AMONG the thousand interesting places which the American traveler may visit in Europe, there are none which have a greater charm for the scholar than the two university towns of England, Oxford and Cambridge. Whatever the architectural beauties or the historic glories he finds in the Continental towns, there is no one in which he lingers so long and lovingly, no one from which he at last tears himself away with such a pang of reluctance, as from these ancient seats of learning. It is now five years since we first enjoyed the intense pleasure of treading the quadrangles, the gardens and the halls of the two universities; and though we have since visited many other places of world-renowned beauty, and hallowed by historic memories, yet there is no one the mention of which conjures up so many pleasant recollections of hours too quickly passed, — hours in which eye and ear, mind and soul, were intoxicated with delight, — as do the names of these famous towns. To which of these haunts of learning the palm of beauty is to be given, it is as hard as it would be invidious to say. Neither has its parallel elsewhere in the world. There is something absolutely unapproachable in the scenes that greet the eye behind the colleges at Cambridge, where the Cam steals along between frequent arches, and groves, and lawns, and beneath the shadow of venerable edifices; there is no other quadrangle in the world like the great quadrangle of 308 Trinity; nor can Oxford boast of any chapel equal to that of King’s College, with its huge buttresses, its immense windows, its profusion of exquisite carvings, and quaint fret-work, and above all, its wondrous stone roof,
“Self-poised and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells,
Linger, — and wandering as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yielded proof
That they were born for immortality.”
Yet the view of Oxford, with its multiplicity of turrets, pinnacles, and towers, rising in the bosom of a beautiful valley, amid waters and gardens, fully merits Wordsworth’s epithet of “overpowering;” and he who can look upon this “City of Palaces,” hoary with ancestral honors, and rich in treasures of bibliography, science, and art, and not exclaim with the poet,
“Robed in the grandeur of thy waving woods,
Girt with a silver zone of winding floods,
Fair art thou, Oxford!”
must be as dull as the clod he treads upon. It was an excusable burst of enthusiasm in Robert Hall, when, standing on the summit of Radcliffe Library, he was so impressed with the beauty of the scene, — the dark and ancient edifices, clustering together in forms full of richness and beauty, — the quadrangles, gardens, and groves, — the flowing rivers and belting hills, wood-crowned, — and, over all, the clear, blue-flecked sky, — that he cried out, “Sir, sir, it is surely the New Jerusalem come down from Heaven!”
It is, of course, impossible, within the limits of a brief essay, to speak of a tithe of the interesting things one may seen in even a day’s visit to a city like Oxford or Cambridge. The name Oxford is derived from the “Ox-fords” 9 about the city, the particular ford being at Binsey or North Hincksey. The city is of great antiquity, and from an early period was one of considerable importance. Nearly every British sovereign has visited it, some have lived in it, and Parliament has assembled in it on twenty different occasions. The zealous antiquaries of the town have even claimed that the first printing-press was set up in Oxford, Corsellis having printed a book there in 1468, four years before Caxton set up a press at Westminster. It is much more certain that the first British martyrs, that suffered for renouncing the Roman Catholic faith, were Oxford men. Thirty Baptists of this city were punished for heresy, in the time of Henry II, by starvation without the walls. The University consists of twenty Colleges and five Halls, or unendowed societies. The oldest (University) is said to date back to 886; the latest (Keble) was founded in 1868. The entrances to the town are all more or less picturesque, except that from the railway station, and three of them cross those beautiful meandering streams which the Oxonians dignify with the names of rivers, — the Thames (here called the “Isis”) and the “Cherwell.” In the good old days, before the scream of the locomotive was heard in this charming valley, the visitor, from whatever direction he came, got from the top of the stage-coach a glorious view of the city. The one that bursts upon you from the Abingdon road, especially, is of such ineffable beauty that it must quicken the pulse of the veriest dunce. It is one of those rare sights that always fill a painter’s heart with delight, and might be put at once on a canvas without the change of a feature. We, of course, came by rail, and, entering the town from the west, felt little throbbing of the heart till 310 we reached “the heart of its mystery.” Strolling along with no guide but our Murray, we passed the Castle, built in William Rufus’s time, now used as a gaol, and soon found ourselves in High street, where the genius loci at once seized upon us, and we realized that we were standing in the intellectual birth-place of Hooker, Hampden, Wyckliffe, and many another
“Giant of mighty bone and high emprise.”
of whose victories not only Englishmen, but Americans, are proud.
This famous street, the pride of Oxford, at once charms the stranger by its beauty, and increasing intimacy only deepens his admiration. The citizens of Oxford may well be pardoned for believing that it has few rivals in the world. It is certainly a noble street, being eighty-five feet in width, and lined with buildings of the most impressive orders of architecture, the parallels of which are to be found nowhere else in the “silver-coasted isle.” The great and rich variety of the buildings, — colleges and churches mingling with modern shops and old-fashioned dwellings, — and the remarkable diversity of the styles in which they are built, are brought, by the gentle curvature of the street, into the most pleasant combination and contrast imaginable. The churches of St. Mary-the-Virgin, All Saints’, and St. Martin, together with the Colleges of All Souls’, University, Queen’s, and Magdalen’s, present a coup d’œil of the rarest beauty, worth almost a trip across the Atlantic to see. Up this street it was that went the sad procession of students to the Bible Audo-da-Fé in 1527. Carrying each his bible and a fagot, they marched slowly and gloomily to Christ Church, thence to the place where the scared books were thrown into the 311 flames. Down this street it was that on march 20, 1556, Cranmer slowly wended his weary steps, bowed with years and trouble, on his way to St. Mary’s Church, to protest against “the great thing that troubled his conscience,” his renunciation of his Protestant faith; and it was but a stone’s throw from here that, with Latimer and Ridley, he received his “baptism of fire.” The waist-shackle of Cranmer is still preserved, and the bailiff’s account for burning him, which is as follows:
One hundred wood fagots £0 6 8
One hundred and fifty furze fagots 0 3 4
Carriage of them 0 0 8
Two laborers 0 1 4
£0 12 0
As we followed “the stream-like windings of that gracious street,” as Wordsworth terms them, evidences that we were in a University-town presented themselves on every side. Bookstores abounded, their windows filled with classics and rare old tomes; and in other shops were exposed for sale gowns, surplices, academical caps, and the colored silken hoods that denote the various degrees of University rank. At every step we encountered persons in the costume worn by the President of Harvard College at Commencement, and which a few years ago, when worn occasionally by undergraduates, provoked the biting ridicule of the Boston butcher-boys and truckmen.
The richest and most extensive of all the Oxford colleges is Christ Church, and to that we took our way. This superb structure, “at once a Cathedral and a College,” owes its foundation to the “King-Cardinal” Wolsey, who felt so deep an anxiety about its completion that, in the midst of his trials, he earnestly begged the 312 King to let the work go on. To this college and to Trinity College, Cambridge, resort all the princes and nobles of Great Britain who desire a liberal education; and from this foundation have gone forth a long line of illustrious statesmen, who have found no superiors in the House of Commons in scholarship, eloquence or ability. Four great religious movements have had their origin in this establishment, — Wyckliffe’s in the fourteenth century, James the Second’s in the seventeenth, Wesley’s and Whitefield’s in the eighteenth, and Dr. Pusey’s in the nineteenth. Nothing can be more imposing than the exterior of this college; its long front of four hundred feet, with its turrets and balustrades, fill the mind at once with ideas of amplitude, magnificence and power. Through the grand gateway, above which, in the beautiful cupola which crowns it, hangs the bell, “Great Tom,” weighing seventeen thousand pounds, you enter the largest quadrangle (or “quad”) in Oxford. The bell, we may say in passing, originally hung in Osney Abbey campanille, “the largest and loudest of Osney bells”; and, as Milton wrote his “Il Penseroso” within four miles of Oxford, it is supposed that it was the sound of “Tom,” borne over the waters in time of flood, that he had in mind when he wrote the famous musical lines,
“Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar.”
The buildings of this, as of all the colleges, form a square, or series of squares, with generally a green lawn in the centre, sometimes a reservoir and fountain; here and there trees are planted, and sometimes the walls are completely covered with ivy. After a few admiring glances at the “quads,” we visit the Hall, a magnificent 313 room, among the finest in Europe. It is one hundred and fifteen feet long and fifty feet high, and has a roof of Irish oak, carved and decorated in the most elaborate manner, and adorned with nearly three hundred armorial bearings of the two founders, Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII. The walls on both sides are lined with portraits of the benefactors of the college, over one hundred in number, and all specimens of the best masters. Holbein, Lely, Vandyke, Hogarth, Raphael, Reynolds, and many other artists hardly less celebrated, have contributed to the riches of this gallery. Though three to four centuries old, the Hall has none of the dust or decay of age, but looks as fresh and bright as if finished but yesterday. Here the scholars of Christ Church dine; the Peers, Dean and Canons occupying the raised dais at the upper end, the Masters and Bachelors the side-tables, and the undergraduates the lower end of the hall. Here Henry VIII, Edward VI, James I, Charles I, and other English Kings and Queens, have been entertained with plays, declamations, and banquets; here Handel, the great composer, gave concerts; here, in June, 1814, the Allied Sovereigns, with Blucher, Metternich, and a host of other celebrities, — nine hundred persons in all, — sat down to a princely feast.
Besides this gallery of portraits the college has in the Library building another splendid collection of paintings, chiefly of Italian schools, some of them belonging to the oldest periods of Italian art. The library is a beautiful apartment, 142 feet by 30 feet, and 37 high. The ceiling is richly ornamented with delicate stucco work, and the wainscoat and pillars are of the finest Norway oak. The room is full of literary treasures and curiosities, and adorned with antique statues and busts. If the visitor has time, 314 he should take a peep into the kitchen, and see a good specimen of an old English cooking-room. Here he will see a huge gridiron moved on wheels, 4½ feet long by 4 feet wide, used before the introduction of spits and ranges, and upon which a whole bullock might have been broiled as easily as a single steak at one of the ranges of these degenerate days. Leaving this unique cuisine, we next proceed to the magnificent Cathedral, now the chapel of the college, but originally the Priory Church of St. Frideswide. To describe fully this fine building, which is a cruciform 154 feet in length, would require an entire article. The beauty of the choir, with the massive Saxon pillars on each side, and the double arches springing from their capitals, through the air, and meeting in the centre the solid arches of the ceiling, with its rich pendants, is such as to baffle description. The Cathedral is rich in altar-tombs, illuminated windows, and monuments of rare workmanship as well as great antiquity, — among which are that of that prodigy of out-of-the-way learning, Robert Burton, the author of “the Anatomy of Melancholy,” and that of Bishop Berkeley, the metaphysician, whose tombstone is inscribed with Pope’s eulogy, “To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.”
The New Buildings, built in the modern Venetian Gothic style, 300 feet in length, and containing fifty luxurious sets of rooms, next attract our attention; after which we visit the shaded walks in the meadows between Christ Church and the Isis, than which it is hard to conceive of a more beautiful scholarly retreat. These consist of “The New Meadow Walk,” six hundred yards long, extending from the New Buildings to the river; and “Broad Walk,” a splendid avenue of a quarter of a mile in length 315 and fifty feet in width, lined on each side with lofty elms, whose meeting tops form in a hot day a most delicious shade. The eminent men of whom Christ Church boasts as its scholars form of themselves a dazzling host. Among them are William Penn, Locke, Ben Jonson, the two Wesleys, Camden the antiquary, Otway, Byron, Dr. Pusey, Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, Sir G. C. Lewis, Ruskin, Lord Derby, and scores of others whose names have been sounded hardly less loudly by the trump of fame.
Leaving Christ Church, we visited college after college, which we found to differ in detail, but all agreeing in their general plan, and presenting something to charm or surprise the traveler. Stepping out of the busy streets, — for in this respect the city contrasts with Cambridge, which has a more quiet, scholastic air, — you go through an arched gateway, and at once find yourself enjoying the beautiful lawns, the trees, ivy, flowers, and fountains of a quadrangle. No person with a spark of enthusiasm or love for the picturesque and beautiful, who has once seen these venerable piles, can ever forget the impression made on him by their cool cloisters, whose pavements are the tombstones of departed worthies; their statues of Kings, Queens, and benefactors; their quaint and grotesque gargoyles; their libraries filled with the rarest books and manuscripts; their chapels adorned with the monuments of the men who have made England the home of freedom, letters, and the arts; their vaulted roofs; their lofty columns; the splendors of their painted windows, that blaze like sparkling jewels in the sunlight; and, if he has been so fortunate as to enjoy a general view of Oxford’s glories from the roof of the Radcliffe Library, or the tower of New College, he must be made of sterner stuff 316 than flesh and blood if he has not cried out with Wordsworth,
“Ye spires of Oxford! domes and towers!
Gardens and groves! Your presence overpowers
The soberness of reason.”
Near by Christ Church is Pembroke College, once the nest of those “singing birds,” Beaumont, Heywood, and Shenstone, and the Alma Mater of the eloquent George Whitefield and the sturdy John Pym. Here that quaint old fantast, Sir Thomas Browne, studied; and here, over the gateway on the second floor, roomed heroic Samuel Johnson, a commoner, “poor as the poorest, proud as the proudest”; so poor that he had but one pair of shoes, and those so old that his feet peeped through them, — so proud that, when a new pair was placed by a gentleman’s order outside of his door, he indignantly flung then out of the window. Indigence drove Johnson away, long before the usual time, from Pembroke; but, though steeped in poverty to the lips, he read, as he said, “solidly,” while there, and always regarded his Alma Mater with the profoundest veneration and love.
The oldest of the Oxford colleges is Merton, on our way to which we pass between two others, of which we must say a word or tow. One, Corpus Christi, was founded in Henry the Eight’s reign, by Bishop Fox, in memory of whom a tame fox was kept in the college for many years. Had Corpus nothing else to boast of but those two giants of the English Church, Bishop Jewell and the judicious Hooker, who were her sons, she might well be proud; but she reckons in her roll many worthy successors of these giants, including that “gulf of learning,” John Rainolds, Dr. Buckland, and John Keble, whose “Christian Year” had reached, seven years ago, its 110th 317 edition, and 265th thousand. Directly opposite Corpus is Oriel College, endowed by Edward II, in 1326. Its building are not remarkable, but it may challenge any other college to show a more splendid muster-roll of names. Here were trained Sir Walter Raleigh; Chief Justice Holt; Bishop Butler, the author of that impregnable bulwark of Christianity, the “Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion”; Prynne, the stout Republican, whose ears were cut off by Charles I; J. H. Newman, the famous “fugitive from the camp of Anglicanism,” a man of noble intellect and antique loftiness of soul, and one of the greatest masters of English of this century; Dr. Copleston; Archbishop Whately, whose “Logic” has crucified the wits of so many students; Matthew Arnold; “Tom Brown” Hughes; Bishop Ken, the hymnist; and Richard H. Froude, from whom emanated the famous “Tractarian” movement; and scores of other men hardly less illustrious. Merton, “the primary model of all the collegiate bodies in Oxford and Cambridge,” merits a minuter notice than our space permits us to give. It has three quadrangles, in one of the smallest of which is the chapel, which, in grandeur of proportion, ranks second to none in Oxford. The side windows, of which there are fourteen, illuminated in imitation of those at Cologne, are marvels of beauty; and the great east or Catherine-wheel window is filled with tracery that is rarely matched in delicacy. In looking at the architectural triumphs of this and many other chapels in Oxford, where
“Through mullioned windows’ tinted panes
The colored radiance softly falls,
And dyes with flickering roseate stains
The nave and aisle, the floor and walls.”
one is tempted again and again to ask, Where did these 318 old masons of the Middle Ages learn the secrets of their skill? They certainly seem to have had more cunning fingers than their modern successors, and to have moulded their stone-tracery as though they were working in some plastic material. In the Middle Ages, Merton College was famous for its professors in scholastic theology. Bradwardine, the great “doctor doctorum”; John Duns Scotus, the acutest and most subtle-witted of the schoolmen, whose name, by a hard fate, has become a synonym for stupidity (dunce); Occam, the “invincible”; John Wyckliffe, Sir Richard Steele, and Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, — all belonged to Merton.
Next in age to Merton, but some distance from it, is Balliol College, founded in the thirteenth century, of which Prof. Jowett, of the famous “Essays and Reviews” memory, is Master. Here Adam Smith the economist, Archbishop Manning, and Bishop Temple, Dr. Arnold’s successor at Rugby, were educated. Among the Masters of Balliol in the eighteenth century was noted wit and punster, Dr. Theophilus Leigh. His conversation was a perpetual stream of jests and retorts; but his most successful practical joke was living to over ninety, when he had been elected Master on account of his weak health and likelihood to die early. As a specimen of his jeux d’esprit, it is said that, when some one told him how, in a late dispute among the Privy Councilors, the Lord Chancellor struck the table with such violence that he split it, Dr. Leigh replied, “No, no; I can hardly persuade myself that he split the table, though I believe he divided the Board.” Almost in death the ruling passion triumphed. Being told, in his last sickness, that a friend had been lately married, that he had recovered from a 319 long illness by eating eggs, and that the wits said he had been egged on to matrimony, the Doctor at once trumped the joke by adding, “Then may the yoke sit easy on him.” It was to Dr. Parsons, the forty-fourth Master of this College, afterwards Vice-Chancellor of the University, that Theodore Hook made his reply when he matriculated, at Oxford. Being asked if he was “prepared to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles,” Theodore replied, “Oh, certainly, sir; forty if you please!”
Leaving Balliol, we stroll down Broad street, and, attracted by the sound of music, enter the gardens of New College, which, like New York, belies its name, having been founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham. The gardens are charmingly retired, and among the most beautiful of the many delicious retreats which Oxford offers to the weary or meditative scholar. We wonder not that our countryman, the shy, contemplative Hawthorne, was ravished by this “sweet, quiet, stately, sacred seclusion,” — these lawns of the richest green and softest velvet grass, shadowed over by ancient trees, and sheltered from the rude winds; for we can conceive of nothing more delightful than to spend an hour’s leisure, earned by a half-dozen hours of hard study, in lounging about or lying down in these lovely grounds, building air-castles, planning new intellectual conquests, or musing over the days of “lang syne.” The charm of the gardens is enhanced by the picturesque views one gets here of the college-buildings; and one hears with interest that the boundary on one sides is the ancient city-wall which Cromwell’s artillery battered at the siege of the town. The music that drew us here comes from a fine band attached to a military company of the students, which 320 plays two or three afternoons in the week for the delight of the scholars and their outside friends. The concert ended, we attend the evening service in the chapel, and listen to some of the most exquisite choral harmonies that have ever
“from eating cares
Lapped us in soft Lydian airs.”
The choir of singers is the best-trained, and the chapel by general consent the noblest, in Oxford. The choir is one hundred feet long; the nave, or ante-chapel, eighty feet; it is sixty-feet high, and thirty-five broad. The style of architecture is the early perpendicular, retaining much of the simplicity of the decorated, but displaying the decided peculiarities of the later style. The organ, whose capabilities are gloriously revealed in the choral service, is one of the finest in England. But the grand attraction to most visitors is the illuminated windows designed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Peckett of York, and the pupils of Rubens, which, if beauty, not the admission of light, be the object of windows, must be deemed worthy of high admiration. The original sketches for the great west window, by Reynolds, were sold at auction, it is said, in 1821, for £7,229 5s. In this chapel is preserved the silver-gilt pastoral staff of the founder, seven feet long, — an exquisite relic of the finished style of the jewelers’ work, with enamels, of the period, and of the most elaborate workmanship. Lack of space prevents more than an allusion to the massive tower of this college, with its fine peal of bells, upon which is inscribed Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth man”; and to the cloisters, with their remarkable echo, repeating sounds seven or eight times. New College boasts many famous sons. It was these cloisters that echoed Sydney Smith’s jokes 321 and laughter; and it was within these walls that William Pitt (Lord Chatham) learned to plume his wings for his grand oratorical flights.
Beautiful as is New College, with its grand old turreted tower, its splendid chapel, and its shaded grounds, it must yield the palm to Magdalen, the magnificent, (for that it’s the meaning of its Syriac name,) which we are inclined to look upon as the gem of the Oxford colleges. Magdalen is, truly, a glorious establishment, and we do not wonder that the old University laureate, Antony a’ Wood, in singing its praises, bursts into a rapturous strain, quite above his usual prosaic style. Grand old buildings this college has, that gladden the eye and captivate the imagination, from the
“High embowed roof
With antique pillars massy proof.”
and the stately tower with its “tunable and melodious ring of bells,” down to studious cloisters; trim gardens, too, it has, full of rare plants and flowers; smooth-shaven lawns, and arched walks of twilight groves; water-walks “as delectable as the banks of the Eurotas, where Apollo himself was wont to walk and sing his lays”; and rivers which so pleasantly, and with a murmuring noise, wind and turn, that we are almost ready to agree with honest Wood, that one may, in a manner, say of them that which the people of Angouleme, in France, were wont to say of their River Touvre, that it is “covered over and checkered with swans, paved and floored with trouts, and hemmed and bordered with crevices.” The buildings of this college which are comprised within three quadrangles, cover an area of three acres. The grounds comprise more than one hundred acres. Entering the college by the beautiful 2 new gateway, with its canopied statues of Mary Magdalen, St. John the Baptist, and the founder (William Waynflete, Lord Chancellor of England in the reign of Henry VI), we are greeted with one of the most striking displays of architectural beauty in Oxford. Directly fronting us is the west end of the chapel, with a gorgeous window, and beneath it an elaborately-ornamented doorway, with a shallow porch richly sculptured, and surmounted by five statues in canopied niches, — which, with the lofty tower, one hundred and fifty feet high, with its diadem of pinnacles and fretted battlements, forms one of the most imposing spectacles we have yet witnessed. The chapel, which, about forty years ago was thoroughly restored, at an expense of £28,000, is an architectural gem. The altar-screen, the oak seats and stalls, the organ-screen of stone, — all the carvings, whether of stone or wood, — are executed with the rarest felicity. Magnificent candelabra, exquisite paintings, and superb painted windows, are among the other beauties of this unique place of worship; and when we add the powerful organ, which Cromwell carried off to Hampton Court, but which Charles II restored, it must be admitted that this chapel has few peers even in this land of chapels. We regret that it was not our good fortune to attend a choral service in it, and hear
“The pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced choir below”;
for it is said to be solemn and impressive in a degree rarely equaled.
Visiting the library; the cloisters, with their grotesque figures, which have so puzzled the antiquaries; and the hall, hung around with portraits; we next pass by a narrow 323 passage into the chaplain’s quadrangle, where we have another glorious view of the tower, from its base to the top. Its simplicity of structure and its graceful proportions, — its union of real solidity with extreme lightness of appearance, — make it one of the finest structures of its class in England. Tradition says that upon the top formerly, on every May morning at four o’clock, a requiem was sung for the soul of Henry VII; and the custom of chanting a hymn there, beginning
“Te Deum Patrem colimus,
Te laudibus prosequimur,”
on the same morning each year, is still preserved.
How shall we do justice to the charming grounds of Magdalen, — the meadows with their winding, tree-embowered walks along the banks of the Cherwell, their rustic bridges, and the peep at the antique-looking water-mill? Can any trees be grander, any lawns more soft and pleasant, any scholastic retreats more cool and shady, any views more picturesque than these? And then that dainty relic of monastic days, the little Deer-Park; how Old-World-like it seems, as another has said, to step out of the High-street of a great city upon a quiet, secluded nook, where deer are quite unconcernedly browsing among huge old elms! It was in these learned groves that Addison loved to linger; here Gibbon studied; there the melancholy Collins wooed the genius of poetry; here glorious “Kit North” drank his earliest draughts of Hippocrene; and here in ages to come, will many other Englishmen, of equal genius, echo the words of Antony a’ Wood:
“Thou dear old college, by whatever name
Natives or strangers call our Oxford “Queen,”
To me, from days long past, thou art the same,
Maudlin — or Magdalen — or Magdalene.”
324Leaving Magdalen, we next proceed to the Bodleian library, founded in 1409, and refounded by “that full solempne man,” Sir Thomas Bodley, in 1602. This vast collection comprises about four hundred thousand volumes, — a wilderness of books, — and is remarkable not only for its size, but for the peculiar character of its “volumed wonders.” It is said that no other library of similar extent in Europe, — none in Paris, Brussels, Frankfort, Munich, Valladolid, or Madrid, — has to conventual a character. Associated with all the great traditions of England, from the age of Duke Humphrey, its original founder, down to the present century, — from the days when Queen Elizabeth, in ruff and farthingale, with Burghley and Walsingham at her side, harangued the doctors and Heads of Houses in Latin, to the time when the Allied Sovereigns celebrated the downfall of Napoleon within its walls, — it is no wonder that its treasures of books, manuscripts, and rarities have a kind of uniqueness and quaint antiquity about them, not found elsewhere. An adequate account of the bibliographical curiosities which are accumulated here would fill a goodly volume. Truly may the scholar, as he sits in the reading cells and curtained cages of “old Bodley,” murky in its antiquity, redolent of old bindings, fragrant with moth-scented coverings, say with Southey,
“My days among the dead are passed,
Around me I behold,
Where’er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old.”
Here are a “History of Troy,” printed by Caxton at Bruges in 1472, the first book printed in the English language; a copy of Caedmon’s Anglo-Saxon version of Genesis, made about A. D. 1000; a Bible collection, including almost 325 every known version; an Aldine edition of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” containing a genuine autograph of Shakspeare: a Latin Bible printed by Gutenberg at Mentz about 1455, the first book printed from movable types; an Italian sermon, translated by Queen Elizabeth into Latin, whilst Princess, and written in her own handwriting; and hundreds of other similar rarities. Here are the collections of Dr. Dee, the earliest of spirit-rappers, who “did observe and write down what was said by the spirits”; here are garnered up all the correspondence of Lord Clarendon, and the little notes that passed between him and Charles I, in the lobby of the House of Commons during the debates that cost the King his crown; and here, too, are the correspondence of the Parliamentary generals, and the papers of the famous non-jurors. Passing to the upper story of the library building, we enter the Picture Gallery, which comprises three sides of the quadrangle. The pictures are chiefly portraits of benefactors of the University and of eminent literary men, by Vandyke, Lily, Kneller, Jansen, Reynolds, and others. Along the centre of the rooms are models of the ancient temples of Greece and Italy; a very curious one of a subterranean palace in Guzerat; an elaborate model of the Cathedral of Calcutta; and one of the Maison Carrée of Nismes in France. Among the rarities in the room are a chair made out of “The Golden Hind,” the ship in which Drake circumnavigated the globe, and the veritable lantern of Guy Fawkes.
Our sketch is long, and yet we have said nothing of the Arundel marbles; nothing of the Ratcliffe library, with the antique statues, busts, Italian marbles, and especially, its lofty dome, from the balustrade surrounding whose exterior you may have a vine panoramic view of the “city of spires 326 and pinnacles”; nothing of the magnificent Taylor Institute, with its art-treasures, including paintings, statues, original drawings by Raphael and Angelo, purchased at a cost of £7,000, and which are marked with all the beauty and grandeur that distinguished their public works; nothing of the Ashmolean Museum, or the New Museum (346 feet by 145), packed full with collections and specimens in every department of science; nothing of the exquisitely-beautiful Martyrs’ Memorial, 73 feet high, with richly-canopied statues, erected near the spot where the three Bishops, — Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, — in blinding smoke and tormenting flames, yielded up their lives at the stake; and we have barely alluded to St. Mary’s Church, whose “symmetric pride” so dazzles the beholder when the pale moonlight falls on spire, buttresses, statues, and pinnacles. As we look back in imagination upon these sights and scenes, to which we bade adieu but a few years ago, they flit before us, though fixed forever in the mind, like the pleasant memories of a dream. Even after a hurried peep at the glories of this vast establishment, we cease to wonder that Lipsius, on first beholding them, declared with fervor that one college of this university was greater in its power and splendor, that it glorified and illustrated the honors of literature more conspicuously by the pomps with which it invested the ministers and machinery of education, than any entire university of the Continent. Go, reader, and see for yourself this home of letters, and you will confess that we have not told you half the truth of this wondrous town, which you will evermore think of as
“A rich gem, in circling gold enshrined,
Where Isis’ waters wind
Along the sweetest shore
That ever felt fair Culture’s hands,
Or Spring’s embroidered mantle wore.”