Wadham windows are attractive with
their two Jonahs and two whales, "The big one that swallowed Jonah,
and the little one that Jonah swallowed" (to quote an old college
jest).

The gardens at Wadham are famous; they have not the magnificence of
St. John's or the antiquarian charm of the old walls at New College
or Merton; but, for the variety and fine growth of their trees, they
are unsurpassed, though the glory of these is passing. Warden Wills
planted them in the days of the French Revolution, and trees have
their time to fall at last, even though they long survive their
planters.

WADHAM COLLEGE (2) HISTORY

"But these were merciful men, whose righteousness
hath not been forgotten. . . . Their bodies are buried
in peace; but their name liveth for evermore."
/Ecclesiasticus/, xliv. 10, 14.

The collection of pictures In Wadham Hall is probably the best of any
college in Oxford--always, of course, excepting Christ Church. It has
no single picture to be compared with the "Thomas Warton" at
Trinity, or the "Dr. Johnson" at Pembroke (both excellent works of
Reynolds), nor does it give so many fine examples of the work of
recent artists as do Trinity or Balliol; but it makes up for these
deficiencies by the number and the variety of its pictures.

Two only of the men they represent can be said to attain to the first
rank among England's worthies--Robert Blake, second as an admiral
only to Nelson and Oxford's greatest fighting man until the present
war, and Christopher Wren, "that prodigious young scholar" (as John
Evelyn calls him), who, as has been well said, would have been second
only to Newton among English mathematicians had he not chosen rather
to be indisputably the first of British architects. It is interesting
to note that Wadham shares with All Souls' two of the greatest names
in the Scientific Revival of the seventeenth century: both Wren and
Thomas Sydenham, the physician, migrated from Wadham to fellowships
at All Souls'.

Their connection with Wadham is part of what is probably the most
interesting single episode in the college history. When the
Parliament triumphed, and the King's partisans were turned out of
Oxford, the Lodgings at Wadham were given to the most distinguished
of her Wardens, John Wilkins, who, no doubt, owed his promotion to
the fact that he was the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell. In his
own day everyone knew him; he was a modera