s! Troubles past forget!
On to fresh deeds! the gods love Brasenose yet."

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE

"But still the old quadrangle keeps the same,
The pelican is here;
Ancestral genius of the place, whose name
All Corpus men revere."
J. J. C., in "/The Pelican Record/," 1700.

[Plate XVI. Corpus Christi College : The First Quadrangle]

Corpus is emphatically, before all other colleges in Oxford, the
college of the Revival of Learning; its very foundation marked the
change from the old order of things to the new. Its Founder, Bishop
Foxe, of Winchester, was one of the great statesman-prelates to whom
mediaeval England owed so much, and he had a leading share in
arranging the two royal marriages which so profoundly affected the
history of our country, that of Henry VII's daughter, Margaret, with
the King of Scotland, and that of his son, afterwards Henry VIII,
with Catharine of Aragon.

After a life spent "in the service of God" "in the State," rather
than "in the Church," Foxe resolved to devote some of his great
wealth to a foundation for the strengthening of the Church. His first
intention was to found a college for monks, but, fortunately for his
memory and for Oxford, he followed the advice of his friend, Bishop
Oldham, of Exeter, who told him, in words truly prophetic, that the
days of monasteries were past: "What, my lord, shall we build housed
for a company of buzzing 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." In the next generation
the monasteries were all swept away, while Foxe's College remains a
monument of the Founder's pious liberality and of his friend's wise
prescience.

Corpus was the first institution in England where definite provision
was made for a teacher of the Greek Language, and Erasmus hailed it
with enthusiasm; in a letter to the first President of the new
college, he definitely contrasts the conciliatory methods of
Reformers in England with the more violent methods of those in
Germany, and counts Foxe's foundation, which he compares to the
Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes, among "the chief glories
of Britain."

Foxe, however, did not confine his benefactions to classical studies,
important as these were. He imported a German to teach his scholars
mathematics, and the scientific tastes of his students are well