takes. He listened silently to the
great man's argument: next morning, at a large breakfast party given in
the College Common Room to the members of the British Association which
met at Oxford in the year 1847, he quietly laid the Account-Book beside
the plate of the unhappy dogmatist. The fact that the Chapel is
Perpendicular while the Quadrangle is late Gothic has been explained by
the late Mr J. H. Parker's reasonable, perhaps fanciful, suggestion that
"the architect desired to emphasise by this variation of style the
religious and secular uses of the several structures."[1]

Wadham has been described by Ayliffe, and without much protest, as being
"in respect of beauty the most regular and uniform of any in the
University." It is the best specimen of that late Gothic style which
makes the charm of Oxford, and which Mr Jackson has helped to preserve
by his work there and elsewhere.

The beauty of Wadham is of a singularly quiet and simple kind, the
effect of proportion, of string-courses and straight lines, marred by
little decoration. Except for buildings annexed from time to time, so
plain that they are no disfigurement, the College stands as it stood
three centuries ago. Mr Andrew Lang has remarked that it is "the only
College in Oxford which has not been fiddled with"; this is high praise,
and gratefully accepted. One defect the College has: the resources of
the Founders sufficed to build only one quadrangle; they had not counted
the cost of the stately Chapel and Hall, and little was left for College
rooms. When will our benefactor come? But it would be ungracious in
Wadham men to criticise the Founders of their College, to whom they owe
the most beautiful of homes. It stood fifty years ago almost in the
country, with nothing north or east of it save the Museum and green
fields. It is still in a great measure what it was called, the Country
College; for though it has neighbours close to it in Mansfield and
Manchester Colleges, yet these and the cricket-grounds, which lie
between Wadham and the Cherwell, and further north, the Parks, make one
spacious region of almost country,--a region of grass and trees and
silence, broken only by the sounds of birds, and the shouts of Matthew
Arnold's "young barbarians all at play."

It is a quiet old College,--not old as age is reckoned in Oxford,--like
some great Elizabethan or Jacobean country-house turned into a College,
splendid yet homely, possessing that double charm w