Lincoln College, Oxford

“ He entered New College, Oxford, in 1866, and after a term won a scholarship at Lincoln College, where he gained much from contact with Mark Pattison, the rector, and Henry Nettleship. After taking a second class in classical moderations in 1868 and a first class in ‘greats’ in 1870, he became fellow of Lincoln College in 1872, and tutor in 1873, undertaking the teaching of Roman history for his own college and Oriel. ”

“ He would at need devise a new coat of arms for Magdalen or St. John’s, or improve “the devil that looks over Lincoln.”
Of “his own college” he knows everything, from the cobweb on Jeremy Taylor in the library to the [Pg 341] oldest beam in the kitchen roof. He knows the benefactors and their benefactions, their rank, and everything but the way to pronounce their names; and has a kind of unofficial bidding prayer in celebration of their good deeds. His ideal of a head of a college is an odd mixture of Dean Gaisford and Tatham of Lincoln ”

“ Royalist colleges like New College and Christ Church took the lead, and Puritan establishments like Lincoln and Magdalen followed unprotestingly.
When (1642) a letter from the King at York, asking for contributions to his necessary defence, was laid before Convocation, it was unanimously resolved that whatever money the University was possessed of, should be lent to the King. The colleges and private persons were equally loyal. University College set an example which was freely followed. ”

“ Marshall died suddenly in Lincoln College, about 11 p.m., on Easter Eve, 18 April 1685, and was as buried in the chancel of All Saints' Church, Oxford. A memorial stone in the floor, with a Latin inscription, marks the spot. His portrait is in the hall of Lincoln College, and an engraved representation of him was on the title-page of the 'Oxford Almanack' for 1743. He left the residue of his estate to Lincoln College, for the maintenance of poor scholars. 'Marshall's scholars' were regularly elected from 1688 to 1765, when the scholarships ceased to be distinctively designated. ”

“ For in the meantime the old hall, after a career of over two hundred years, had been converted into a college, founded by William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln, and Master Sotton, very much as a protest against the new learning which was then being encouraged at Corpus Christi. The continuity of the society is indicated by the fact that the first Principal of the college was the last Principal of the old “Aula Regia de Brasinnose.” The foundation stone was laid in 1509, as the inscription in the old quadrangle, to which a story was added in the time of James I., records. ”

“ A place of good things olden!
In the next century the ideas of Walter de Merton and Dervorguilla and William of Wykeham were borrowed and developed by loving founders, architects, [Pg 116] and benefactors. The building of Lincoln College, next founded, was begun as soon as its charter was received; a chapel and a library, a hall and a kitchen, and chambers on three storys, finely and nobly built, were a matter of course. In the same way, All Souls’ front quadrangle, practically as we see it to-day, was built at once by Archbishop Chichele, the founder ”

“ We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from without—from Italy, from France, from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. ”

“ A university should certainly exist to promote learning, and Mark Pattison, with all his unfairness, certainly helped its cause in Oxford. But a university exists also for the promotion of friendships among young men, and for the development of their social life. Of this duty, Oxford has never been unmindful, and perhaps it is in small colleges like Lincoln that the flowers of friendship best flourish. It is needless to make comparisons, for they flourish everywhere ”

“ In this great foundation then the three characteristic features of a college are found—a common life, powers of self-government, with the right of choosing future members, and endowments that enable religion and learning to flourish, free from more pressing cares. It is these features which distinguish the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and which have determined their history. ”

“ As democracies need universities, so do universities need democracy as a means of recall to duty. Lincoln used to say that 'bath of the people' was necessary now and then for public men. This 'bath of the people' the university needs lest it substitute pedantry for wisdom, or lest it become a place for basking instead of an agency for training.
An Oxford man said not long since: 'Our men are not scholars; our scholars are not men.' Those we call scholars are bloodless pedants, finical and ineffective. Those we call men, strong, forceful, joyous, British boys, have no adequate mental training. ”

“ If Oxford thus, to some extent, moulded to her pattern men who, welcome as they were, were only accidental, surely the college spirit may be trusted to assimilate whatever material the changed conditions of social or of political life furnish to it. The hope of many at Oxford is that there will be a great development and a great change. On one side it will be good if Oxford becomes to a much greater extent not only an all-British, but also a world university; on another side it is to be hoped that far more than ever before men of all classes in England will come to Oxford. ”

“ It is like a great family mansion, which owner after owner has enlarged or improved to meet his own needs or tastes, and which, thus chronicling successive phases of social and domestic life, is wanting in uniformity but not in living interest or beauty.
Oxford is a federation of Colleges. It had been strictly so for two centuries, and every student had been required to be a member of a college when, in 1856, non-collegiate students, of whom there are now a good many, were admitted. The University is the federal government. ”

“ The number of students and of residents, the dignity of the authorities, the value of the foundations, the history and the architecture, the known sympathy of entire Britain in what is done there, justify a dedication to study in the undergraduate, such as cannot easily be in America, where his college is half suspected by the Freshman to be insignificant in the scale beside trade and politics. Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm ”

“ And he is bound to be a gentleman and a scholar, with certain duties, privileges, and responsibilities; and not a little unusual amount of learning.
Thomas Linacre, Physician and Classical Scholar, is supposed to have been sent to Oxford as a student in his twentieth year; but it is not known to what college, if to any college. He became a Fellow of All Souls in 1484; and Anthony Wood asserts that he was a Lecturer there about the year 1510. One of his favorite pupils was Erasmus, with whom, however, he quarrelled over a Latin Grammar, which was prepared by Linacre for St. ”

“ The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities, and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its models. ”

“ While the University is thus only a union of the Colleges for attaining such ends and such status as can better be attained by united than by isolated existence, the College is a real and concrete thing, the foundation stone of the ‘Oxford System’. Each College is within itself independent; each has its own traditions and some characteristics of organization, life, and system which are peculiar to itself. With the affairs of the College individually the University is not concerned. ”

“ Lincoln never finished his education. To the [Pg 337] night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an inquirer, a seeker after knowledge. You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney or a hypocritical parson. ”

“ The ordinary English man or woman, unconnected with Oxford, has never heard of them. The undergraduate and the ordinary don has seen some part just now and then, when some enthusiastic guests have had to be taken round the sights.
And yet a book of many volumes might be written to tell of the things both rare and exquisite that Oxford hugs most close to her breast. He who cares to look may find them everywhere. There is not a college in all the University that does not possess something precious, either for its intrinsic beauty or for its historical interest. ”

“ The close of the fifteenth century found the University of Oxford far more complete in its outward structure, if somewhat less vigorous in its inward life, than it had been two centuries earlier. It was no longer a loose aggregate of students under the paramount jurisdiction of a bishop resident at Lincoln, but an organised institution, with a government of its own, under the special protection of the Crown, and capable of being used as a powerful engine for effecting or resisting changes in Church or State. ”

“ During this century, too, we find a rival university springing up at Stamford; but, owing to the opposition of Oxford and Cambridge, [Pg 136] it was snuffed out, though there are still standing some interesting buildings which were connected with it. College after college, at both Oxford and Cambridge, has been founded since then; each one has its own special laws and government, which have been altered from time to time, and for many centuries now they have been cities of colleges, unlike anything else in the country. ”

“ But no one who has been brought intimately in contact with the Oxford life can fail to realize its charm. The influence on a few American students scattered over the whole country will surely be of advantage to them and to our relations with Great Britain. The American university presidents who have been given control of the administration of the Rhodes scholarships have decided to require residence at an American college before the student proceeds to Oxford. ”

“ Endowments and buildings are only the means; unless the end to which these means are subservient be clearly perceived and persistently followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance rather than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.
Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of college instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen years, or are they likely to change essentially within the coming twenty-five? In the year 1770 the greatest genius of [pg 196] Germany entered the walls of the old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete his education. ”

“ Indeed, the growth of colleges had been due in great part to the desire on the part of far-seeing men and friends of order as well as learning to curb the absolute and undesirable freedom of the mass of students brought together at Oxford and Cambridge, and in the middle ages living almost without discipline or control, often indulging in open riots or acts of wholesale insubordination.
Anthony Dalaber was not at present a member of any college, nor even of one of the religious houses where students could lodge, and where they lived beneath a sort of lesser control. ”

“ The University of London has no colleges directly connected with it, but confers degrees, upon examination, to students of nearly all the institutions of learning in the country. Oxford has twenty-three colleges and Cambridge eighteen. This college system distinguishes the universities of England from those of the continent. A student must connect himself with a college before he becomes a member of the university. The teaching in these colleges is done almost entirely by tutors, and the professors of the university only deliver lectures on special subjects once or twice a week. ”

“ It had at length become possible again for [Pg 182] a man to keep his terms and take his degree without continual residence within college walls. The numbers of the University grew rapidly, and at a time when more efficient tutors and discipline made Oxford attractive to many who were neither frivolous nor rich. Oxford became, in fact, a place of education. The previous century had been conspicuous for great names and lack of system; what was achieved was due to individual endowment and energy; and the able men stood somewhat apart from their contemporaries. ”

“ As a teaching institution Oxford is expensive, but (on the whole) efficient. It is expensive because it sacrifices the teacher to the taught, and leads the former to bestow upon the latter a great deal of individual attention, more, possibly, than is good for him, more, certainly, than is necessary or than he gets elsewhere. It is efficient because the college spirit is strong, and the competition between the colleges is keen. ”

“ In the sixteenth century, Oxford plays no great part in the actual revolution in the English Church; yet it will be a place attractive to many who cherish the memory of the "Oxford Reformers," the members of Erasmus' circle—John Colet, Thomas More, William Grocyn, and other scholars—who hoped by sound learning to amend the Church without violent change. Some, on the other hand, will see in the sixteenth-century Oxford, the school which trained men for the Counter-Reformation, such as the heroic Jesuit, Campion, or Cardinal Alien, the founder of the English College at Douai. ”