and others who fell in the war for the Crown of France." Of that unhappy war Chicheley had been the adviser; and seeing the wreck which his folly, or, if the suspicion immortalised by Shakespeare is true, his selfish policy, as the head of a bloated Establishment threatened with depletion, had wrought, he may well have felt the sting of conscience in his old age. The figures in the new reredos of the Chapel tell the story of the foundation.

Magdalen was the work of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of Henry VI., another statesman-prelate who turned from the political storm to found a house of learning. Of all the houses of learning in England, perhaps of any country, that which Waynflete founded is the loveliest, as he will say who stands in its cloistered and ivy-mantled quadrangle, either beneath the light of the summer's sun or that of the winter's moon. Some American architect, captivated by the graces of Magdalen, has reproduced them in his plan for a new University in California. Those courts, when newly built, were darkened by the presence of Richard III. Waynflete came to Oxford to receive the king; and

this homage, paid by a saintly man, seems to show that in those fierce times of dynastic change, Richard, before the murder of his nephews, was not regarded as a criminal usurper, perhaps not as a usurper at all. The tyrant was intellectual. In him, as still more notably in Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, nicknamed for his cruelty the Butcher, but literary and a benefactor to the University, was something like an English counterpart of the mixture in the Italian Renaissance of culture with licentiousness and crime. But as he sat beside Waynflete in the Hall wooing popularity by apparent attention to the exercises, Richard's thoughts probably were far away. A red rose among

the architectural ornaments is found to have been afterwards painted white. It changed, no doubt, with fortune, when she left the red for the white rose. A new relation between College and University is inaugurated by the institution at Magdalen of three Readers to lecture to the University at large.

The old quadrangle of Brasenose remains much as it was left by its co-founders, a munificent Bishop and a pious Knight. It is of no special historic interest, and its importance belongs to later times. It absorbed

several Halls, the sign of one of which was probably the brazen nose which now adorns its gate, and so far it marks an epoch.

The quiet and sombre old quadrangle of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by the side of Merton, much as its Founder left it. Now we have come to the real dawn of the English Renaissance, a gray dawn which never became a very bright day; for in England, as in Germany and other Teutonic countries, reawakened and emancipated intellect turned to the pursuit of truth rather than of beauty, and the great movement was less a birth of literature and of art than of reformation in religion. This is the age of Grocyn, the teacher of Greek; of Linacre, the English Hippocrates; of Colet, the regenerator of education; of Sir Thomas More, who carried culture to the Chancellorship of the realm, and whose “Utopia" proclaims the growth of fresh aspirations and the opening of a new era in one way, as Rabelais did in another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI., had perhaps opened the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift of books, in which the Renaissance literature was strongly represented, and which was the germ of the University

Library. Soon Erasmus will visit Oxford and chant in elegant Latin the praises of the classical and cultured circle which he finds there. Now rages the war between the humanists of the new classical learning, called the Greeks, and its opponents, the Trojans, who desired to walk in the ancient paths, and who, though bigoted and grotesque, were, after all, not far wrong in identifying heresy with Greek, since the study of the New Testament in the original was subversive of the medieval faith. Again, as in the cases of Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a statesman-prelate turns in old age from the distractions of State to found a house of learning. Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, was the chief counsellor and diplomatist of Henry VII., in whose service he had no doubt passed anxious hours and trodden dark paths. It may have been partly for the good of his soul that he proposed to found a house in Oxford for the reception of young monks from St. Swithin's Priory in Winchester while studying in Oxford. He was diverted from that design, and persuaded to found a College instead, by his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who is represented as saying, "What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide

livelihoods for a company of bussing monks whose end and fall we ourselves may live to see? No, no. It is more meet, a great deal, that we should have care to provide for the increase of learning and for such as by their learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth." Supposing the prognostication embodied in these words genuine, they show that to an enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable. The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the highest classical elegance. They elaborate throughout the metaphor of a bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects of his lectures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin authors is given, and who is to keep "barbarism," that mortal sin in the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional, tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a Professor, but its guides