Entrance Gate being built as late as 1535 to give King’s Hall a frontage on the High Street. The Hall rebuilt in the later xiv century and added to in the xvth was however only the nucleus of Henry VIII.’s college. To the south west stood Michaelhouse; this too was absorbed in the new building, and its second dedication to the holy and undivided Trinity was retained in Henry’s college. Seven other buildings—all university hostels—were also absorbed—Gregory’s, Crouched, Physwick, S. Margaret’s, Tyled, Gerard’s, and Oving’s. The present kitchen occupies part of the site of Michaelhouse; Physwick stood between the Queen’s Gate and Trinity Street; and the other hostels were grouped round these in S. Michael’s and King’s Hall Lanes.[228]
The work which had been begun by Lady Margaret at Christ’s and S. John’s—the final substitution of the college for the monastery school—was now completed by her grandson, the great despoiler of the monasteries, who appears to have designed Trinity College as a splendid atonement for the destruction of so many homes of learning. It was largely endowed with abbey lands, and Henry’s undeniable interest in erudition seems to have found its ultimate satisfaction in a foundation into which there entered every element of that “new learning” which was humanistic before it was Protestant. That provision was here to be made for a wider field of knowledge than any hitherto contemplated in or out of a university, seems amply proved by the words of the founder; who, after declaring that the college is intended for the “development and perpetuation of religion” (a well-chosen form of words?), continues thus: “for the cultivation of wholesome study in all departments of learning, knowledge of languages, the education of youth in piety, virtue, self-restraint, and knowledge; charity towards the poor, and the relief of the afflicted and distressed.” The programme was so liberal that Mary herself endowed the college with monastic property, and Elizabeth completed the chapel which her sister had begun.
No building, indeed, in either university suggests in the same way and in the same degree that delightful mental combination of form and space which is the mark of the “Cambridge mind” in science if it is not so in literature. As we pass into the great court the buildings we see neither shut out the light nor hem in the thoughts. The enclosure they suggest is that formal enclosure of point and line which enables us to make propositions about infinity. Of all scholastic buildings in the world the great court of Trinity is that which best suggests the majesty and spaciousness of learning. Here one receives an impression of adequacy, balance, clearness, spaciousness, elevation, serenity, a certain high power of the imagination—the mathematical qualities, the qualities of the seeker after truth: an impression of the simple force of what is simply clear, the simple grandeur of that which can dispense with the mysterious; of the dignity which accompanies those who have looked upon things as
