te man, who interceded for
Royalist scholars under the Commonwealth, and tempered the penal laws
to Non-Conformists, when later he was Bishop of Chester. He was even
better known to the "philosophers" as the inventor of a universal
language and as curious for every advance in Natural Science. But, in
our day, he is only remembered for his connection with the Royal
Society; that most illustrious body grew out of the meetings held
weekly at his Lodgings and the similar meetings held in London; when
later these two movements were united, Wilkins was secretary of the
committee which drew up the rules for their future organization, and
thus prepared the way for the Royal Charter, given to the Society in
1662. When the Royal Society celebrated its 250th anniversary in
1912, many of its members made a pilgrimage to "its cradle" (or what
was, at any rate, "/one/ of its cradles").

Wadham also produced, among other early members of the Royal Society,
its historian, Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, who somehow, as
"Pindaric Sprat" (he was the friend and also the editor of /Abraham
Cowley/), found his way into Johnson's /Lives of the Poets/; he is,
however, more likely to be remembered because his subserviency, when
he was Dean of Westminster to James II, has earned him an unenviable
place in Macaulay's gallery of Revolution worthies and unworthies.
Sprat, it should be added, was an exception to the prevailing Whig
tradition of Wadham, which found a worthy exponent in Arthur Onslow,
the greatest Speaker of the House of Commons, who ruled over that
august body for a record period, thirty-four years (1727-1761), and
formed its rules and traditions in the period when it was first
asserting its claim to govern.

[Plate XXIII. Wadham College : The Hall Interior]

Two centuries later than the Royal Society days at Wadham, another
group of philosophers was trained there, who thought that the views
of their master, Auguste Comte, were going to make as great a
revolution in human thought as the views of a Bacon or a Newton. All
the leading English Positivists were at Wadham--Congreve, Beesley,
Bridges, Frederic Harrison, of whom the last alone survives, to fight
with undiminished vigour for the causes which he championed in Mid-
Victorian days. Positivism had less influence than its adherents
expected, but it powerfully affected for a time the political and the
religious thought of England.

Forty years later another famous group o