illustrated by the picturesque and curious dial, still in the centre
of his College Quad, which was constructed by one of them in the
reign of Elizabeth. It is well shown in our picture, as are also
Foxe's charming low buildings, almost unaltered since the time of
their Founder.
But it has been on the humanistic, rather than on the scientific,
side that Corpus men have specially distinguished themselves. The
first century of the College existence produced the two great
Elizabethan champions of Anglicanism. Bishop Jewel, whose "Apology"
was for a long period the great bulwark of the English Church against
Jesuit attacks, had laid the foundations of his great learning in the
Corpus Library, still--after that of Merton--the most picturesque in
Oxford; he often spent whole days there, beginning an hour before
Early Mass, i.e. at 4 a.m., and continuing his reading till 10 p.m.
"There were giants on the earth in those days." Even more famous is
the "judicious Hooker," who resided in the college for sixteen years,
and only left it when, by the wiles of a woman, he, "like a true
Nathanael who feared no guile" (as his biographer, Isaac Walton,
writes), was entrapped into a marriage which "brought him neither
beauty nor fortune." The first editor of his great work, /The
Ecclesiastical Polity/, was a Corpus man, and it was only fitting
that the Anglican Revival of the nineteenth century should receive
its first impulse from the famous Assize Sermon (in 1833) of another
Corpus scholar, John Keble.
Corpus has been singularly fortunate in its history, no doubt because
its Presidents have been so frequently men of mark for learning and
for character. Even in the dark period of the eighteenth century it
recovered sooner than the rest of the University, and one of its sons
records complacently that "scarcely a day passed without my having
added to my stock of knowledge some new fact or idea." A charming
picture of the life of the scholars of Corpus at the beginning of the
last century is given in Stanley's /Life of Arnold/; for the famous
reformer of the English public-school system was at the College
immediately after John Keble, whom he followed as fellow to Oriel, on
the other side of the road. It need hardly be added that in those
days an Oriel Fellowship was the crown of intellectual distinction in
Oxford.
Bishop Foxe had set up his college as a "ladder" by which, "with one
side of it virtue and the other knowledge," men mi
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