or senior student of the College, who has nothing in his appearance to call attention. But this is Burton, by some accounted a morose person, but by those who knew him intimately a cheery and witty companion. Here, too, with slow and faltering step comes Pusey in extreme old age, and Liddon of ascetic mien. Hark to the laughter! It is Stubbs—historian Bishop—with witty saying falling from his lips. And there is Liddell, feared of the undergraduate, but splendid both in figure and in face. And many another shade would fancy depict taking the old familiar way: men of renown, but none, however royal his demeanour, however high his literary rank, none to compare with him, Wolsey the great Cardinal, the founder of the place.

It is worth while before we explore further to think for a few moments about this wonderful personality, one of the most remarkable of all Oxford's sons. At the very end of the fifteenth century he is discovered as a Junior Fellow of Magdalen, then as Dean of Divinity, and in the first years of the next century as Rector of Lymington. Rapidly climbing the ecclesiastical tree, he reappears as Cardinal Archbishop of York, and resumes his close connection with Oxford, in the guise of a great promoter of learning, paying the salaries of lecturers out of his own pocket and so on. But the position of a mere patron of education did not satisfy his ambition. He determined on founding a college which should eclipse even that of Wykeham—the already famous New College. He was a rich man, but the vast undertaking upon which he had set his heart could not be paid for out of the private purse of any living man. He was in high favour with the King, and persuaded him to allow him to plunder the monasteries, and devote the proceeds to the expenses of the great foundation which he called Cardinal's College. Besides several small religious houses, he, in 1522, obtained the surrender of the Priory of St. Frideswide in Oxford itself.

Wolsey was possessed of sufficient funds to make a beginning. Clearing away some portion of the old Church of St. Frideswide, he laid the foundation of what afterwards became Christ Church in the summer of 1525. The work went on apace, but in a very few years there came a serious check. Henry VIII had made up his mind to marry Ann Boleyn, and this particular matrimonial venture had a curious influence on the fortunes of the College. It came about in this way. To marry Ann, it was necessary for the King to get his marriage with Catherine dissolved. The Papacy declined to grant the decree. The ultimate result of this was Henry's determination to free himself and his country from the power of Rome. This in its turn resulted in Wolsey's downfall. The work of building Cardinal's College ceased, and there was a great probability that the beginning already made would be demolished. The King, however, changed his mind, and in 1532 refounded and endowed it. It now received the name of King Henry VIII's College. This title it bore for some fourteen years, at the end of which the See of Oxford was removed from Olney Abbey to St Frideswide's, which had already become a part of the College. From that date the whole foundation, partly educational and partly ecclesiastical in character, became one institution, and was then and for ever after called Christ Church. It is an extraordinary story, and, mixed up as it is with the rise and fall of Cardinal Wolsey, lends a great amount of human interest to the inspection of the College.

There is nothing else at all like it in existence. Collegiate and ecclesiastical life are inextricably mixed up. There is a Dean: but instead of being an official appointed to keep order among the undergraduates, he is both Head of the College and Dean of the Cathedral. The great quadrangle is partly like the quad of another college, in containing certain sets of rooms in the occupation of undergraduates, and partly like a cathedral close, inasmuch as therein is the Deanery and the residences of an archdeacon and canons. The Cathedral itself is, though small, a dignified and beautiful building of true cathedral character. At the same time it is the College Chapel, and the undergraduates who daily attend its services are privileged to worship in a magnificent fane, but at the same time must lose that sense of what, for want of a better word, must be called the home-like charm which endears to so many their College Chapel. The scenes, too, that the quadrangles witness are curiously varied. Now there is a procession of divines wending their way to some diocesan function, with bishops and chaplains bringing up the rear, and anon a crowd of undergraduates, smarting beneath some fancied grievance, or merely celebrating some success upon the river, noisily express their wish to paint the college red.

But Christ Church is not the only unique college in Oxford. As there is no other to be found in any university so curiously combined with the cathedral and ecclesiastical dignitaries of a see, so is there no other, in this country at all events, that has preserved its original intention, as a college for Fellows only, as has All Souls. Here no noisy undergraduate is allowed to disturb the calm. There are, indeed, four Bible Clerks who are undergraduate members and reside within its walls, but their very name is enough to guarantee their unobtrusive respectability—if indeed they exist in the flesh at all, for it is said that none except the Fellows of the College have ever seen one! The foundation is rich both in money and in fine buildings. Taking no share in education within its own walls—having, that is to say, none of the usual routine of college lectures and so on—it has had to justify the retention of its wealth. This it has done to the full, for it provides a large part of the funds for the teaching of Law in the University, and greatly aids the study of Modern History. It also has shown itself most liberal in supplying the wherewithal for the ever-increasing needs of the Bodleian Library.

To most people All Souls is chiefly familiar for its entrance facing the High Street, with porch and tower of the founder's date (1437), and for its chapel and library. The chapel possesses in its reredos a work of art which is one of the chief goals of the sightseer in Oxford. It covers the entire east wall, and consists of an immense series of niches, in which are numberless statues, surrounding a crucifixion scene in the centre. Of its kind it is certainly the most beautiful thing in the whole University. It was robbed of its statues and walled up in the seventeenth century, but has been restored with wonderful success a quarter of a century ago. The Library, called after its donor, Sir Christopher Codrington, is singularly beautiful in decoration. It is 200 feet long, and contains every imaginable book necessary for the Student of Law. By permitting a very wide use of this room All Souls College gives one more evidence of its desire to further the general educational work of Oxford.

Within the walls of a place so redolent of Law it is not strange to find that Blackstone (he of the "Commentaries") had his rooms, but it is remarkable to find how diverse are the professions which have been adorned by Fellows of All Souls. Statesmen one might expect, and it is not difficult to conjure up the form of the late Marquis of Salisbury, stooping over a volume of Constitutional Law in the Codrington Library. Easier, perhaps, to imagine him thus than in the garb of a Christian warrior, as he stands in one of the niches of the Chapel reredos. The Fellows of All Souls are supposed under their statutes to be splendide vestiti, and in this respect Lord Salisbury, who was probably never aware of what he wore, must have singularly fallen short of the standard. But even so he would seem a more natural personage to haunt the still quadrangles of the College than his antagonist, Mr. Gladstone, who was an honorary Fellow of the College, but whose impulsive, eager vivacity would harmonize ill with the spirit of the place.