is; the small and close
college of pre-Commission days has become one of the largest and most
intellectual in the University; but Winchester men in their Oxford
college fully hold their own in every way against the scholars from
the world outside, who are now admitted to share with them the
advantages of Wykeham's foundation.

The bishop's careful provision, however, of good teaching at his
school and in his college bore good fruit at first, whatever may have
been the result later. If Corpus is especially the college of the
revival of learning, New College had prepared the way, and the first
Englishman to teach Greek in Oxford was the New College fellow,
William Grocyn, whom Erasmus called the "most upright and best of all
Britons." From the same college, about the same time, came the patron
of Erasmus, Archbishop Warham, of whose saintly simplicity and love
of learning he gives so attractive a picture. Warham was not
forgetful of his old college, and presented the beautiful "linen
fold" panelling which still adorns the hall.

At the time of the Reformation, New College was especially attached
to the old form of the faith, and it has been maintained that the
dangerous lowness of the wicket entrance in the Gate Tower was due to
the deliberate purpose of the governing body, who resolved that
everyone who entered the college, however Protestant his views,
should bow his head under the statue of the Blessed Virgin above. At
any rate, one New College man in the seventeenth century attributed
his perversion to "the lively memorials of Popery in statues and
pictures in the gates and in the chapel of New College."

Certain it is that under Elizabeth, after the purging of the college
from its recusant fellows, who contributed a large share of the Roman
controversialists to the colleges of Louvain and Douai, Wykeham's
foundation sank, as has been said, into inglorious ease for two
centuries. Yet, during this period, it had the honour of producing
two of the Seven Bishops who resisted King James II's attack on the
English Constitution--one of them the saintly hymn writer, Thomas
Ken. And to the darkest days of the eighteenth century belongs the
most famous picture of the ideal Oxford life: "I spent many years, in
that illustrious society, in a well-regulated course of useful
discipline and studies, and in the agreeable and improving commerce
of gentlemen and of scholars; in a society where emulation without
envy, ambition with