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BRASENOSE COLLEGE AND RADCLIFFE LIBRARY ROTUNDA

To-day it seems almost strange to find that All Souls has recruited the ranks of great ecclesiastics, but so it is. From there came Archbishop Sheldon, Bishops Heber and Jeremy Taylor, and many other great divines. Even Architecture can claim a Fellowship of All Souls for one of its greatest masters, Sir Christopher Wren.

But time presses. Oxford, all beautiful in her surroundings, great in her history, splendid in her buildings, unique in such foundations as have just been described, means so much more to most who have claimed her as their Alma Mater. They have had some inkling of all these things: especially perhaps they have imbibed, and made their lifelong possession, a sense of her natural charms: but no matter what their college may have been, no matter how little illustrious, historically or architecturally, it is round the college life, the rooms, the friendships, the homely details, that their loving memory hangs. It is there that first they knew what independence meant: there that the chairs and table were their very own: there that they could come and go almost as they liked: there that they first knew the delight of voluntary work.

How it all comes back! A freshman passes the Entrance Examination just well enough to get rooms in College—the last set vacant. They look out upon a wall at the back of the buildings; in themselves they are small and dark, the bedroom a mere cupboard. But they are his own. He enters and finds a pot of marmalade and a tin of Bath Olivers on the table, put there by the forethought of his scout. He gets his boxes open: hangs up the school groups and the picture of his home: puts his books into the shelves—and has made his abode complete. He waits impatiently for the cap and gown he has ordered. The door flies open, and in rushes his special friend, who has preceded him from Marlborough. The old threads are picked up and knit together in a moment—and so the life begins. There is not much variety from day to day: chapel first thing, at which five attendances are required weekly, Sunday morning service (owing to its length) counting as two—then breakfast, seldom altogether alone. It is the most sociable meal of the day, which says much for the youth and health of the breakfasters! Should it be Sunday the undergraduate may hope (often in vain) to be asked to breakfast by some man in lodgings. Otherwise he will be condemned to feed either upon cold chicken—tasteless and a little dry—or upon gherkin pie, known only (by the mercy of Providence) to certain colleges in Oxford, and consisting of a dish of cold fat, interspersed with gherkins, and covered with lid of heavy pastry.

Afterwards, on week days, there are lectures, then a quick change to flannels and a hurried luncheon, and then in summertime the river or the cricket fields. Back again he comes to cold supper and long draughts of shandygaff in hall; then a pipe or two and a chat, and then (sometimes) a spell of reading before bed and sleep. But all this is nearly forty years ago:—a mere memory:—but yet it is things like these that first come to mind when Oxford's name is heard.

And then the scout! How many memories he brings! The college servants were a race apart with curious standards of their own. It is true they fattened on the undergraduate. Did not the cook of a certain college disdain to enter his son at the college for which he cooked, and send him to Christ Church? Did not each scout bear away all that was left upon his masters' tables in a vast basket, beneath the weight of which he could scarcely stagger home? Quite true, but all the same how would the freshman have fared had not his scout looked after him, seen that he did what it behoved him to do, and kept him not seldom from some faux pas? A senior scout had often an almost fatherly regard for the men upon his staircase. One, who comes at once to mind, would stand and urge and argue long enough by the bedside of some lazy youth, for whom an interview with the Dean was imminent, persuading him to get up for Chapel, and the same man would take it seriously to heart if any of his particular gentlemen behaved in a manner which he considered unseemly. A good scout attached himself to his many masters and never forgot them. If any member of a college revisits his old haunts after years of absence, the one man who may be depended upon to give him a warm welcome is his old scout.

Of the tutors and fellows of the colleges, and their frequent kindness to the junior members of their college, this is not the place to expatiate. They are of course an intimate part of every man's college life, and around them many happy memories will generally dwell. The point that it is desired to emphasize is that, in looking back upon Oxford, it is these matters that have been briefly described—the details of the college and the college life—that are remembered with the greatest affection.

A Trinity man will tell you of the Grinling Gibbons carvings in the Chapel, but he thinks with greater tenderness of an old armchair in his rooms in the garden quad. A Corpus man will take a pride in belonging to a college that has always set before itself a high standard of learning, and is suitably possessed of a magnificent old library, but it is of his quaint old rooms in the little quiet quad that he dreams, when his thoughts go back again to Oxford.

The mention of Corpus brings to mind the fact, that this is almost the only college of those in the front rank to retain the charm of being small both in size and in numbers. All who have in their day belonged to a college of this kind will remember with pleasure the absence of "sets", and the possibility of knowing every other member of the college. Were Corpus to be revisited to-day by any of its distinguished members of the past, such as Lord Tenterden, John Taylor Coleridge, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, or John Keble, he would find far less change than in almost any other college in Oxford. Till lately much the same might have been said of Oriel, where one is brought to a pause the moment the gate is passed by the sight of one of the most beautiful of all quadrangles, of which the chief adornment is the charming porch of the hall, with its canopy and wide flight of steps. But Oriel is no longer to rank as one of the moderate-sized colleges. Enriched by Mr. Rhodes it has pushed its way into the High Street, and a new quadrangle is beginning already to arise. The fame of the College has been great. It has sent out an extraordinarily large number of prominent Churchmen, and the place is also full of memories of such men as Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert White, Tom Hughes, and that great provost and scholar Dr. Monro. It must be hoped that its increase in size, and the publicity of its buildings, will not detract from the excellence of the College, though it must be allowed that, by joining the ranks of the larger colleges, it loses something of its individuality and charm.

Among those larger foundations Balliol is perhaps the best known, and in some ways the most remarkable. It has had a curious history. Founded almost at the same time as Merton, it is by its own members held to be the oldest of all the colleges. But alas! the front that it presents, though respectable enough, is quite modern, and cannot be included among the things that help to make Oxford lovely. Then, again, for hundreds of years it remained an obscure place with no pretensions of any kind. Since the Mastership of Dr. Jenkyn in comparatively recent times it has managed, by throwing open its scholarships, to attract the finest scholars from all over the country. It can now boast a world-wide reputation; for the Balliol scholarship is known by all to be the chief prize offered in the University.