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.”