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The next foundation, following hard upon | This it has hardly been, but it has produced Magdalen, is Brasenose, a mass of buildings eminent men; and here Arnold practiced in close under the Radclyffe Library-dark, as youthful, almost boyish, debate the weapons much from the discoloring of the stone as from which he was afterward to wield for truth and years. As the night of the Middle Ages passed justice on an ampler field. away, and the sun of the Renaissance climbed the sky, more colleges and fewer monasteries were founded. Yet the bishop and the pious knight who jointly founded Brasenose had no misgiving as to the perpetual continuance of Roman Catholic devotions. They did not imagine that a day would come, and that soon, when it would be no longer a duty to attend daily mass, to repeat the Miserere and the Sancta Marie Mater, to say the Paternoster five times a day in honor of the five wounds of Christ, and the Angelical Salutation as many times in honor of the five joys of the Virgin. Yet the patent of their foundation is dated in the third year of Henry VIII.

Pulpit eloquence as well as classical learning was now in vogue, and the Fellows of Corpus Christi College are required, when of a certain standing, to preach in populous cities, and at last, as the crowning test of their powers, at St. Paul's Cross. To preach at St. Paul's Cross went, among other Fellows of the College, Richard Hooker; and those who have read his life can tell with how ludicrous and calamitous a result.

The hour of Medieval Catholicism was now come; but its grandest foundation at Oxford was its last. The stately façade, the ample quadrangle, the noble hall of Christchurch are monuments, as every reader of Shakspeare knows, of the magnificence of Cardinal Wolsey, a true Prince of the Church, with a prince

the point of transition between Catholic and Protestant England. Wolsey was in every sense the English Leo X.; an indifferentist, probably, in religion, as well as loose in morals, till misfortune and the approach of death made him again turn to God; an enthusiast only in learning; one of a group of men who, by fostering the new studies, promoted-without being aware of it-the progress of the new faith, and built with their own hands the funeral pile of their own Church. He suppressed a number of small monasteries to found Christchurch; and no doubt he felt for the monks-with their trumpery, their gross legends, and their fabricated relics-the same contempt which was felt for them by Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, and all other educated and enlightened men of the time. But he started back, and was troubled in mind, when he found that the eminent teachers whom he had sought out with great pains for his new college were teachers of other novelties besides the classics.

Pent between Merton and Christchurch-a confinement from which its growing greatness may one day tempt it to escape by migration-ly, if not with a pure, heart. Here we stand on is Corpus Christi College. The quadrangle, with its quaint sun-dial, stands as it was left by the founder, Fox, Bishop of Winchester, a statesman and diplomatist, trusted in the crafty councils of Henry VII. We are now in full Renaissance, and on the brink of the Reformation. The name of the college, denoting a strong belief in transubstantiation, and the devotions prescribed in the statutes, show that the founder was (as the holder of the rich see of Winchester might be expected to be) an adherent of the established faith. He had first intended to found a monastery. But his far-sighted friend, Bishop Oldham, said, "What! my lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihoods for a company of bussing [praying] monks, whose end and fall we may ourselves live to see? No, no; it is more meet that we should provide for the increase of learning, and for such as by their learning may do good to the Church and commonwealth." To the Renaissance, however, Fox's college emphatically belongs. For the first time the classical authors are distinctly pre- Grand as it is, Christchurch is not what Wolscribed as studies, and a long and liberal list of sey intended it to be. Had his design been fulthem is given in the statutes. Latin composi- filled it would have been "Oxford" indeed, and tion, both in prose and verse, is enjoined; and the University would have been almost swaleven on holidays and in vacation the students lowed up in "Cardinal College," the name are required to practice themselves in writing which, with a spirit of self-glorification someverses and letters, in the rules of eloquence, the what characteristic of him, he intended to give poets, orators, and historians. Greek as well his foundation. But in the midst of his work as Latin was to be spoken by the students in the he fell; and the King, whom he had served too college hall-an enactment which bespeaks the well, took his wealth and usurped his place as intoxicating enthusiasm excited by the revival the legal founder of Christchurch, though he of learning. The foundation embraced two has not been able to usurp his place in history or classical lecturers for the whole University, and in the real allegiance of Christchurch men. The Greece and Southern Italy are especially men- college, however, though shorn of part of its tioned as countries from which the lecturers are splendor, was still splendid. In after-times it to be taken. The language of the statutes them- became-in a social and political sense at least selves affects classical elegance, and the framer-the first in England; and the portraits which apologizes for not being perfectly Ciceronian. line its hall are a gallery of English worthies in Erasmus, who had visited the college, said that Church and State. it would be to Britain what the Mausoleum was to Caria, what the Colossus was to Rhodes.

And now over Oxford, as well as over the rest of England-and more fiercely, perhaps,

than over any other city of England-swept the | in the endowment of literary or charitable ingreat storm of the Reformation. The current stitutions ennobled English commerce in those of religious thought which, left to itself, would days. In England, at the present day, a man have flowed in a peaceful and beneficent stream, who has grown rich by commerce generally asrestrained by the barriers of a political church, pires to found a family. In America, it seems, at last burst upon society with the accumulated he still aspires to found an institution. fury of a pent-up torrent. The monasteries, in The Elizabethan era was glorious at Oxford, Oxford as elsewhere, fell by a cruel though a as well as elsewhere, though the literary spirit righteous doom; their beauty was laid desolate. of the University was classical, not national, For a moment the colleges were in danger. Our like that which culminated in Shakspeare. The charters were taken from us, and the hungry learned Queen paid us a visit, was entertaincourtiers, fleshed with the plunder of the mon-ed with classical dramas and flattered in clasasteries, marked us for their prey. But Henry VIII. was learned, and a friend of learning: after a short hesitation he drove off the pack of ravening hounds, and the charters were given back into our trembling hands. But every thing monastic was rigorously suppressed. The great bell of Christchurch, which Milton heard from his neighboring house at Forest Hill, "swinging slow with sullen roar,' was saved from the wreck of Ouseney Abbey, the chief monastery of the city.

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The revolution was almost as great in the intellectual as in the ecclesiastical sphere. The books of the great school philosophers and divines of Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the Master of the Sentences were torn up and scattered about the college quadrangles. They had been the "angelic," the "subtle," the "irrefragable" doctors of their day.

To and fro swept the tide of controversy and persecution from the beginning of the Reformation, under Henry VIII., to the final settlement under Elizabeth. Now Catholics were expelled from their colleges by Edward VI., now Protestants by Mary, and again Catholics by Elizabeth. In Broad Street, opposite Baliol College, a site once occupied by the city ditch, is a spot marked by a flat cross of stone. There Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died. In the city wall, close by, was their prison-house. While the Protestant divines, Bucer and Fagius, reigned in Oxford the wife of Fagius was buried near the shrine of St. Frideswide, in Christchurch Cathedral. The Catholics, in their hour of triumph, flung out the accursed wife of the heretic from the holy ground. The Protestants, in their turn victorious, mingled her bones with those of the Saint; and the dust of the two remains forever blended together by the irony of fate.

Two colleges, Trinity and St. John's, were founded during the brief Catholic reaction under Philip and Mary. As celibate institutions, colleges, though less distinctively Catholic than monasteries, were still more congenial to Catholicism than to Protestantism, and it was natural that the fashion of founding them should revive with Catholic ascendency. The founder of Trinity, Sir Thomas Pope, was an ardent partisan of the Reaction, and has earnestly enjoined his Fellows to avoid the contamination of the Protestant heresy. He lived to see them make way for Protestants. Sir Thomas White, the founder of St. John's, was a great merchant, and one of a group whose princely munificence

sical harangues; and, at parting, expressed her warm affection for the University. On Shotover Hill, over which the old London Road passed, is a monument marking the spot to which the Heads of Colleges toiled up to meet her, and where, no doubt, there was abundance of ceremony and genuflection. It need scarcely be said that her still more learned successor made the light of his countenance shine upon us. In the great Quadrangle of the Schools, a very noble monument of the late Tudor architecture, upon a façade pedantically adorned with all the Greek orders, sits the effigy of the royal Solomon, majestic as when he drank the rich incense of Bacon's adulation. And be it said that James was, at all events, none the worse for his learning. It inspired him with some beneficent ideas, and redeemed his weakness from utter degradation.

James bestowed on the University the right of sending representatives to Parliament. A questionable boon. For though universities, if they are worth any thing, will make their influence felt in politics, it is not desirable that they should be directly involved in the struggles of political parties. Theirs should be a neutral territory and a serener air.

Exeter College, founded by a prelate of Edward II., was refounded and raised to its present magnificence by Sir William Petre, a statesman of the Elizabethan age, and an upholder of the Spartan theory of education against Ascham, who took the more liberal view. These famous Elizabethan statesmen were all highlycultivated men. Cultivation without force may be impotent, but force without cultivation is blind. Force without cultivation has produced great effects for the time; but only cultivated men have left their mark upon the world.

Another knight of the Elizabethan age, Sir Thomas Bodley, founded the Bodleian Library, now one of the famous libraries of the world. The book-worm will scarcely find a greater paradise than the good knight's antique readingroom, especially in the quiet months of the summer vacation. If the spirit of learned leisure and repose breathes any where, it is there.

Jesus College was founded in the reign of Elizabeth for Welshmen, the remnant of the old Celtic inhabitants of Britain, who, saved from the Saxon sword by the rampart of the Welsh hills, had in that fastness preserved their national language and character, and do still to some extent preserve them, though railroads

and other centralizing and civilizing influences are now fast completing the inevitable work of amalgamation. To draw Welsh students to English universities would of course be an object with all who desired the consolidation of the United Kingdom. This was a Protestant college, founded to uphold and disseminate the faith which Lincoln College, its neighbor over the way, had been founded to combat and put down. The Fellows are adjured to prefer Scripture to that which is not Scripture, truth to tradition. They are also directed specially to cultivate, and even to speak, Hebrew-a language which Protestants loved as the key to the Old Testament, and Catholics dreaded as the sure source of misbeliefs. According to the strong partisans of Catholicism, to learn Greek was heretical, to learn Hebrew was diabolical. The lingering love of clerical celibacy, however, betrays itself in a statute forbidding the Principal to marry. It is well known how strong this feeling was in the half-Catholic heart of the Virgin Queen.

college life, also contributed to make Oxford, as she has twice been, the scene of a great Romanizing reaction.

In restoring the beautiful Gothic Church of St. Mary, where the University sermons are preached, we have spared, on historical grounds, an incongruous portico, in the Italian style, which, though built nearly a century after the Reformation, bears an image of the Virgin and Child. This is a monument of Laud, and helped to send him to the scaffold. In the interior quadrangle of St. John's College stand the statues of Charles and Henrietta, placed there by the same hand. Laud was the President of this college. Here he learned the narrow, arbitrary notions of government which he afterward put in practice with such fatal effect upon a more important scene; and here, in angry college controversies with the Puritans, he imbibed the malignant hatred of that sect which, when he had mounted to power, broke out in persecution.

Laud was a University reformer, though in a despotic way. He gave us a new Code of Wadham College was founded in the reign University Statutes, containing, no doubt, some of James I., on a site occupied by a monastery enactments which were useful in their day. But of Austin friars. In style it is a mixture of the here, too, he was Laud. He completely sacriGothic college with the Tudor manor-house. ficed liberty to order. He gave us no power of In beauty and attractiveness as a home of learn- amendment; and he legally bound upon our ing it is second, perhaps, only to Magdalen.necks the oligarchy toward which our once free It is, moreover, interesting as the last great constitution had for some time been practically collegiate foundation of the medieval type, the tending. We burst his fetters only a few years last creation of that medieval spirit, which, like ago. Gothic architecture, lingered at Oxford longer than in any other place in Protestant Britain. Sir Nicholas Wadham, whose name it bears, seems to have been, like a large portion of the wealthier classes at that time, a waverer in religion. It is said that he first intended to found a monastery abroad, but afterward made up his mind to found a college at home. Upon his death his widow, Dame Dorothy Wadham, fulfilled his design by building and endowing this noble house. The hand of time has touched it with a far higher beauty, especially on its garden side, since its foundress looked upon her work.

The

During the great civil war Oxford, once almost the head-quarters of Simon de Montfort, was the head-quarters of Charles. The city was in a state of siege. Study ceased. students were in arms. The Royalist Parliaments sat in our college halls and our Convocation. One seat of learning became the mint. Soldiers trooped in the streets. The college plate was melted down into money; and thus perished, probably, a rare collection of medieval works of art. The monuments of that period are not houses of learning, but the traces of earth-works which united the river Cherwell with the Isis, and protected the beleaguered city.

Two colleges, Pembroke and Worcester (the The victorious Puritans have left their mark latter known to our summer visitors by the beau- on some painted windows and Romish images. ty of its gardens), are of later date than Wad- The extreme fanatics of the party would have ham; but these grew up to their present goodly done away with universities and learning altoproportions out of foundations which, in their gether, and left nothing but the Bible and the origin, were comparatively poor and insignificant. pulpit. But Cromwell was of a different mind. Meantime a great change had been passing He was no incarnation either of mere fanaticism over the character of the University. In the or of brute force. He had been bred at a gramthirteenth century we had been liberal and even mar-school and at Cambridge. What was more, somewhat revolutionary, both in religion and he had conversed on the highest themes with politics: we now became at once Tory and High the choicest spirits of his time. He protected Church. We had been the school of liberty, and fostered both universities, and did his best progress, hope: we now became the school of to draw highly-cultivated men from them into doctrines most adverse to them all. This was the public service. Of course he put Puritans dae mainly to the clerical character of the Fel- in our high places. But these men promoted lowship, which, the University having been com- learning as well as Puritanism, restored discipletely absorbed in the colleges, bound her des- pline, revived education, and upheld the honor tinies to those of the Established Church and its of the University in their day. protector and ally, the Crown. The rule of celibacy, and the somewhat monkish tendencies of

Of course Oxford hailed the Restoration. Alas for the depths of servility into which, in

that her evil hour, she fell! Archbishop Shel- | don then reigned over us in the spirit of the most violent Royalism and the narrowest intolerance. The Sheldonian Theatre, in which our Commemorations are held, is his work. Let it do what it may to redeem an unloved and unhonored name.

The Radclyffe Library, rising with its Palladian dome in not unpleasing contrast to the Gothic buildings which surround it, and upon the whole galaxy of which it looks down, is a memorial of the Augustan glories of the reign of Anne, of which even Tory Oxford did not fail to catch the beams. Its founder, Dr. Radclyffe, was the court physician of the time. Less pleasing memorials of the same age are the Chapel of Trinity College, and other buildings, designed by Aldrich, the Dean of Christchurch in that day, a tasteless architect, but a man of liberal culture, and the centre of a group of scholars who made Christchurch illustrious in his time.

The commencement of the present century, when the mind of Europe had been stirred by the French Revolution, and the great struggles, political and intellectual as well as military, to which it gave birth, witnessed a revival of learning and education at Oxford. Then it was that our examinations were again made effective, that our class-list was instituted, and that Oxford once more became, what she had so long ceased to be, a power in the intellectual world. Then it was that our Cannings and Peels began to arise, and that we began again to send men of worth and high aspirations into the service of the state. Still we were High Tories. At Oxford, in 1814, the Allied Sovereigns celebrated their victory, and a memorial of their visit is seen in the portraits of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia, which hang, with that of George IV. between them, in the Sheldonian Theatre. Among the honors and rewards heaped on the Duke of Wellington, the great chief of the Tory party, was the Chancellorship of the University, and at his installation Oxford was the scene of a memorable gathering of his political adherents. It was, in fact, their first rally after their great overthrow.

Scarcely, however, had the intellectual revival of the University commenced when, owing to the clerical and half-monastic character of the colleges, Oxford became the centre of the great priestly and Romanizing reaction in the Anglican Church, of which Dr. Newman was the illustrious leader, and which was provoked by the general progress of liberal opinions in the nation and the victory of Parliamentary Reform. The annals of that reaction belong rather to the history of the Anglican Church than to that of the University of Oxford. But when it was at its height it completely absorbed the intellectual activity of the University, and fatally shattered many a fine mind destined by nature to render high service to Oxford and to the nation, but now rendered useless, except as the wrecked vessel which marks the sunken reef. Of this attempt to revive the faith and the ecclesiastical institutions of the Middle Ages, the architectural additions and restorations in the Gothic style with which Oxford abounds, and which have been made within the last thirty years, are in part the monuments; though they are mainly the fruits of an improved taste in architecture, and a returning preference for the Romantic over the Classical in poetry and art. The Mar

And now we come to a period over which every loyal son of Oxford will gladly pass as quickly as he may. The State Church of England during the greater half of the last century was torpid and corrupt, and Oxford shared its torpor and corruption. The only spirit active in the University was that of Jacobitism-a political conspiracy in favor of the heir of James II., and against the constitutional liberties of the nation-destitute, in the case of the Oxford Fellows, even of the redeeming lustre which valor sheds over the self-devoted adherents of a bad cause. Instead of bleeding at Preston and Culloden, these men merely indulged their factious feeling by "drinking the king over the water," in what Gibbon calls the "deep but dull potations which excused the brisk intemperance of youth." In truth the University, in the proper sense of the word, could scarcely be said to live in those days. Her corpse was possessed by an alien spirit of clerical depravity and political intrigue. Learning slept, education languished, university and college examinations became a farce. Life in most of the colleges was indolent, sensual, and coarse. A few names, such as those of Lowth and Wharton, redeemed our dishonor. Christchurch—thanks, chiefly, to the good scholars it received from Westminster school-maintained a position higher than that of the other colleges. But our general history, for seventy or eighty years, was such that we would gladly bury it in oblivion. It is not sur-tyrs' Memorial, also-erected near the spot prising that a University where duty was dead, where religious faith was a mere prejudice deeply tainted with political bigotry, should have become the mother of skepticism and irreligion, or that the most conspicuous name among the Oxford men of the last century should be that of Gibbon. If we seek architectural memorials of this evil age, they will be found in tasteless masses of modern building, such as the "new buildings" at Magdalen, designed merely as luxurious residences, without any thought of the higher aims of architectural art.

where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley sufferedmay be regarded as, in another sense, a monument of the same epoch. It is the architectural manifesto of the Protestant party against the Romanizing doctrines of Dr. Newman and his disciples.

The secession of Dr. Newman to the Church of Rome closed, in truth, the history of the religious movement of which he was the leader. With him its genius, its poetry, its chivalry, its fascinations for high intellects and spiritual natures passed away. Since that time it has al

The friends of Reform and Progress within the University did not call on the central Government for aid without hesitation. All En

most lost its spiritual character, and degenerated the power of self-adaptation and development into a mere State Church combination, the sub- without which no institution can long sustain servient ally of political Toryism, and the tool its greatness. of the Tory chiefs. Twenty years ago it carried with it almost all the powerful intellects of the University; now it has decisively lost them all. Romanizing extravagances in ceremonial, lan-glishmen are attached to local liberties and jealguage, dress, and all that Carlyle calls the "millinery and upholstery" part of the movement, still go on; but these are the freaks and toys of children, not the deliberate efforts of men to master the intellect of the world.

Since the catastrophe of Tractarianism the proper interests of the University have revived, and a more liberal spirit has begun to pervade our society and administration. The Tractarian movement, though itself reactionary, broke up old Anglican and Tory prejudices, weaned active minds from subservience to custom and tradition, loosened the soil in all directions, and prepared the ground for healthier plants to grow. Having trained those who were influenced by it to rest on authority instead of resting on truth, it, of course, at its downfall, left behind it a certain amount of religious perplexity and distress peculiar to Oxford, besides what is generally prevalent in an age of final transition from false authority to rational religion. But this is accidental, and, as Oxford teachers and students brace themselves to their proper duties, it will pass away.

Meantime our course of education, till lately confined to classics and mathematics, is being rendered more liberal and more adequate to the needs of our age by the admission of Science, History, Jurisprudence, and Political Economy. The Museum, newly built on the north of the city, and the Taylor Institution for the study of modern languages, are the architectural expressions of an onward movement in education almost as important as that which substituted classical literature for the scholastic philosophy in the sixteenth century.

We have also got rid, by the help of Parliament, of the antiquated codes of statutes with which each founder, anxious to perpetuate his own will to the end of time, had prevented the free development and frozen the life-blood of his college. Our case is a warning to others, especially to the citizens of the United States, where private munificence displays itself to so large an extent in the endowment of institutions, against the danger, incident to perpetual endowments, of allowing the gifts of one generation to become the fetters of those which follow. No perpetual foundation should be permitted without a power vested in proper authorities of amending, from time to time, the regulations of the founder, so far as is consistent with his main object, which should always be distinctly stated at the commencement of the instrument of foundation.

At the same time and by the same assistance we shook off, in part at least, the oligarchical government imposed on us by Laud, and recovered in some measure the freedom of action and VOL. XXXI.-No. 181.-G

ous of the interference of the central power. We are, moreover, convinced that the great places of national education and learning, as the guardians of interests and principles which are the common heritage of all, should be as free as possible from the influence and vicissitudes of political parties. But it was for emancipation, not for interference, that Oxford reformers appealed to Parliament; and it was in a case where, from the absence of any legal power of amending our statutes, we were unable to emancipate ourselves.

Moreover, from the predominance of the clerical element (the immemorial bane of our greatness), we are subjected, in academical legislation, to an influence more sectional and more injurious than that of any political party not wholly regardless of the general interests of the nation. It is on this account that the friends of liberty at Oxford are obliged again to appeal to Parliament to relieve us from the religious tests, and enable us once more to become the University of the whole nation. Your Oxford guest will not exert himself with the less energy or the less confidence in this cause after having, once in his life, breathed the air, to him so strange, to you so happily familiar, of perfect religious liberty, and learned, from the evidence of his own senses, how false, how blasphemous, is the belief that rational religion is opposed to freedom, or that freedom is injurious to rational religion.

Thus we have traced, though necessarily in a brief and summary way, the history of this group of corporations, and seen the united threads of their existence pass through many successive phases of the national history, and reflect the varying hues, the happy lights, and the melancholy shadows of each phase in turn. We have seen pass before us the long train of Founders, in the characters and costumes of many successive ages: the sceptred Plantagenets; the warrior prelates; the ecclesiastical statesmen of the Middle Ages; the grave knights, bountiful ladies, and wealthy merchants of the Tudor age; the more familiar forms of modern intellect and science. A common purpose runs through and unites the whole, binding the present to all the generations of the past. In the latest buildings we see modern science installed in a home prepared for it by the Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages.

It only remains to be said that Oxford, like all the antiquities and glories of England, is yours as well as ours. It is a part of the common heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race. I trust that any American who may come to it, either as a visitor or a student, will not fail to be welcomed, as I know by happy experience that Englishmen are welcomed here.

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