o'clock. Good again. You order an open carriage to be waiting at the major's door at that time, Mr. Armadale; and I'll give the man his directions where to drive to. When the governess comes to the cottage let her find a nice little note of apology (along with the cold fowl, or whatever else they give her after her journey), begging her to join us at the picnic, and putting a carriage at her own sole disposal to take her there. Gad, Sir!" said young Pedgift, gayly, "she must be a Touchy One if she thinks herself neglected after that!"

"Capital!" cried Allan. "She shall have every attention. I'll give her the pony-chaise and the white harness, and she shall drive herself if she likes."

He scribbled a line to relieve Miss Milroy's apprehensions, and gave the necessary orders for the pony-chaise. Ten minutes later the carriages for the pleasure party were at the door.

"Now we've taken all this trouble about her," said Allan, reverting to the governess as they left the house, "I wonder, if she does come today, whether we shall see her at the picnic."

"Depends entirely on her age, Sir," remarked young Pedgift, pronouncing judgment with the happy confidence in himself which eminently distinguished him. "If she's an old one, she'll be knocked up with the journey, and she'll stick to the cold fowl and the cottage. If she's a young one, either I know nothing of women or the pony in the white harness will bring her to the picnic."

They started for the major's cottage.

THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.*

EW COLLEGE is four centuries and a

age, which has also added another quadrangle, in wretched imitation, it is believed, of some part of Versailles. Beyond, you pass into a garden remarkable for its fine masses of varied foliage and its vignette view of Magdalen Tower. Skirting the college and garden is the ancient city wall, here in its most perfect state, and most completely recalling the image of the old feudal town. The style of the college is the earliest perpendicular, marking the entrance of Gothic architecture into the last of its successive phases of beauty, and at the same time the entrance of Medieval Catholicism and the feudal system upon the period of their decline. The special studies prescribed by the founder, which are of a classical character, also mark the dawn of the Renaissance in England some time after its light had begun to fill the sky in the land of Petrarch. This was the age of Gower and Chaucer, the natal hour of modern English literature. With the revival of learning was destined to come a great revolution in the religious sphere. But to this part of the movement Wykeham was no friend. In ecclesiastical matters he was a Conservative. He had come into collision with the early Reformation, and with the precursor of Luther in the person of Wycliffe. He dedicated his two colleges to the Virgin, of whom he was a special devotee, and whose. image stands conspicuous in more than one part of the quadrangle. He went beyond the previous founders in making peculiar and sumptuous provision for the performance of the Catholic ritual, with its stoled processions and tapered rites, and in enjoining religious observ ances and devotions on the members of his col

lege. New College is still distinguished not only by the size and beauty of its chapel, but by its

patron and promoter of learning in the epoch preceding the Reformation-like Wolsey, like Sir Thomas More, like Leo X.-Wykeham, in fostering classical literature and intellectual progress, unconsciously forwarded the destruction of all that was most dear to him. He warmed into life the serpent (so he would have thought it) that was to sting his own Church to death.

a novelty, and the wonder of its age. This college, and the great school at Winchester attached to it, were the splendid and memorable work of William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, who, combining, after the manner of those days, the statesman with the churchman, was the Chancellor, the favorite minister, and the chief diplomatist of Edward III. Loaded with preferment, even to an excess of pluralism, by the favor of his sovereign, he used his accumulated wealth with the munificence which Bacon, childless himself, complacently notes as characteristic of childless men. The founder of New College had originally risen in life and attracted the King's notice by his skill as an architect-a calling not incompatible with the clerical character in an age when the clergy embraced all who wrought not with the hand but with the brain. He had built Windsor Castle; and in founding his own colleges no doubt he gratified the tastes of the architect as well as those of the friend of religion and learning. The chapel, the hall, the cloisters, the tower, the great quadrangle, still bespeak his genius; though the great quadrangle has been some-enactments that in those days, as in these, the what marred by the tastelessness of a later

• Concluded from the May Number.

New College had altogether more the character of an Abbey than the previous foundations. Its warden lived with more of the state of an abbot than the warden of Merton and the other colleges of that type. Its statutes prescribed a more monastic rule of life than previous codes. They regulated more narrowly, not to say more tyrannically, the details of personal conduct, and provided for more of mutual surveillance and denunciation. They forbid any student to go beyond the gates any where, except to the schools of the University, without a companion to keep watch over him. They betray an increased desire to force individual character into a prescribed mould. We may gather from their

student was sometimes led astray from the path i of learning and asceticism by the sports and

ley.

allurements of an evil world; for they strictly | tical and scoffing age, at the head of whom was enjoin abstinence from gambling, hunting, and the modern counterpart of Wycliffe-John Weshawking. Each member of the college is sworn to observe them by oaths which, by their almost portentous rigor and prolixity, seem to betray the advent of an age when, the religious faith of the world having given way, morality had given way with it, and man could no longer put trust in man.

Facing one way on High Street, the other on the Radclyffe Square, with a fine Gothic front, two quadrangles, and a pair of high towers in debased Gothic style, but very picturesque, stands All Souls College. Over the gateway in High Street are sculptured the souls for whose relief from Purgatory the college was partly founded. Chichele, its founder, was Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of Henry V. Parliament already at that time was moving the Crown to secularize church property and apply it to the defense of the realm. Shakspeare has immor

The University, as has been said, appears to have been in a languishing state when New College was founded. Wykeham obtained for his students the peculiar privilege of being examined for their degrees by the college instead of the University, whereby he meant to raise them to a higher pitch of industry, though the privi-talized the statement of the chroniclers that lege proved, in after-times, a charter of idleness. He also provided for instruction by college tutors within the walls.

In these respects his college was peculiar. It was still more peculiar in its connection with the famous school which, standing beneath the shadow of Winchester Cathedral, casts over boyhood the spell of reverend antiquity. Winches ter was the first of our English public schools, and the archetype of our public school system: a system somewhat severe, taking the boy, almost the child, from his home, and throwing him before his hour into a world almost as hard as that with which the man will have to struggle; but the parent, no doubt, of some Roman virtues, and the mistress, in part, of our imperial greatness.

Archbishop Chichele urged his master to claim the crown of France in order to divert him from attending to these proposals. Some confirmation of this belief may perhaps be found in the statutes of Chichele's college, which command its members, as a duty more incumbent on them even than that of learning, to pray for the souls of King Henry V. and such of his companions in arms as "drank the bitter cup of death" in the fields of that glorious but unjust, and therefore, in its ultimate issue, disastrous war. In after-times, through some unexplained train of accidents, the college became appropriated to men of high family, and the claims of aristocratic connection are still struggling with those of merit for the possession of the institution.

Chichele had been educated at New College, It is probable that the troubles which inter- the statutes of which he to a great extent copied. fered with the prosperity of the University had Another son of the same house, who also copied been connected with the rise of Wycliffeism. its statutes, was William of Waynflete, ChanThe arch-heretic was himself the foremost of cellor of Henry VI., and founder of Magdalen Oxford teachers and the leader of the ardent College, which stands beside the river Cherwell, intellect of Oxford, as well as of its high spirit- amidst its smooth expanses of lawn and under ual aspirations. It was with great difficulty, its immemorial trees, the loveliest of all the and after repeated struggles, that the church homes of learning, the richest in all that is dear authorities succeeded in purifying, if ever they to a student's heart. Let one whose youth was did succeed in purifying, the University of this passed in that fair house pay his tribute of gratplague; and our first religious test was directed itude and reverence to his founder's shade. In against this the earliest form of the Protestant this work, we may believe, the spirit of a statesreligion. Among those who had caught the man-prelate, tossed on the waves of civil war, infection was Fleming, the founder of Lincoln found relief from the troubles of an unquiet time. College, a venerable and somewhat sombre pile, Under that gateway, when the tracery, now close to Exeter. Afterward he grew orthodox, touched by age, was fresh, and the stone, now was made a bishop, and, becoming a deadly en-gray, was white, passed Richard III., with his emy of the party which he had deserted, found-crime in his heart. The shadow of his dark ed a theological college specially to combat presence is in the rooms of state over the gate"that new and pestilent sect, which assailed all the sacraments and all the possessions of the Church." These words are not a bad summary of Wycliffeism, a movement directed at once against the worldly wealth of the Establishment and the sacramental and ceremonial system, which failed any longer to satisfy the religious heart. Whether Bishop Fleming's college contributed much toward the suppression of Protestant heresy in those days we do not know. In the last century it produced a group of students of a serious turn, diligent in religious studies and exercises, and on that account the laughing-stock of their fellow-students in a skep

way, which have just been restored by the college to their pristine magnificence. But pass on, under the cloisters, through the quadrangle, with its tranquil beauty, its level floor of green, and its quaint symbolic figures, and you will come to the walk consecrated by the gentle genius of Addison.

The quadrangle, chapel, and hall are the work of the founder. But the tower, which lends grace to every view of Oxford, is believed to be a monument of the taste and of the soaring genius of Wolsey, who was a Fellow of the college, and the occurrence of whose name is ominous of coming change.

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 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.

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 prescribed as studies, and a long and liberal list of them is given in the statutes. Latin composition, both in prose and verse, is enjoined; and even on holidays and in vacation the students are required to practice themselves in writing verses and letters, in the rules of eloquence, the poets, orators, and historians. Greek as well as Latin was to be spoken by the students in the college hall-an enactment which bespeaks the intoxicating enthusiasm excited by the revival of learning. The foundation embraced two classical lecturers for the whole University, and Greece and Southern Italy are especially mentioned as countries from which the lecturers are to be taken. The language of the statutes themselves affects classical elegance, and the framer-the first in England; and the portraits which apologizes for not being perfectly Ciceronian. Erasmus, who had visited the college, said that it would be to Britain what the Mausoleum was to Caria, what the Colossus was to Rhodes.

Grand as it is, Christchurch is not what Wolsey intended it to be. Had his design been fulfilled it would have been "Oxford" indeed, and the University would have been almost swallowed up in "Cardinal College," the name which, with a spirit of self-glorification somewhat characteristic of him, he intended to give his foundation. But in the midst of his work he fell; and the King, whom he had served too well, took his wealth and usurped his place as the legal founder of Christchurch, though he has not been able to usurp his place in history or in the real allegiance of Christchurch men. The college, however, though shorn of part of its splendor, was still splendid. In after-times it became-in a social and political sense at least

line its hall are a gallery of English worthies in Church and State.

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

days. In England, at the present day, a man who has grown rich by commerce generally aspires to found a family. In America, it seems, he still aspires to found an institution.

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 have flowed in a peaceful and beneficent stream, restrained by the barriers of a political church, at last burst upon society with the accumulated fury of a pent-up torrent. The monasteries, in Oxford as elsewhere, fell by a cruel though a righteous doom; their beauty was laid desolate. For a moment the colleges were in danger. Our charters were taken from us, and the hungry courtiers, fleshed with the plunder of the monasteries, 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.

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.

The Elizabethan era was glorious at Oxford, as well as elsewhere, though the literary spirit of the University was classical, not national, like that which culminated in Shakspeare. The learned Queen paid us a visit, was entertained with classical dramas and flattered in classical 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 cf Bacon's adulation. And be it said that Jaines 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 influ

should be directly involved in the struggles of political parties. Theirs should be a neutral territory and a serener air.

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 Protest-ence felt in politics, it is not desirable that they ants 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

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 stat ues 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 University Statutes, containing, no doubt, some enactments which were useful in their day. But here, too, he was Laud. He completely sacrificed liberty to order. He gave us no power of amendment; and he legally bound upon our

constitution had for some time been practically tending. We burst his fetters only a few years ago.

Wadham College was founded in the reign of James I., on a site occupied by a monastery of Austin friars. In style it is a mixture of the Gothic college with the Tudor manor-house. In beauty and attractiveness as a home of learning it is second, perhaps, only to Magdalen.necks the oligarchy toward which our once free It is, moreover, interesting as the last great collegiate foundation of the medieval type, the last creation of that medieval spirit, which, like 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 due 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 cel- Of course Oxford hailed the Restoration. ibacy, and the somewhat monkish tendencies of | Alas for the depths of servility into which, in

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