The last of the many vicissitudes which this venerable site has experienced remains to be recorded. In 1874 the defunct Hertford College was recalled to life by the munificence of Mr. T. C. Baring, M.P., who endowed it with seventeen Fellowships, and thirty Scholarships of £100 per annum, limited to members of the Church of England.[357] An Act of Parliament gave the new foundation “all such rights and privileges as are possessed or enjoyed or can be exercised by other Colleges in the University of Oxford;” and Dr. Richard Michell, the last Principal of Magdalen Hall, became the first Principal of the present Hertford College.
While future ages will feel towards the name of Baring all the loyalty that is a Founders due, it is a fortunate circumstance that the accidents which have been related enabled him to give to his new foundation the only thing which money could not buy—a slight flavour of antiquity. The existing foundation is substantially the creation of Mr. Baring, but enough remains of its predecessors—the Elizabethan hall now transformed into a Library, the Jacobean Common-rooms which represent the pre-Newtonian Hart Hall, Newton’s Chapel with the adjoining “angle,” the plate and pictures of Magdalen Hall and its ten Scholarships[358]—to give us a link with the past, a not uninteresting past, of which, however glorious its future, the College need never be ashamed. In one sense, notwithstanding the newness of its foundation, the College belongs to the past more than its more venerable sisters. It is untouched by recent legislation, its Statutes are constructed upon the old model, and it still rejoices in Fellowships which are tenable during life and celibacy.
XXI.
KEBLE COLLEGE.
By Rev. Walter Lock, M.A., Sub-Warden of Keble College.
This, the most recent of the Oxford colleges, was opened in 1870, the foundation of it being due to a combination of three different but cognate causes: the first was a widespread desire to make University education more widely accessible to the nation, and especially to those who were anxious to take Holy Orders in the Church of England; the second, the desire to ensure that this education should be in the hands of Churchmen; and the third, the desire to perpetuate the memory of the Rev. John Keble, formerly Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College, Professor of Poetry in the University (1832-1841), Vicar of Hursley (1836-1866), and author of The Christian Year, Lyra Innocentium, A Treatise on Eucharistical Adoration, &c.
Of these motives the first had been stirring in Oxford for many years. In 1845 the following address was presented to the Hebdomadal Board—
“Considerable efforts have lately been made in this country for the diffusion of civil and spiritual knowledge, whether at home or abroad. Schools have been instituted for the lower and middle classes, churches built and endowed, missionary societies established, further Schools founded, as at Marlborough and Fleetwood, for the sons of poor clergy and others; and, again, associations for the provision of additional Ministers. But between these schools on the one hand, and on the other the ministry which requires to be augmented, there is a chasm which needs to be filled. Our Universities take up education where our schools leave it; yet no one can say that they have been strengthened or extended, whether for Clergy or Laity, in proportion to the growing population of the country, its increasing empire, or deepening responsibilities.
“We are anxious to suggest, that the link which we find thus missing in the chain of improvement should be supplied by rendering Academical education accessible to the sons of parents whose incomes are too narrow for the scale of expenditure at present prevailing among the junior members of the University of Oxford, and that this should be done through the addition of new departments to existing Colleges, or, if necessary, by the foundation of new Collegiate bodies. We have learned, on what we consider unquestionable information, that in such institutions, if the furniture were provided by the College, and public meals alone were permitted, to the entire exclusion of private entertainments in the rooms of the Students, the annual College payments for board, lodging, and tuition might be reduced to £60 at most; and that if frugality were enforced as the condition of membership, the Student’s entire expenditure might be brought within the compass of £80 yearly.