“Well, then, dear Mr. Wilmot, you will let us come soon again,” cried the girls.
“Yes, my dears,” he replied. “But see, the sun is shining: we can take a little walk before dinner: it will refresh you.”
The party then left the gallery.
CHAP. III.
As it is not my intention to enter so fully into the history of Susan and Ann, as it is to relate the true stories they heard from Mr. Wilmot, I shall only just tell my young readers, that the following day proving fine, they enjoyed the promised excursion on the water. The weather now becoming very sultry, and the children unable to take their morning walks, their mother and Mr. Wilmot, who sought to mingle instruction with amusement, proposed that they should spend an hour or two, in the middle of every day, in the picture gallery.
The two little girls were delighted with this proposition, and followed with alacrity their good-humoured conductor, as he kindly led the way.
When they had entered the room, Mr. Wilmot stopped before a fine sketch of an entrance into Oxford; and whilst pointing out to the children the college at which he had been educated, he enquired whether they had ever been told who were the first founders of the university.
The children answering in the negative, Mr. Wilmot proceeded to tell them that it was founded in the year 886[[1]], in the second year after St. Grimbald’s coming over to England. Its first regents and readers in divinity were, St. Neot, an abbot and eminent professor of theology; and St. Grimbald, an eloquent and most excellent interpreter of the Holy Scriptures; grammar and rhetoric were taught by Asser, a monk of extraordinary learning; logic, music, and arithmetic, by John, a monk of St. David’s; and geometry and astronomy by another John, a monk and a colleague of St. Grimbald, a man of acute wit and immense erudition. “These lectures,” says the annalist, “were often honoured with the presence of the most illustrious and invincible king Alfred, whose memory, to every judicious taste, shall be sweeter than honey.” From this small beginning arose this now celebrated university, which is at once the ornament and pride of the land.