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.