under-cook. Therefore "Dorothy's Romance" must take its place among the many College stories in which Oxford abounds, and become a forsaken belief. Wright was the first on the long roll of Wadham bishops, and played a not inconsiderable part at a crisis in English history. In December 1641, as Bishop of Lichfield, he was one of the twelve bishops who presented to Charles I. the famous protest against their exclusion by mob violence from the House of Lords, declaring all proceedings in their absence null and void: for this they were sent to the Tower as guilty of high treason. Wright was soon released, and died two years later defending his episcopal seat, Eccleshall Castle, against the Parliamentarians,—a member of the Church militant like Ancktill.

DOROTHY WADHAM.

The history of the College from its foundation to the beginning of the Civil War is uneventful, one of great prosperity. Among the Fellows admitted in 1613, three, Smyth, Estcott, and Pitt, became Wardens: four of the Fellows were drawn from Exeter, then, as now, a west-country College like Wadham, though it has, more than Wadham, maintained its connection with the West of England. The Foundress showed her resolve that her husband's countryside should be well represented among the first members of the foundation: of the fifteen Fellows, eleven—of the fifteen Scholars, ten, came from western counties, especially from Somerset; the Commoners also were many of them western men. The value to a College of a local connection, not with a village or a small school, but with a county or a large town, was not understood by the Commissioners of 1853: they were under the tyranny of the formulæ current in their day, when "open competition" was supposed to be the solution of all the difficulties of life.

In the first year of the College now opened for work, fifty-one undergraduates, including the Scholars, were admitted. The number of its inmates, from the Warden to the latest freshman, was therefore sixty-nine, including the two chaplains. The rooms were larger than most of the rooms in the older colleges, but fewer, and those available for undergraduates were not more than about forty: the freshmen of 1613 must have been closely packed, the Scholars especially, who had rooms three together, sleeping in the large chamber and working in the muscœlæ or small studies attached, now used as bedrooms, or as scouts' pantries. In the nine years following the admissions were necessarily fewer—averaging twenty-seven. It is probable that till the depletion of Oxford, when the Civil War began—i.e., during the first thirty years of its life—Wadham numbered on an average between eighty and ninety undergraduates, all of them resident in College, as was then required by the Statutes of the University. This estimate is based on imperfect data, and Mr Gardiner has pronounced that materials for any accurate calculation are not to be found. We do not know what was the usual length of undergraduates' residence at that time; some resided only for a year, some proceeded to a degree. Nor is it clear whether the Warden used all the rooms, eight in number, assigned to him, or gave, perhaps rented, some of them to undergraduates. The estimate, which can neither be confirmed nor disproved, is worth making only as helping us to imagine the condition of the College in its early days. One thing is certain, that Wadham was popular and fashionable, to use a modern curious name, as is shown by the record of admissions.

Life, both for graduates and undergraduates, was harder then than it is now. The Fellows were required to reside for forty-six weeks, the Scholars, and probably the Commoners, for forty-eight weeks in each year. All undergraduates had to attend lectures or disputations for twenty-four hours in every week. These tasks were arranged with careful malignity to begin at 6 A.M., and resumed at 2 P.M. and 6 P.M. Nor were examinations wanting. The Bible was to be read during dinner in Hall by a Bible Clerk or Scholar, and heard attentively and reverently. Latin was to be spoken in Hall, and English only when the presence of an unlearned person or of a member of another college justified its use. The Chapel Service was held between 5 and 6 A.M. and between 8 and 9 P.M.; and attendance twice a-day was required from bachelors and undergraduates, and rigidly enforced. Attendance at roll-call as a substitute for chapel was unheard of in those days, when all members of the colleges were, or were presumed to be, members also of the Church of England, nor would conscientious scruples have been treated with much courtesy. In other matters discipline was no less strict; clothes and boots were to be black, and gowns were to be long. No undergraduate was allowed to go out of College unaccompanied by a "discrete senior" of mature age as a witness to his good behaviour, unless to attend a lecture or a disputation: nor might he keep dogs, or guns, or ferrets, or any bird, within the precincts of the College, nor play any games with dice or cards or of any unseemly kind. Yet the Foundress showed a tenderness for human weakness by permitting the Fellows and Scholars to play cards in Hall on some of the Gaudy days for "moderate stakes and at timeous hours." Moreover, she ordained that £30 from the College revenues should be spent on College banquets to be held on Gaudy days, by which were meant the great Church festivals, the election days of Fellows and College officers, All Saints' Day, and, on what at first sight seems strange, the anniversary of her husband's death; but the strangeness disappears if it be remembered that October 20th comes close to All Saints' Day.

This seems, in some of its provisions, Draconian legislation, but it was made for the government of boys, many of them only fourteen or fifteen years of age: how far it was, even in early days, unflinchingly enforced, we cannot tell. It began to fall into abeyance after the Restoration, if we are to believe Antony Wood. His statements are always to be received with caution; but they are on this point confirmed by other testimonies, and by the antecedent probability of a strong reaction against the Puritan régime. Eighteen months after the King's Restoration, he writes of the decay of learning and discipline in the University. "Before the warr wee had scholars that made a thorough search in scholasticall and polemicall divinity, in humane authors, and naturall philosophy. But now scholars studie these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the Universitie. Their aime is not to live as students ought to do—viz., temperat, abstemious, and plaine and grave in the apparel; but to live like gentlemen, to keep dogs and horses, to turne their studies and coleholes into places to receive bottles, to swash it in apparell, to wear long periwigs, &c., and the theologists to ride abroad in grey coats with swords by their sides: the masters have lost their respect by being themselves scandalous, and keeping company with undergraduates." We cannot believe that Wadham escaped the contagion, and remained what its Foundress meant it to be. It would be interesting—but lack of space forbids—to compare the discipline