THE TOWER, MAGDALEN COLLEGE
The great Tudor foundation was Christ Church, built on the sacred ground where, in the eighth century, St. Frideswide, a princess with a pronounced vocation for the religious life, had erected a nunnery of which she was first abbess. The nunnery became, after her death, a house of canons, known as St. Frideswide's Priory. Cardinal Wolsey brought about the surrender of this priory to the king, and its prompt transfer to himself, some fifteen years before the general Dissolution. His ambition, not all unrealised, was to found as his memorial a splendid seat of the New Learning at Oxford to be called Cardinal's College. He had gone so far as to erect a magnificent hall, with fan-vaulted entrance and carved oak ceiling of surpassing beauty, a kitchen ample enough to feed the Titans, "The Faire Gate" and, in outline, the Great Quadrangle, for whose enlargement he pulled down three bays of the Priory church, when his fall cut short his princely projects. His graceless master attempted to take over to himself the credit of Wolsey's labours, substituting the name of King Henry VIII's College, but on creating, a few years later, the bishopric of Oxford, he blended the cathedral and college foundations as the Church and House of Christ. The cathedral fabric is still in the main that of the old Priory church. Of the several quadrangles, Canterbury Quad keeps a memory of Canterbury College, which, with the other Benedictine colleges, Gloucester and Durham, went down in the storm. Christ's Church—"The House," as its members call it—is the aristocratic college of Oxford. Noblemen and even princes may be among those white-surpliced figures that flit about the dim quads after Sunday evensong. Ruskin's father, a wealthy wine-merchant of refined tastes and broad intelligence, hesitated to enter his son as a gentleman commoner at Christ's lest the act should savour of presumption. Yet no name has conferred more lustre on "The House" than that of him who became the Slade Professor of Fine Arts, waking all Oxford to nobler life and resigning, at last, because he could not bear that the university should sanction vivisection.
Wadham College, though the lovely garden with its hoary walls starred by jasmine and its patriarchal cedars casting majestic shadows—a garden that rivals for charm even those of St. John's and Worcester and Exeter—has such a venerable air, is the youngest of all these. Its first stone was laid, on a site formerly occupied by a priory of Augustinian Friars, only six years before Shakespeare's death. In his later journeys he would not have failed to note the progress of its erection.
But if Shakespeare saw, as he rode through Oxford, almost all the colleges that may now be seen, he also saw much that has crumbled away into an irretrievable past. Not only were the various colleges, halls, priories, and friaries of the monastic orders still in visible ruin, but the great abbeys of Osney and of Rewley, the former one of the largest and richest in all England, still made the appeal of a beautiful desolation. No wonder that Shakespeare compared the naked branches of autumn, that wintry end of the season
"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,"
to
If, as seems probable, the Arden sympathies lingered long with the Mother Church, if Shakespeare did not forget, even in those closing years when his homeward trips brought him to a Puritan household and an ever more Puritan town, the bitter fate of his kinsmen of Wilmcote and Wootton-Wawen, he must have been keenly alive to these ravages of the Reformation. Yet he had been some twenty years at the vortex of Elizabethan life, in the very seethe of London; he had witnessed many a wrong and many a tragedy; he was versed to weariness of heart in the "hostile strokes" that befall humanity, in all the varied
"throes
That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain
In life's uncertain voyage";