IF Magdalen is the most beautiful of Oxford Colleges, Christ Church is assuredly the most magnificent. Building was one of the favourite pursuits of Cardinal Wolsey, first Founder of Christ Church, as it was of Wykeham and Waynflete before him: it is almost mysterious how men of this type, who had the highest affairs of the State as well as of the Church upon their shoulders, found so much leisure to devote to architecture. Wolsey's plans were cut short by his fall from power, but he had already shewn by his completed palace in Whitehall and by Hampton Court, which he built as a present for his sovereign, the grandeur and largeness of his ideas. Out of the revenues of suppressed monasteries he had designed to establish a College far larger and far more richly endowed than any of its predecessors; and three sides of the Great Quadrangle had arisen before he fell upon adversity. Then the king stopped the work, and for a century the unfinished structure stood as a reminder of
Vaulting ambition, that o'erleaps itself,
And falls o' the other side.
Yet Wolsey had a public as well as a private ambition. He loved learning, and desired to promote it: he sought to save the Church by rearing instructed ministers for her service. If he failed, it was a noble failure; for though Henry VIII., who now assumed the title of Founder, sanctioned an establishment less wide and generous than Wolsey proposed, even so the new College easily surpassed all others in the scale of its endowments.
[Original]
