elles, which he much applauded, and
thanked me muche for putting him in minde of him; he also then sayd
he would have his Colledge to be called Wadham Colledge."

[Illustration: NICHOLAS WADHAM.]

Our ancestors knew what they meant and how to express it in good
English, though their spelling was irregular. In his instructions the
Founder anticipated reforms made by the Commissioners of 1853 and 1882.
They had the benefit of two and a half centuries' experience of national
and academical life to guide them: Nicholas Wadham foresaw things and
needs not foreseen or understood by his contemporaries or predecessors.
His Fellowships were to be, all of them, open to laymen, and terminable
after a tenure of years in which a young lawyer, of physician, might
maintain and prepare himself till he had made a practice: eighteen years
were allowed for that purpose, instead of the scanty seven with which a
Prize Fellow must now content himself. It may be that Nicholas gave too
much and the Commissioners gave too little; but that is a doubtful
question.

The Wardenship, as well as the Fellowships, could by the Founder's
intention, and in the first draft of the Statutes, be held without the
condition of Holy Orders. The Foundress, in this matter only, disobeyed
her husband, and at the wish of the Society altered the Statutes, and by
binding the Warden to take his Doctorate in Divinity made the office
clerical for two hundred and sixty years. In all other points she
followed the instructions which she may herself to some extent have
inspired. Her Visitor was to be the Bishop of the diocese in which she
had spent her life; her Warden was to be "a virtuous and honourable man
of stainless life, not a bishop, nor a foreigner but born in Britain":
the last word is significant. It was inserted in the Statutes by James
I. in place of "England": even Dr Griffiths is known to have spoken of
England as the kingdom in which he lived: further, the Warden was to be
"thirty years old at least, and unmarried."

There is nothing in Dorothy's grim features to suggest that she would
have approved of one of the reforms or perversions of her Statutes
ordained by the Commissioners, which gives a place in her College to a
married Warden and to married Fellows, much less that she would have
been willing to marry one of them herself. Thereby hangs a tale which
might suggest a new situation to our exhausted novelists. The Foundress,
so the story runs, chose