial under the impertinent superimpositions of more egotistic innovators. No other age and city perhaps would have been so curious and fortunate in restoring the old, as when at Christ Church the old floral marble base of St. Frideswide’s shrine was restored after three hundred years in the wilderness. Part was found in the cemetery wall, part in a well-side, part in a staircase, part in a wall: and almost the whole now rests in the Cathedral again.[Pg 190][Pg 189]
INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST CHURCH
At the east end of the choir is seen the wheel-window with two circular-headed windows underneath, restored in 1871.
Above these rises the late groined roof of the Choir, its richness contrasting well with the Norman arches below, which spring from corbels attached to the pillars.
The Cathedral is also the College Chapel.