Wadham College

“ 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. ”

“ One of the most far-reaching of the Literary Landmarks of Wadham is the fact that it was the cradle of the Royal Society.
Mr. J. Wells, a Fellow of Wadham, quotes Bishop Sprat as telling how "the first meetings were made in 1649 in Dr. Wilkins's lodgings, in Wadham College, which was then the place of resort for virtuous and learned men; "and Mr. Wells places these meetings" by tradition in the great room over the Gateway, although this," he considers, "more than doubtful." ”

“ Some of them remembered too, that he was a Scholar of his College, and got a First. None of them, I am quite sure, knew that he would have been unable to go to Oxford at all, because he had no money to go on, except his scholarship at Wadham, if he had not borrowed the money, and repaid it out of his own earnings after he left the university. Could anything be more magnificent than that the man who holds the record of all Englishmen, and for that matter, that of all recorded men, for achievements in games, should have paid for himself at the university? ”

“ He became a commoner of Wadham College, Oxford, in 1652, took his B.A. degree in 1656, and afterwards migrated to Cambridge. At Oxford he made a laughing-stock of himself by his inordinate self-conceit. Wood is very severe on him: 'Such was the vanity of this person that he, being extremely conceited of his own worth, and overvaluing his poetical fancy more than that of Cleveland, who was then accounted the "hectoring prince of poets," fell into the hands of the satyrical wits of this university, who, having got some of his prose and poetry, served him as the wits did Tho. ”

“ His talents and attainments, however, attracted the notice of some wealthy neighbours, who enabled him to pursue his studies at Ruscomb, and again at Gloucester, and the liberality of John Moore (1730-1805) [q. v.] (afterwards bishop of Bangor and archbishop of Canterbury) enabled him to enter Wadham College, Oxford, as a commoner on 6 June 1765. In September of that year he became scholar of his college, where he shortly afterwards obtained the Hody exhibition for Hebrew, as well as other prizes. He was fellow from 1771 until 1788, and filled various college offices. ”

“ It was a nursery of bishops, contributing to the bench no less than six, including Wilkins himself; a nursery also of Fellows of the Royal Society,—Wilkins, Ward, Rooke, Wren, Sprat, and Pope were original [Pg 73] members of the "invisible college." Not only to the Church and to Science did Wadham do good service, but more directly to the State, by educating together impartially the youth of both the great parties. "When the hurly-burly's done, when the battle's lost and won," it is above all things desirable to allay bitter feelings, and bring the former combatants together. ”

“ Mary’s Hall; the east end of Jesus College chapel, which was just finished when Henry Vaughan arrived; and the front quadrangle of Pembroke College, converted from Broadgates Hall by a clothier, the Earl of Pembroke, and James I., and opened with ceremonies which included a fantastic Latin oration by Sir Thomas Browne, as senior undergraduate. The architecture of Wadham is a remarkable proof of the influence of antiquity upon men and things in Oxford. The founders, in 1609, were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his wife, of Merifield in Somerset. ”

“ The buildings of Wadham have remained practically unchanged since the foundation, either by alteration of the existing fabric or by addition. Beautiful gardens lie to the east and north of them; the warden’s garden is especially fine. In the quadrangle is a clock designed by Christopher Wren, who entered the college in 1649. It was in this year that John Wilkins, warden (1648–1659) , initiated a weekly philosophical club, out of the meetings of which grew the Royal Society, which received its charter in 1662. ”

“ The permanence of Gothic in Oxford is a point for professional students; the studied simplicity, which is the great secret of Wadham's beauty, concerns everyone. The effect of the garden front is produced simply by the long lines of the string-courses and by the procession of the beautifully proportioned gables. Neither here nor in any part of the college is there a piece of carved work, except in the classical screen, which marks the entry to the hall. It may be noted that at Wadham and at Clare, Cambridge, the same effect is produced by the same means ”

“ 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 [Pg 19] 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. ”

“ About the same time he was joined at Wadham by his elder brother Robert, and the two brothers, both of whom left without taking degrees, presented to the college two fine silver tankards, which were sacrificed to the royal cause on 26 Jan. 1643. After leaving Oxford he was entered of the Inner Temple. Subsequently he travelled in the south of Europe, and, according to Wood, ‘became a gent. ”

“ Hamblin Hall stands at the end of the long green "Campus" with its sextuple line of elms--the boast and the singularity of Wentworth. A pale spring moon, rising above the dome of the University library at the opposite end of the elm-walk, diffused a pearly mildness in the sky, melted to thin haze the shadows of the trees, and turned to golden yellow the lights of the college windows. ”

“ 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 [Pg 23] themselves scandalous, and keeping company with undergraduates." We cannot believe that Wadham escaped the contagion, and remained what its Foundress meant it to be. ”

“ You are doubly rewarded, for not merely is Cambridge a perfect specimen of a colonial village, but in Harvard there breathes the true spirit of humane letters. Nor is the college a creation of yesterday. It is not far short of three centuries ago that John Harvard, once of Emmanuel College in England, endowed the university which bears his honoured name. The bequest was a poor £780, with 260 books, but it was sufficient to ensure an amiable immortality, and to bestow a just cause of pride upon the mother-college. ”

“ I trust that, at least, I shall have brought home to many the conviction that Newnham College is unique, in the character and motives of its first founders, in the steady devotion to its best interests of successive governors, teachers and students, as also in its relations—complicated, but near, we may hope, to a solution—with the University under the protecting shadow of which it has grown to prosperity. ”

“ Upon their view had burst the wide, gently undulating green slopes of Hamilton Campus. While the grounds surrounding the majority of institutions of learning are laid out with an eye to the decorative, Hamilton campus has a peculiar, living charm of its own that perhaps none other has ever possessed. It is not that its thick short grass grows any greener than that of other campuses. Still it is more pleasing to the eye. The noble growth of elm, beech and maple, shading the lawns at graceful distances apart carries a personality that one feels but can hardly express by description. ”

“ For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.
Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. ”

“ The acquisition of an education would mean personal contacts, helpful financially, projecting, perhaps, that culture that he felt was as essential as the rest. Certainly the starting place for him was a big university where a man, once in, could work his way through. Lambert went to Yale. Harvard sprang into his mind, but there was the question of railroad fare and lost time. He'd better try his luck at Princeton which wasn't far and which had, he'd heard, a welcome for boys working their way through college. ”

“ For whose benefit was the property of Dartmouth College given to that institution? For the people at large, as counsel insist? Read the charter. Does it give the State "any exclusive right to the property of the college, any exclusive interest in the labors of the professors?" Does it not rather "merely indicate a willingness that New Hampshire should enjoy those advantages which result to all from the establishment of a seminary of learning in the neighborhood? On this point we think it impossible to entertain a serious doubt." ”

“ I should think there are!" replied Wadge. "Why, think of our Mechanics' Institute. We have more than a thousand students there. They all come of an evening, after work, and they pay next to nothing for their lessons; but I've known lots of them who have got on so well that they have been able to go to Owens College at Manchester—even taken degrees. And there is no end to the possibilities for the chap who has taken a degree." ”

“ Whether the newly-created Lord of Walden regarded himself as inheriting also the Monks’ rights and responsibilities in connection with the Cambridge college or not, or whether, being an old man now and infirm and with no male heir, he thought to find some solace for his conscience in the thought of himself as the benefactor and founder of a permanent college, I cannot say. ”

“ She cared far less that the students should take good places in their examinations than that they should come to understand what sound learning really means, and should share her own delight in the search for undiscovered truth. Broad in her sympathies with all honest workers, genial in her manners, remarkably constant and helpful in her friendships, and withal scholarly to the backbone in her tastes and ambitions, she stands out as one of the leading figures of our College. ”

“ Nothing confers more honor on the State where it is established, or more utility on the country at large. A respectable university is an establishment which must be the work of time. If pecuniary means were not wanting, no new institution could possess character and respectability at once. We owe deep obligation to our ancestors, who began, almost on the moment of their arrival, the work of building up this institution.
Although established in a different government, the Colony of Plymouth manifested warm friendship for Harvard College. ”

“ Well, your technical school should enable you to make your bargain splendidly; but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain—a pretty poor place, possibly—in the whole policy of mankind. That is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with it.
We of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as Harvard. ”

“ The Academic Institute is designed to aid the cause of education, and elevate the profession, [Pg 216] amongst the teachers in Cincinnati. Its meetings are monthly. The Athenæum is an institution under the management of Roman Catholic Priests. The college edifice is a splendid and permanent building, of great capacity. The Woodward High School was founded by the late William Woodward. The fund yields an income of about $2000 annually. It is conducted by four professors, and has about one hundred and twenty students. ”

“ At Harvard College there is, of course, none of that old-fashioned, time-honoured, delicious, mediæval life which lends so much grace and beauty to our colleges. There are no gates, no porter's lodges, no butteries, no halls, no battels, and no common rooms. ”

“ Its graduates include many of the ablest men of the country, both of the present and the past. Everywhere, at every loading point in our widely extended Republic, the graduates of Washington and Jefferson College are pushing ahead at the front, in all the learned professions, in the judiciary, and in every line of honorable industry. It is not a dude college, as many more pretentious colleges are, but a working college, sending out workers, equipped like men, to run the race set before them. The Female Seminary is another institution of which the citizens of Washington are justly proud. ”