CHAPTER II.

OXFORD TO ABINGDON.

Oxford, from the Upper River; the New Town--The Courses of the River, from Medley Weir to Folly Bridge--The Houses of the Regulars and Friars--The University and Parish Churches--The Halls and Colleges of the Seculars, from the Thirteenth Century to the Reformation--Jacobean Oxford--Classic Oxford--Convenient Oxford--The Architectural Revival--The Undergraduate Revival--The River below Folly Bridge, and the Invention of Rowing--The Navigation Shape of the River--Floods--The Barges--Iffley--Littlemore--Kennington--Radley--Sandford--Nuneham.

The traveller down stream, who looks for Oxford across the flats of Port Meadow, is aware of a large town, dusky red in colour, skirted by a canal and a railway, and dominated by the slim brick bell-tower of a church, one of the pangs of the architectural renaissance. There, beyond the dingy quarter called Jericho, one may stray through many streets of villas in the Middle Victorian taste, by flower-beds gay with the geranium and calceolaria. Little is wanting that would be found in St. John's Wood or West Kensington. For this is, in late after-growth, that town of Oxford that meant to be like London, and was like London, before the University came to interfere. It had its Norman castle, its Gild Merchant, its charter, as good as those of London. It was a place where Parliaments met. It had a palace of the kings, and a rich Jewry, and a great mind to trade. But the University sprang up and choked these things. London never had a real University, but only colleges for students of Common Law, and so flourished. In Oxford the town went under, and the University was everything. The "nations" came, and after long war reduced the natives to servitude. But the wheel has turned. The down-trodden race is quickly hiding the University with its new towns of houses and churches, and the very University has lost the monastic rule that allowed its members to camp as an alien garrison in the place. Now they are surely being wrought into the fabric of the town.

For the University there exist two rivers; one, The River, below Folly Bridge, the other, The Upper River, above Medley Weir. Between the two there is not one stream, but many. The river goes out of itself and returns into itself again. And in this division it suffers various fortunes. It goes far afield and grows forget-me-nots. It turns mill-wheels, and is a servant of breweries. It is locked and sluiced for the passage of barges. It is constrained and laid away in low and discouraged quarters, where it keeps company with people out of repair, with philanthropic enterprises, with aimless smells, with exhausted dust, with retired hansom cabs. It is beguiled into obscure cuts for bathing. It is imprisoned under streets. And when it comes to itself again it is not allowed to have its name, but is called by the vain sound of Isis.

The two main branches of the stream enclose a space rather over a mile in length, and roughly of the shape of a slim ewer, with a handle broken off near the top, that is at Medley Weir. There is a minor junction of the streams by a cut across the narrowed neck of the ewer opposite Worcester Garden. The upper of the two islands thus formed is given up to meadows and the two railway lines. The lower island, Osney, holds the two railway stations, and the continuation southwards of the Great Western. South of the stations, and at right angles to the railway, the Seven Bridges Road runs out towards Botley. South of this again St. Thomas's Church lies east, and St. Mary's Cemetery and Osney Mill west of the railway havoc. The rest is meadow and garden land, scored with the streets of old and new settlements, and cracked by lesser dykes and courses of the stream.

The eastern branch, after defining the upper rim of the ewer, turns sharp southwards, and, keeping company with the canal, skirts red Oxford and Worcester Gardens. It is here that its interest begins. A little way above the first, or Hythe Bridge, a fresh division takes place, and a narrow irregular strip of low island is formed, running under three bridges to the Castle Mill, and below that occupied by breweries for some hundred yards. Now it is only on the upper stretch of this island down to the Castle Mill that any attempt is made by the town to come to public and pleasant terms with its river. The attempt is a shy one. The treatment is on a humbler scale than that of the River Witham at Lincoln. The Fishers Row of low houses--some new, some old, and one or two remarkable--straggles along a narrow quay, arched over by the bridges. In the doubled stream, where it fronts the houses, fleets of old punts lie moored to their poles among the choking weeds; not the varnished toys of the Cherwell, but the craft native to these shallow standing waters, as the gondola to the lagoons of Venice. At the back of the houses, their gardens abutting upon it in all variety of confusion and decay, moves a furtive and even feebler stream. There is a wealth of matter here for the artist to rescue from its odours; grey walls that have seen better days and other uses, bricks rough-cast and timber, willow leaves and fluttering clothes, the most old and various dirt. All this is only to be won by glimpses from the bridges, or from the hospitality of back pigsties and the like; and it is only just to add that the tenants of this picturesque quarter--people, pigs, and ducks--show to the curious visitor an unvarying courtesy. The best bit was till lately to be seen from Pacey's Bridge, the second in order down stream. Just there a house is bracketed out over the water, with windows disposed in graceful bays. But the jealousy that keeps the stream secret has shut away that last easy view, on the one side with a shop astride the water, on the other with a mere wilful screen. Hythe Bridge is a poor new thing; Pacey's Bridge is defaced with a new top. The next bridge brings us to the Castle and the Castle Mill, the very heart of the old town; the Castle older than the University, the Mill of older foundation than the Castle. Then follow breweries, not without charm, but reticent about the river. Just below the Swan Brewery the streams come together again at a point marked by a summer-house; but it is only for a fresh separation. From a garden in Chapel Place may be seen the point of division; but one branch is now built over. Its name is the Trill Mill Stream, and it runs behind Paradise Square, and round by way of Rose Place, across St. Aldate's. Then it comes to light again behind the houses, and skirts Christ Church Meadows, to join the river near Folly Bridge. The other branch takes a stealthy course round the low quarter between Paradise Square and the gasworks. They are least ashamed of it in Abbey Place. From that point onward it shows at the end of poor little streets, with meadows and willows beyond. From one of these--Blackfriars Road--a bridge crosses to the bathing-cut, which rounds the base of our ewer, and leads into the navigation stream. At the tail of an island formed by the cut the navigation stream itself comes in, and the united water bends round the gasworks, and so to Folly Bridge, past some broken little gardens and backs of houses in Thames Street. Folly Bridge is as poor as the other Thames bridges in Oxford. It replaces the old Norman _Grand Pont_ with its forty arches, and Friar Bacon's Study over the further end. A top storey added to the "Study" was the "Folly." There is another now almost in the same spot, built by a money-lender.

Of the navigation stream in its course from Medley Weir there is less to say. At the neck of the ewer, at the point called Four Streams, it goes so far as to form a regular cross. One of the arms is the cut already mentioned running towards Worcester. The opposite arm is known as the Old Navigation Stream, and runs out in a great loop under the Binsey Road and the Seven Bridges Road at New Botley, and back to the present navigation stream at the base of the ewer. A smaller concentric loop leaves the stream at the first bridge beyond the station, throws off a branch to join the outer loop at the Binsey Road bridge, and returns at Osney Mill. Here, just by the mill, there is a lock on the navigation stream. The island formed by the mill-stream and the lock runs down a hundred yards or so, and on the face of the island, made by the loop above, there is a meaner repetition of the Fishers Row. It may clear the maze a little to think of the two mills and islands, and quays balancing on opposite sides of the ewer.

But this is not all. We have still to account for a stream that left the Thames at Hagley Pool, above Godstow. From that point it describes a yet wider loop, passing first by Witham, then under the Seven Bridges Road at Botley, and on by the two Hinkseys. At Clasper's Boathouse under the Long Bridges it is reinforced by a fresh offset from the main stream, and does not return again till just above Rose Island by Kennington. The old men on the river have been heard to say that this branch from Clasper's to Kennington used to be the main stream for barges, and it is quite possible, for the Long Bridges and new towpath only date from the end of last century. The Hinksey Stream is not navigable throughout, because of two mills on its lower reaches. The low Cumnor Heights behind make a limit to the wandering and division of the water; but the whole flat between this boundary on the west and that of the Oxford Canal on the east is an amphibious country, now lake, now labyrinth.

It will have been observed how little the obscure region of the river we have traversed has to do with the University of our time. One is invited to think how the river of Oxford has come to be treated so; why the colleges shun it and give it over to railways and slums. And again, if one regards the college quarter with any attention, one is forced to ask by what steps the plan of building and habit of life we know as a college came to be as it is out of the old Benedictine conventual schools. What were the links of building between St. Frideswide's and Merton, and what has become of them?

The answer to the first question, and partly to the second, is that a more magnificent and more richly significant Oxford than the present once occupied the isle of Osney and the river quarter now so degraded;[1] but all that proper fortune of the river, all that beauty and history, has been incredibly blotted out, leaving only its first and last links in St. Frideswide's and Worcester, together with a few names and inconsiderable fragments. The buildings of Oxford are a story whose mutilated preface is followed by a great gap where the opening chapters should be. A line here and there marks the interval, and when the tale is taken up again it is abruptly and in a changed temper. Quickly it runs to a fluent mannerism that makes a great bulk of the text. Then it proceeds in a classical version till the time when our own century began to spell and imitate the archaic forms.

The town before the University is better represented than the following period by its castle and parish churches. The ancient St. Frideswide's remains as Christ Church. But greater churches than St. Frideswide's, one of them, that of the Franciscans, twice as long, have been taken clean away, and not a stone remains to stand for the Dominican and Franciscan houses that moulded the early University. We must give a little space to this, and to another missing chapter, and then briefly read the rest of the story.

When the two great mendicant orders arrived early in the thirteenth century, there was already, besides the old foundation of St. Frideswide, at that time a house of Austin canons, the great monastic foundation of Osney, dating from early Norman times. In its church, over the tomb of the foundress Edith, English wife of the second lord of the Castle, was painted a tree full of chattering pies, whose voice assailed her in her walks. Her confessor knew them for souls in Purgatory, and the canons were installed to pray for them. By the time the friars came to Oxford the chattering souls were perhaps as much thought of as are the souls of those killed in the French wars of the fifteenth century by the Fellows of All Souls College now. At the Dissolution the great Abbey Church had a chance of safety. For a short time it was the cathedral church of the new diocese of Oxford. But that fortune passed to St. Frideswide's, and no one translated Osney Abbey into a college. All that is left of it now is an archway and part of a barn among the buildings of the Mill.

The two great orders of friars settled finally near one another on opposite sides of the Trill Mill Stream. The Dominicans were first in the field, and for a time encamped near the schools and the Jewry, with designs on both. They built a hospital for converted Jews, which afterwards was used as the Town Hall, and it is on record that at one time they had two Jews in the _Domus Conversorum_, but one of them, an acolyte, afterwards suffered a relapse. Soon, however, the friars migrated to the damp riverside, as a place more favourable to rheumatism and ague, just as in London they went from Holborn to Blackfriars. It was the happiest fact that the mendicant orders coming to towns in their young and ascetic days settled in outcast and uninviting quarters, and covered them, as they grew in riches, with pleasant gardens and splendid buildings. But the Black Friars of Oxford, like those of London, are only remembered now by names of streets, and of that bend of the river by the gasworks still known as Preachers' Pool.

The Grey Friars are even more completely gone. The Paradise given them by a pious lady has given its name to a square, but the groves and buildings of the Minorites have not even left a name to the streets that have replaced them. There must be many of the friars still below ground in their coffins; in the courtyards behind the dismal streets there are glimpses of provoking walls, but with no speaking stones; and in the wall that divides the garden of Trinity from Parks Street lie many old stones incognito, brought from the quarry of the Friars Preachers and the Friars Minor.

The White Friars, or Carmelites, had no better fate. Edward II., flying from Bannockburn with his Carmelite confessor, vowed a house to Our Lady of the White Friars if he should cross the Border in safety. To redeem the vow he gave over his palace of Beaumont to the Carmelites. Beaumont Street runs through the site. Some of the stones are in Laud's new quad at St. John's.

Of another great house a small witness remains. Above Hythe Bridge, the way by Fishers Row is continued from the tip of the eyot across a little bridge, and thence runs for a space alongside an ancient wall. This was a boundary wall of Rewley Abbey, the great house of the order of Citeaux. Almost covered by the wood stores of a wheelwright is a doorway with carved spandrils, and a label ending in sculptured heads. The wheelwrights, whose sheds lean against the old wall, show a wooden peak, the last vestige of a "summer-house" lately pulled down. Only the other day they came upon a well in the garden behind. The London and North-Western Station occupies the site of the chief buildings. Before it was put up the remains were considerable. Rewley and Osney Abbeys between them accounted for most of the Osney island.

But the most speaking memorial of this lost University is that side of Worcester that still remains of old Gloucester Hall. Benedictine novices, from the many houses of the order scattered over England, were numerous among the early students of Oxford. The Benedictines were rich, and there were few University endowments. Gloucester Hall was the house founded in 1283 for those of the novices who came from Gloucester Abbey. Then other Benedictine abbeys had houses built alongside the first for their own students, till twenty-five abbeys were represented. Others in the same way sent their men to Buckingham College, Cambridge. Over the doorways of the halls still standing at Worcester may be seen the escutcheons of their several abbeys; the griffin of Malmesbury, the cross of Norwich.

The house of the fourth great mendicant order, the Austin Friars, has disappeared as completely as the other three. On its site, in the reign of James I., Wadham College was built, but the phrase "doing Austins" long survived as a memory of the University exercises that took place in the Austin Schools.

The friars of the Order of the Redemption of Captives have left as little sign. Their property is part of the garden of New College.

But some of the houses of the Regular Orders, besides Gloucester Hall, remain in a translation. The College of the Novices from the Convent of Durham is the old part of Trinity. St. Mary's College of the Regular Canons has left a gateway opposite New Inn Hall, and the latest-founded of the religious houses, that of St. Bernard for the Cistercians, still shows in the street with some changes as the front of St. John's.

We have to think, then, of the Oxford of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as chiefly made up of the schools of the Regular and Mendicant Orders, afterwards suppressed. The Colleges of the third class, the Secular Clergy, were only beginning; the prevailing influence was that of the Dominican and Franciscan teachers, particularly the latter, with their Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus and Occam, to set off against the Aquinas and Albertus of the Parisian Dominicans. At the time of the Dissolution the numbers and spirit of the various religious houses had run very low. However, they made a push to extend their buildings, hoping so to ensure their wealth against the Royal Commission, just as the Colleges did in our own time. But Henry VIII. seems, in most cases, to have made for the lead from the roofs of the buildings as his own share of the spoil, and the later additions with their flat lead roofing would just meet his taste. The walls he sold or gave to others, who used them chiefly as quarries. A letter quoted by Mr. Fletcher, written to Thomas Cromwell by one of his agents, gives a good notion of the look of things at the time, and of the spirit of the reformers:-"The Black Fryers bathe in ther backsyde lykwise dyvers Ilonds well woddyd and conteyneth in lengith a great ground. There quere wasse lately new byldede and covered with ledde. It ys lykewisse a bigge Howse, and all coveryd with slatt, saving the queere. They have prety store of plate and juellys, and specially there ys a gudd chales of golde sett with stonys, and ys better than a C marks: and there ys also a gudd crosse with other things conteynyd in the bill. Ther ornaments be olde and of small valor. They have a very fayer Cundytt and ronnyth fresshelye. Ther be butt X. Fryers, being Prests besid the Anker, which is a well-disposyd man, and have 1. marks yerly of the King's cofers."

Now we turn to the reaction against all this; to the quarter of the University that remains, the quarter of the old town parishes in which the Halls and Colleges of the secular clergy grew.

And first we feel the Gothic pattern of the streets. We have left the water behind, but the streams had to do in determining the flow of the "stream-like" streets. They kept the forms they were pressed into by the castle and city walls; St. Giles's bursting out wide from the point where the old north gate cramped it by St. Michael's; Broad Street broad because just outside the circuit; the rest winding and twisting with the happiest effects for the jostling buildings.

Then when we look closer at this large mass of Gothic work, of great establishments squeezed into the old shapes, and elbowing scanty strips and corners of the displaced houses, the notable point about most of the work is, not how old, but how new it is. The Gothic is late, even belated. Little of it is earlier than the Perpendicular Period; much of it is more recent still, and of a kind to which purists grudge even the name of Gothic. It is true that in Oxford buildings, when made of local stone not cunningly laid, become shabby and theatrically aged in the shortest time. They look not venerable, but battered and burned, the stone hanging in rags, and leaving where it falls raw yellow patches. Mouldings and carvings drop away; pinnacles, battlements, and gables, and all outstanding features, thaw like blackened snow; walls are suddenly found wasted and thin, the rooms and towers depending on the merest crust of stone. The heads about the Sheldonian Theatre shed their beards of a rainy night. But all this is a very sham antiquity. Some of the later buildings suffer from it most, and some of the oldest look, and are, newest because of sedulous restoration. One has to search diligently for hints of the older work, and to entrap it as it looks out of its new body in some favourable light.

It is the churches, the parish churches and the towers of St. Frideswide's and St. Mary's, that seem most to promise age in a distant prospect, and to strike a recurrent note of antiquity as one goes about the town. The old Town Church of St. Martin at Carfax, with its picturesque altered gables and clock and "penniless bench," is much wanted; but it was pulled down inconsiderately and rebuilt in haste. But St. Peter's, St. Michael's, St. Mary Magdalen's, and St. Giles's, are rich in beauty and interest. The lovely spire of St. Mary's, panelled with pomegranates for Queen Eleanor, stands almost alone of the old University Church. There is, indeed, on the north of the chancel, and set at a divergent angle, a yet older building--the two-storeyed Ancient House of Congregation. Its two storeys simulate on the outer side the appearance of one to conform with the new church, but the groined roof remains of the lower room, now half-buried and given to lumber. This and the old church were the real centre of the University. In the five chapels the regents of the five faculties assembled for the Act at which disputations were held and degrees given. Not only the Schools and Theatre and Convocation House, but the University Library, too, hived off from these buildings. The first books were kept in chests in the "soler," or upper room, and there, too, those other chests were stored that were the earliest form of University endowment. In them the money left by benefactors was kept, and lent out to poor students, who in return pawned books and daggers and other articles of value.

The colleges began as a counterpoise to the schools of the regular and mendicant orders, more particularly the latter. The friars, learned and powerful, naturally drew to them great numbers of the poor unattached scholars. Statutes ineffectually made eighteen years the lowest age of consent. The University had a hard fight to keep even its degrees in its own hands. This third great body of scholars, unattached to monks or friars, consisted of the ordinary or secular clergy, men qualifying not merely for the work of parish priests, but for what are now the lay professions of lawyer and doctor. They had a bad time of it while the friars were still popular. They had few endowments, and were forced to labour for a living, or to beg their way. It was common for poor scholars to serve as scouts. They lived either in private lodgings or in the numerous private Halls, Inns, or Hostels that covered the sites of the present colleges. Those are the second obliterated chapter among university buildings. They were simply lodging-houses, rented from the owner by a Master of Arts, who was styled Principal. By an early statute, that marks the encroachment of the University on the town, the owner of the hall was bound to let it to the first applicant who deposited the needful caution with the Vice-Chancellor. The Principal was paid by the inmates for board and tuition. The first colleges were such halls, furnished with an endowment for poor scholars, and with a set of statutes to regulate its administration. At first the scholars went to service at the nearest parish church; but gradually, as funds allowed, chapel and hall and library were built, and the familiar front with its gate-tower screened the old and new buildings. The full-grown College, as it had taken shape before the times of the Reformation and rich lay undergraduates, was a society incorporated for the benefit of poor scholars of the secular order. Its buildings replaced the single Hall or group of Halls that had been converted from private to corporate use, or else the old tenements were recast in the new mould. That new mould followed with modifications the plan of the monastic houses.

Some of these Halls still remain. But the form of university life they represented, and to a great extent the buildings themselves, have gone as completely as the Oxford of the Religious. The colleges swallowed most of them. New College accounts for ten, Merton for eight. From old prints one can gain a notion of the splendid jumble of gables and chimneys of all degrees of dignity that enriched the streets; and one is tempted to regret that some of the colleges gave up the picturesque grouping and domestic style of the clustered halls for the more monotonous and pretentious manner of their latter shape. As Henry suppressed the religious houses, so Laud suppressed the private halls, leaving five only as academic halls. Of these, one--Magdalen Hall--has left its beautiful bell-tower to Magdalen College, and its second site to Hertford. Of the rest, three are now absorbed in colleges.

The great date in college history is 1264, when Walter de Merton gave statutes to the college he had founded. University Hall, afterwards University College, had already been founded from a legacy administered by the University. But in Merton the idea of a great college was first clearly struck out, and its statutes were an exemplar for all succeeding societies both at Oxford and Cambridge. Merton, however was not built in one heat. The old quad and parts of the chapel are early work, but the tower and other parts are later. The chapel is so large, because it is not only chapel to the college, but church to the parish of St. John, a great part of which the college absorbs. The library is one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most ancient rooms in Oxford.

Balliol and Exeter, Oriel and Queen's, are also early colleges, but they do not stand for so much historically. They group with Merton, and have all changed their first bodily shape. The next great moment in the college history, the beginning of a new group, comes about a hundred years after Merton. This was the foundation of the College of St. Mary Winton--called New from a sense of the importance of the event--by William Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. Several things are important about this great creation. To begin with, the foundation was of a new magnificence. It provided for seventy scholars, a term at that time synonymous with fellows. There was a stronger accent about it of opposition to the regular clergy. Its lands were bought from impoverished monastic bodies. It was made self-sufficient by its nursery and counterpart in architecture, the College of St. Mary at Winchester. It was saved from the jurisdiction of the University by the power granted it of giving degrees, and from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese Oxford then lay, by the appointment of the Bishop of Winchester as its Visitor. But above all, not only was the plan of its institution a great educational achievement, but the building itself was by the same author, the work of a man of genius, coherent and complete. The quadrangle has been altered out of all knowledge by the addition of the third storey with battlements, and the re-shaping of the windows, but even so it shares with the added wings of the garden front a wonderful dignity and purity. The original towers are so dominant everywhere that one reads their spirit into the encumbered translation.

The stroke told. Henry VI. echoed the idea in Eton and King's College, Cambridge. In Oxford, the chapel and cloisters of Chichele's All Souls' were imitated from New College. But a richer reverberation followed. Waynflete's Magdalen is another New more magnificent, and later by a hundred years. It is not more beautiful. Feature by feature is reproduced, with just that luxury of virtue and grace that one would expect from Mary the Magdalen walking in the footsteps of Mary the Virgin. The chapels are planned alike, and in either college set back to back with the hall. Magdalen has a cloister quad, a more spacious one; a higher and richer tower, wider and more lordly grounds. But one can turn from the baffling and haunting charm of Magdalen Tower to be satisfied with the simple fighting tower of New College; and it is dangerous to go from the blackened walls and gaunt arches, the austerely divided daylight of the cloistered walk at New College, to the coarser forms and less single purpose of the other. The older cloister is still the walk of a recluse, overlooked only by the tower and gable of the chapel, and interrupted by rare and funeral writing on the walls. The other is built in an easier temper. Staircases open upon it below, and many windows occupy it above. It is the covered thoroughfare of the College.

It should be remembered, however, that Magdalen cloisters have suffered much. They have been pulled down almost throughout and rebuilt. An upper storey has gone from the north side, ugly Westmorland slate has replaced the grey Stonesfield kind, and windows have been made bigger and more regular. Historically it is to be noted that Magdalen superseded a collegiate building of another kind, the old hospital or almshouse of St. John the Baptist. The stone pulpit in St. John's Quad marks this. On the saint's day a sermon used to be preached from the pulpit, and the quad was strewn with rushes and hung with boughs to represent a wilderness. At last a Principal caught his death of cold by going out into the wilderness, so they gave it up, and had the sermon in chapel instead. There was some grudging show made of keeping up the almshouse. A low vault under a chapel was given over to the poor. A report was drawn up for the year 1596 giving the following cheerful particulars:--"In sommer the resort is greater, in winter very smale, bycause of the coldnes and onwholesomenes of the vault; which is in verie deed so moyst and dampish that we have the last yeare removed the beddes into another house not far of, for that everie winter they are subject to rottennes." However, they were going to repair the floor "as well for the safetie of our beddes as for the health and ease of the poore."[2]

The building of the old quad of Lincoln went on by stages during this same fifteenth century, and Corpus followed early in the next. Neither of these has been rebuilt, but both have been defaced so as to lose almost all interest; but they stand for points in history. Lincoln was a college of priests, to make head against Lollardry; Corpus stood for Greek.

Then follows the notable foundation of Wolsey's Cardinal College, afterwards Christchurch. All Souls' had been founded with the spoil of "alien" priories--cells, that is, of foreign monasteries in England. Magdalen had taken the place of a religious society; but the final step was taken when English religious houses were suppressed to form one great educational foundation. St. Frideswide's was preserved to be its chapel. The huge ungainly quad was planned out and partly built. After the suppression of religious houses stone was cheap, so the building went on even after Wolsey's fall. The Tom Tower was added much later. It is one of Wren's essays in Gothic, masterful and striking in general design, but unfeeling in detail. The fan-vaulted roof of the hall staircase is a lovely piece of later work, but the staircase itself is badly managed. The cathedral is a rather disconcerted building; but there is plenty in it to study and enjoy. The story of the saint may be read in a window by Mr. Burne Jones. Other four windows by the same artist were executed by Mr. Morris, with the result that in colour as well as in design they rank with the best of old workmanship, and can be compared with nothing new, except those from the same hands in other places.

If New and Magdalen stand for the enriching sunset of Gothic in Oxford, the great group of buildings that follows the Reformation stands for a strange and prolonged after-glow of the art. It is this period that more than any other belongs to Oxford, gives it a peculiar character. Nowhere else is it so largely represented. The Renaissance, coming all this way, was too weak and distressed to create forms of architecture quite its own; but it passed as a principle of change into the veins of the old style, and broke out here and there in the strangest features. The main ideas of the Gothic structure held their own--the sloping roof, the traceried window; but a languor and a fever seized upon the mouldings and details of the old work. At any moment the sedate lines of the Perpendicular tracery might run wild into twirls of trivial scroll-work, or one whole side of a building speak a sleepy Gothic and another stammer the queerest Greek. But the whole seldom fails to please, because it is ordered throughout by the most sure and delicate sense of proportion. It is the work of men whose hand is well in, whose ideas are running few and thin, but are dealt out and recombined with the utmost freedom and familiarity. One is often blankly disappointed by the flatness, the poverty, the childishness of the decoration; but however meagre and thoughtless and alien the elements of the design may be, there never fails an artistic sense in the way they are set out, so that the most incongruous lendings of various styles meet and are subdued to perfect comfort in one another's company. Perhaps the salt that saves the whole is the sense of humour that pervades it, just as it does the rich enjoyed sentences of the contemporary literature. The buildings do not expect to be taken quite seriously; the figures on the tombs are very much at play with death. Sometimes, indeed, the windows of grave buildings like the chapel of Wadham stiffen out into the older and more decorous manner; but it would be hard to match for rollicking irresponsibility the porch that Laud added to St. Mary's Church.

Colour, too, was near the heart of the builders. They revelled in gilding, in paint, in marbles and alabaster. And in the weighty matters of architecture that go beyond the mere building, in the recognition of its neighbourhood, of its place as a mass in the streets or a kindly growth among fields and trees, they were very much at home. The presence of such buildings is one of comfort, of fun, of flexible tradition and generous possibilities. The style begins at Oxford under Elizabeth, and continues under Charles; but it centres under James, and hence is conveniently called Jacobean. Not only university and college buildings belong to it, but most of the beautiful domestic work of the streets, like Archbishop King's house off St. Aldate's, and the house off the High, used as a police-office.

It was in a building of the Jacobean time that the University idea first found adequate expression, gathered out of the scattered lodgings in which it had been housed. Already, by 1480, a noble room had been built for the Divinity school, with the library of Duke Humphrey above it. Sir Thomas Bodley's first act was to give this library a new roof and fittings, and to add to it at right angles the building that forms above an extension of the library, below the Proscholium or ambulatory of the schools. It was the day after his funeral, in the year 1613, that the first stone was laid of his magnificent plan for completing the quadrangle, of which the Proscholium forms one side. This quadrangle is a plan or map of the University's theory of knowledge. As one enters under the gateway tower the scholastic sciences announce themselves in gold letters above the various doors. The faculties--the faculty of Arts with its subdivision into the Trivium and Quadrivium, the faculties of Canon and Civil Law and of Medicine lead up to the fifth and crowning faculty, the science of sciences, Divinity, lodged behind the richly-panelled front of the Proscholium. Before this, the faculty of Arts had been housed in the thirty-two schools that gave their name to Schools Street. In these the Regents, that is the young M.A.'s, the ruling and teaching body of the University, gave lectures and sat, at stated times, to determine in the disputations that preceded, as examinations do now, the B.A. degree. The public viva voce in the schools is the remnant of this formal exhibition of logical skill. The disputant went round to solicit the presence of his friends, and statutes were passed to restrain the system of touting for an audience as well as to limit the regular supper that followed. At Cambridge it was the duty of the Bedells to go round to the various colleges and halls where the questionists were, and "call or give warninge in the middest of the courte with thees words: 'Alons, alons, goe, Mrs., goe, goe,'" and any tendency to a real viva voce was rudely checked by the same officer. "If the Father shall uppon his Chyldren's aunswer replie and make an Argument, then the Bedel shall knocke him out"--which seems to have meant that he hammered loudly on the door.[3] The Act, or public contest of degrees, still took place in St. Mary's, till the Sheldonian Theatre completed the new group of the schools in 1669. The new Convocation House, with the Selden Library above, had already been added in 1640 at the further end of the Divinity school. About the same time as the new schools Wadham College had been built. Complete at the outset, it is remarkable among Oxford buildings for its singleness and symmetry of design, and its skill of building or fortune of stone; it is one of the most ancient of the colleges in the sense that it is authentic.

The rebuilt University College and Oriel and the new Jesus may be grouped together. They have in common the beautiful treatment of the upper windows as a series of little gables in place of the tiresome screen of battlements. The front of Jesus is a modern disguise, the clever but unsympathetic work of Mr. Buckler. It replaces the old Elizabethan front with its gateway in the fashion of the beautiful one of St. Alban's Hall. The Jesus gate, however, had been obscured by a heavy rusticated screen. Brasenose gained in the Jacobean Period its exquisite dormer windows; Lincoln its homely second quad and lovely chapel. Another fine example is the hall and chapel of St. Mary Hall. In Merton four of the five orders of the Schools Tower were reproduced. The chief author of all this work was a Thomas Holt of York. Among his followers were the brothers Bentley, and Acroide, Oxford builders. A greater name is associated with the new quad of St. John's. In this Inigo Jones was mastered by the genius of the place, and constrained to build the wonderful garden front. Inside the quad he had his own way in the colonnades, but he was more in character still when he designed the Danvers Gateway of the new Physic Garden, and plotted its wall and walks. Here, at last, in a quiet corner of the place, where science was beginning in a gentle way to stir, the English Gothic tradition of building was fairly broken, and the key struck of the manner that in the end of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century gave Oxford its sturdy and picturesque English Classic. Soon after, the troubled times of the Civil War, the rather farcical, but disastrous siege of Oxford, "leaving no face of a University," and the subsequent spoiling of the colleges by the Puritans, must have served very effectually to snap the chain of building tradition, and make a blank for the new ideas.

When the strange holiday time was over, and the University was in a frame for building again, the period of Wren and of his school began. The Chapel of Brasenose, built under the Commonwealth, marks the point when the relations of the mixed styles were becoming too strained. The Sheldonian Theatre announces the rupture. It is in Wren's happiest manner. There is no building where the audience is more artfully disposed so as itself to be a great part of the architecture. This was followed by various buildings of the school of Wren. He revised Bathurst's design for Trinity Chapel, though he clearly thought it a bad job, and he is said to have had a hand in Hawksmoor's work at Queen's and All Souls. Certainly the robust screen and gateway of the Queen's front are not unworthy of him. Aldrich's All Saints' Church and Peckwater Quad at Christ Church belong to the early eighteenth century. The last great building in this manner is Gibbs's Radcliffe Library. It gives the University a comfortable centre as only a dome can, and counts for quite half in any distant view of Oxford buildings.

The rest of the eighteenth century has nothing very notable to show. Hawksmoor, in his nightmare buildings at All Souls', had proved how dead Gothic was. A good deal of Classic went up, the work of academic amateurs, dabbling in Vitruvius and Palladio. But one holds one's breath till the period is well over. Dilettanti among the dons travelled to Italy and came back terribly ashamed of their barbarous Oxford. It is a matter for thankful wonder that all the old buildings were not replaced by Palladian colleges. The clean sweep of old Queen's and of the mass of buildings that made way for the Radcliffe, must have tempted many a common room. Hawksmoor actually prepared a design for a brand-new Classic Brasenose, with four domes and a High Street front. Magdalen had the narrowest escape. A Mr. Holdsworth, a Fellow of the College, "an amiable man and a good scholar," returned from a sojourn in Rome full of enlightenment. His first scheme was to pull down the whole building, tower and all; but he had to give up the tower chapel and hall, and content himself with the destruction of the cloister quad. However, he began his scheme with the New Buildings on unoccupied ground, and somehow it was not carried further; so the great new quad, with its three colonnades, remained on paper.

But in 1771 the University set itself to a wider change. The rough unpaved streets in which the buildings were rooted like trees, the island markets that blocked the traffic, the narrow rambling bridges, and above all, the North Gate or Bocardo by St. Michael's, and the East Gate above Magdalen, hurt the best feelings of dons dreaming of vistas and piazzas. The place, besides, was no doubt very dark and dirty. An Act of Parliament was obtained for cleaning, lighting, and paving the town, removing gates and other obstructions, building markets, and repairing or rebuilding Magdalen Bridge. So Oxford became convenient and lost half its pictorial effect. The old bridge over the Cherwell at Magdalen was everything that a good bridge can be without being convenient. It had a chequered course of six hundred feet over land and water, leaping the water in a series of arches of different height and width just as was necessary; occupied by houses and shops where it crossed the land; and throwing out, at irregular intervals, angular bays of varying width and projection. But in some places it was as narrow as thirteen feet, some of the arches were ruinous, and the city and county were responsible for the repair of different parts, which they both appear to have left alone. So it had to come down. The new bridge, as well as the market and other changes, was the work of an engineer named Gwyn. His bridge kept something of the old picturesqueness, though in a formal way. It had the same places to go over; a circular bay in the centre stood for the old angles; and the lines at either end swept out in graceful curves. But people were very angry because it was so narrow and high. The roadway was afterwards heightened to reduce the pitch of the bridge, the parapet was lowered, and in our own time the width has been doubled for the convenience of trams. Old St. Clement's Church, too, has gone from the road on the further side, and has been rebuilt in another place and manner in full view of every one who crosses the bridge.

Many of the old houses had been shorn away in the process of widening the streets; but some people were not satisfied. The old Gothic buildings had begun to command a certain zeal without knowledge; but people disliked the Gothic pattern of the streets, and the irregular patches of domestic buildings. They wanted to have things cleaned up, and made regular; to have "views;" to see the great buildings in solitary distance with no interference from house-roofs or trees, a thing that very few buildings in the world can stand. An interesting evidence of this state of mind is a little book by a certain rector of Lincoln, Dr. Tatham. It was he who defaced the old quad of his college with stupid battlements and other changes. He is remembered by Mr. Cox as an old gentleman, who lived out of Oxford, but might be seen landing his pigs in the market-place on Saturdays, and who, in defence of the faith and the Three Witnesses, in the University pulpit, wished all the "Jarmans" at the bottom of the "Jarman" Ocean. The book is called "Oxonia Explicata et Ornata: Proposals for Disengaging and Beautifying the University and City of Oxford." The buildings of Oxford, he thought, were "too crowded and engaged. Our forefathers seem to have consulted petty convenience and monastic reclusiveness, while they neglected that uniformity of Design which is indispensable to elegance, and that grandeur of Approach which adds half the delight. If the Colleges and Public Edifices of this place were drawn apart from each other, and dispersed through the extent of a thousand acres, so that each might enjoy the situation a man of genius would approve, we might boast," &c. He prefixes to the book a little design of his own for a martyr's memorial, "a triumphant monument to be placed across Broad Street, the whole so airy as very little to obstruct the view of the buildings." Of this design one may say that it would have been much more interesting than the Eleanor Cross of Sir Gilbert Scott.

This cross of Scott's was one of the first new works at Oxford of the Gothic revival. Wyatt and others had already worked at what they called restoration, and Pugin's gateway, lately removed, had been set up at Magdalen the year before. Oxford has suffered its full share of buildings that were the costly grammatical exercises of men learning a dead tongue. In architecture such exercises are more expensive and obtrusive than in any other art, and it will be long perhaps before people will have the courage and sacrifice to pull them down again. Some are merely learned and lifeless, like Buckler's Magdalen School and Jesus, and Scott's Chapel of Exeter. Others are hopeless, sullen blocks, like Scott's extensions of Exeter and New College, and Butterfield's new buildings at Merton. Others are fancifully bad, like the conscientious ugliness of the Museum, and the _recherché_ ugliness of Balliol, and the mixture of both in the Meadow Buildings of Christ Church. Butterfield in Balliol Chapel and Keble College shows a great power of geometrical invention in form and colour, an invention for the most part greatly astray. It is refreshing among all this to come upon the strong, though wayward artistic temperament of Burges in the decoration of the hall and chapel of Worcester, or even the respectable classic Taylorian buildings of Cockerell, unpleasant in colour and jarring on the spirit of the place as they are.

Very different work has been done of late years. There is less about it of defiant expression of undesirable artistic personality, or pedantic exhibition of a style--more recognition of the power of the place, more actual artistic instinct. Even the much abused Indian Institute of Champneys, in spite of the heavy frivolity of its details and interior, is, in the disposition of the wall and window space, the invention of its tower, and the way the whole building takes its place in the picture, a piece of architecture, which such things as Balliol are not. The space of blank wall on its corner tower is worth more than all the geometrical troubles that fret the face of Keble. At Magdalen, again, the genius of the old buildings has been lovingly reproduced by Mr. Bodley in the new. His tower is not good, and it was carrying faithfulness too far to reproduce the stupid gargoyles and grotesques of the original; but much of the rich decoration in wood and stone is refined in design and workmanship. One can praise, too, the extension of St. John's. It may be said of all the new Oxford buildings that they are apt to be heavy within, owing a good deal to the fear of fire that makes all the staircases of stone.

But there is an architect who has taken up the tale where Thomas Holt dropped it, and who has carried it farther, with results almost as important for the appearance of Oxford. A like moment in the history of the place seemed to have come round again. The new ways of the University needed new schools--for examination this time instead of disputation--and a great extension of college building coincided. Never, perhaps, since Wren had the churches of London to rebuild has one architect had such a fling in so important a place as Mr. T. G. Jackson in the Oxford of our time. And there can be no question that, whatever the faults of restlessness and overcrowding that sometimes mar his designs, Mr. Jackson has been worthy of his opportunity.

The last great addition to Oxford is its undergraduates. It is not very long since the colleges, in respect of undergraduates, were normally as All Souls' is now, with its four Bible Clerks; but they were not as All Souls' is in respect of its Fellows. The long deserts of theological and political war had left them for the most part mere club-houses, whose members existed to drink port together of an evening, and abuse one another in little pamphlets during the day. The Common Room was the great invention of the late seventeenth century, and the eighteenth was spent in bringing it to perfection. Then came the Fellows of Oriel, the Examination Statutes, the genius of the Masters of Balliol, the Commission, the new Statutes, the Unattached. It is an exciting show for the visitor, this incongruous surface of new and old, this great bustle and pulse of the machine among the frail and crumbling walls. Each morning dilatory tides of men in cap and gown set about the streets under the jangling bells; each afternoon, in punctual haste, a steady stream of the same men, in flannel, makes for the river, and flows back for the monastic evensong and refectory dinner. There was a time when the dinner-hour was ten o'clock in the morning, and it was thought that so late an hour was a sign of the decay of learning.

Meanwhile the streets grow emptier, and the visitor, in the abstraction of the growing darkness, will gather hints of the antiquity about him. He will see the society grimace of the buildings relax. Their features will relapse into startling meanings, and the presence of other centuries will strike in upon his senses. If he is an American, like Mr. James's _Passionate Pilgrim_, he will feel about it all the pang of a forfeited possession. It is part of himself that was lost and is found, a history forgotten long before he was born. Now he remembers it.

Nowhere is midnight so late as in Oxford. It is announced from so many towers at so many moments by bells of the most various tone and cadence; but by all, even to the most maundering and belated, with the same precise conviction, as if one could hear all the lecturers saying the same thing in their own words--_It is midnight here, now_. And faint and loud another and another awakes and insists, _It is midnight here, now_. Through the middle clamour the chime of St. Mary's drops down three pathetic steps and climbs up through the same intervals. The University is older by another hour.

The great deed of the new undergraduates was the discovery of the river. In the early years of the century it was still only a place for fishing in; occasionally a heavy tub was rowed down to Nuneham. Bell-ringing had gone out as an exercise; cricket was the game of one exclusive club; the nearest approach to a healthy rivalry between the colleges was a competition between New College and All Souls' in making negus. New College won by putting in no water. It was not till 1837 that the old boats had their sides cut down. About ten years later outriggers came in, and after another ten, keelless boats. Another ten brought sliding seats from America, and so the skiff and the four and the eight reached their perfect economy of construction, and the quality of beauty they share with their counterpart, the bicycle, on land. Both bicycle and skiff are extensions of the human machine within such limits that they remain as it were mere developed limbs working at every moment as parts of one balancing frame, projections of the person.

In 1839 the University Boat Club was started, and the great Oxford school of rowing shot up to overshadow the older faculties. Before this time college racing had begun on the admirable bumping system, that not only makes the race a prolonged spectacle for those who stand still to see, but allows of so much spirit of body in those who run by their college boat. At first the boats started out of Iffley Lock. The stroke of each boat, as its turn came, ran down the thwarts pushing out, and the next boat followed as soon as he cleared the lock.

The river between Oxford and Abingdon in its present shape is a sort of free canal, locked at Iffley and Sandford, and again just above Abingdon. There used to be a lock at Nuneham, but it was taken down. More recently, too, the Folly Bridge Lock was carried away, and has not been replaced. The history of the river as a work of art is a long and interesting one. Obstructions to its natural course, and to its navigation, began with mills and mill-weirs. In early charters there are provisions for removing "gorees, mills, wears, stanks, stakes, and kiddles." Commissions and Acts of Parliament tinkered at the navigation, but till the end of the eighteenth century no progress was made beyond the old mill-weir, with sluices in it to let the boats through. This arrangement was called a "flash" lock. The flashing emptied the reach of the river above the lock, but all the water was needed to move the heavy barge sticking on the "gulls" below. Navigation was of course terribly slow. A bargeman had sometimes to send on ten miles ahead to get a flash when going up stream, and sometimes lay for a month till enough water had accumulated. When he got it there was none for any one else. Leonardo da Vinci, who thought of everything, had invented the pound-lock long ago; and other people before and after him had hit on what seems a very obvious contrivance. But that ingenious people, the Chinese, are said still to hoist their barges over weirs, and it was not till the time of the great period of canal-making that began with the Bridgewater Canal in 1760 that the pound-lock made any way in this country. The canal from Birmingham reached Oxford in 1790, and shortly afterwards the locks and towpath were put into their present shape. Then followed jealousies between rivers and canals, till the railways came and made inland navigation of less importance. Nowadays there is little barge traffic through Oxford (Folly Bridge was always a difficult point), but another question, that of floods, presses as much as ever. Quite recently the engineer to the Thames Commission brought out a scheme for doing away with Iffley Lock and Weir, and dredging a deep and narrow channel between Iffley and Folly Bridge. The Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of Christchurch, both by virtue of office Commissioners, were in favour of this scheme with a view to Oxford health; but it has been proved to the satisfaction of the Thames Conservancy Board, whose officers have examined the place, that so sweeping a change is not needed. The effect of the change would be to give the river banks instead of brims, and it has been argued that it would kill the elms of Christ Church and the fritillaries in the water meadows about Iffley. Most serious of all would be the loss of Iffley Mill. We may hope that Oxford health need not be bought so dearly.

Meantime Iffley Lock ends the shorter course for rowing practice, Sandford the longer; while Nuneham and Abingdon, to keep to an Oxford point of view, mark the longer picnic courses. It is all Frideswide ground; the saint was rowed to the outhouse near Abingdon by an angel, when she was warned in a dream and fled. The meadows of her convent now are lined by the college barges. These are an interesting study in development. The first of them were old procession barges of the London City Companies. One of them, the Oriel barge, still remains, with its delicate form, and long sharp prow, in which the rowers sat. The bronze figures by the door of the saloon are untouched, the oval windows, the tarnished gilding within. But the spirit of utility rebelled and the model changed. The long prow was chopped off close, the semblance of the high stern went, and there was left merely a square floating dressing-room with railings round its roof, and seats for the spectators of races. Then the sense of beauty mutinied, perhaps alleging the use of the toy for picnic excursions, and the prow and stern were restored. The University barge is a monument of the Gothic revival. Several architects have tried their hand in designs for these craft, and new ones are from time to time constructed. It is the oddest little street, this row of motley Noah's Arks; and when the high poles shake out their amazing flags, and the men come down in fearless college colours, and a vast and diverse millinery decks every foot of standing room the roofs can give, there would seem to be some touch of an Arabian Night about a very English day, were it not that the vigorous people wear many more colours than Arabia would allow.

A little hill at Iffley lifts up the rusty-grey rectory and church. The church is, for its size, made in an absurd number of styles, beginning with Late Norman. The heavy arches inside are carved round with sunflowers, looking like an ancient imitation of modern work. Outside, there is the strangest confusion of carvings; a centaur strayed from Phigaleia, and other pagan images among the Christian symbols. The Gods in Exile have visited Iffley too. On the south side a great yew has been building all through the Transition and the Perpendicular and the Tractarian times, and the people who Decorated, and the people who Late Middle Pointed, and the rest make the ground quite uneven round its roots. An undated villager, who styles himself Archdeacon of Iffley, and has a venerable humour, comes among the graves for company.

Behind the hill, and a little beyond Iffley, lies Littlemore. Here is the little church that Newman built, and came to from St. Mary's for the last two years of the Via Media. Near it is the range of low buildings that people called a monastery, where Mark Pattison and others came to be with Newman, and where, on October 8th, 1845, Newman was received into the "One Fold of Christ" by Father Dominic the Passionist, the good father making holy puns upon the name of the place. Now The College, as the building is called in the village, is given as almshouses to the poor. The largest room is a public library. In the kitchen lives an old woman who served the Newmans in her youth. Her husband, an old toy peasant, with smock-frock and silver hair, and a fine rheumatism that I am sure his country gladly supports, sits by. She stands up and remembers Newman. He lived there with his pupils "before he became a Pope. The Pope of Rome, that's the real Pope, over-persuaded him, and he went away and never came back again. She did hear that the Church of England gave him some punishment for leaving, but didn't rightly know. And the clerk's wife had been to see him, and found him in a bare room with no carpet on the bricks, like any poor person, and had said that it was to be humble and like his Master that he did it all."

Meanwhile on the river we have to pass some ornate sewage works, and the wanton embankment of a railway, that here crosses to Littlemore. Below lies the Rose Isle, with its "Swan Inn," and on the right the heights come nearer with the little village of Kennington. A beautiful tree-planted road runs along the top to Radley, with its school in the old park of the Bowyers' house, and against the tall trees is a little grey church and thatched cottages, where women come out and sit with their sewing machines on the summer evenings. From this the road goes on through a corn country to Abingdon.

Next on the river comes Sandford Mill, with a leaning chimney, that has all the interest and all the beauty of the leaning tower of Pisa. Sandford Church lies away from the river, nearer the Nuneham Road. The porch proclaims, "Condidit me domina Eliz. Isham. Anno gratiæ 1652," and adds--

"Thanks to thy charitie, religiose dame, Which found me old, and made me new againe."

It is proper, at the same time, to speak strongly of the taste which found the church Norman, and made it something very new indeed. But it is worth while going in to see the curious carving in the chancel of the Assumption of the Virgin.

Another mile, and the heights of Nuneham close in on the left with woods sweeping down to the very edge of the water. Presently one comes upon a little island, connected with the Nuneham side by an intensely rustic bridge. By the landing-place is a cottage with exaggerated thatch. Here they make tea. They make most not for the University picnics that the summer term brings to these hospitable woods, but when the great revolt of the town sets in with the long vacation. The river is as populous as ever then with dashing young fellows in flannel, and enchanting young ladies dressed in the depth of fashion. Great and many barges are towed down to Nuneham, and there merry people dance round Carfax, and float up again to Salter's in the heavy purple dusk, trolling snatches of songs. Carfax reminds us what a place of shifting Nuneham is. To begin with, the family was removed hither from Stanton Harcourt in the last century; then they moved the church and the village to new places; then the river was moved into a new cut, and the town of Oxford presented Lord Harcourt with Otho Nicholson's conduit. It was a work that gave the town the final accent of the Jacobean style; but it was in the way of cabs. May one hope that perhaps it came to Nuneham, like other pilgrims from Oxford, only for a season, and that it is waiting in that hospitable retreat till its home is worthy of it again?

The conduit did good service to Nuneham at the time. It took the place of a projected "Gothic castle." Gothic castles and abbeys, well ruined, were in vogue, to cap a rising ground or to conceal a dairy. It was the time of "landscape gardening." People corrected their land as much as possible after the ideas of Claude. It is for his pictures one must look in grounds like those of Nuneham. The trim Elizabethan garden, with its pleasaunce and mount, and bowling-green and wilderness, its fountains and clipped trees, give place to a carefully-arranged disorder. Foregrounds were picturesquely grouped, middle distances were plotted, and sunk fences, palings painted green, grottoes with stalactites and stalagmites and other devices went to make up what was called Nature. The disciple of Rousseau felt that he had indeed returned when he could sit upon a jag of extremely difficult geology fresh from the contractor's hand, and drop the tear of sensibility into the cascade that his own fingers had turned on. The man who had the chief hand in the laying out of Nuneham was Lancelot Brown, called "Capability;" but Lord Harcourt kept, besides, two tame poets, Mason, the author of "The English Garden," and Whitehead, the Laureate, to help him to be elaborately natural in his gardening, and to write verses on the seats. The two had a genuine contempt for one another. Mason had the last word. He wrote the verses on Whitehead's memorial urn. He said--

"....let the sons of fire The genius of that modest bard despise, Who bade discretion regulate his lyre, Studious to please, but scorning to surprise; Enough for him, if those who shared his love Through life, who virtue more than verse revere, Here pensive pause, while circling round the grove, And drop the heart-paid tribute of a tear."

Mason could do most things badly. His patron says of him:--"In the church there is a barrel-organ, upon which is set Mr. Mason's music for the responses to the Commandments, and his Sunday hymns. The adjoining flower-garden was formed by him, and he suggested the alterations on the north terrace. So that in a very small space we have specimens of his genius in music, painting" (the altarpiece of the church was his work), "and poetry; of his taste in improving the beauties of Nature; and what is most soothing to those who loved him, a proof that he applied his talents to the noblest purpose, that of celebrating the praises of Him from whom he received them."

All this has only a little to do with the look of Nuneham Reach from the river. One may discern upon it perhaps the seal of Claude, of this and the other poet. It is so with all planted landscape. But apart from that, Nuneham, in its architecture of hill and wood and water, has the trick of the great places in Thames scenery. It is an early feat that promises Richmond.

It is best to see Nuneham Reach from the railway bridge. From any other point it is necessary to see the bridge itself. Soon after its great achievement the river is claimed again by a distant spire. Above Nuneham the towers of Oxford linger, holding the landscape; for the rest of the way it belongs to St. Helen's at Abingdon.

/D. S. MacColl/.