ighteen months after the King's
Restoration, he writes of the decay of learning and discipline in the
University. "Before the warr wee had scholars that made a thorough
search in scholasticall and polemicall divinity, in humane authors, and
naturall philosophy. But now scholars studie these things not more than
what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their
respective Colleges and the Universitie. Their aime is not to live as
students ought to do--viz., temperat, abstemious, and plaine and grave
in the apparel; but to live like gentlemen, to keep dogs and horses, to
turne their studies and coleholes into places to receive bottles, to
swash it in apparell, to wear long periwigs, &c., and the theologists to
ride abroad in grey coats with swords by their sides: the masters have
lost their respect by being themselves scandalous, and keeping company
with undergraduates." We cannot believe that Wadham escaped the
contagion, and remained what its Foundress meant it to be. It would be
interesting--but lack of space forbids--to compare the discipline
prescribed with that administered in Wadham now. Sufficient to say--what
indeed might go without saying--that the lapse of three hundred years
has made changes desirable and necessary.

The Foundress died on May 16, 1618, aged eighty-four. For five years she
had watched over the infancy of her College, and had seen it grow into a
vigorous child, with the promise of a robust manhood. The mythopoeic
faculty is strong in all of us, and in Wadham has grown up a tradition
that Dorothy was a strong-minded woman, and her husband a submissive man
without character and will. The myth rests only on the science of
physiognomy working on portraits,--a most insecure foundation. The
Founders' portraits depict him as a gentle, placid person with
melancholy eyes; her as a hard-featured woman with a long upper lip and
an almost cruel mouth. Against the testimony, always dubious, of
portraits, must be set the known facts of her loyal devotion in carrying
out his wishes with scrupulous fidelity, and the sacrifices she made in
doing so, of money and of laborious supervision in the last years of her
long life.

The College may do well to remember the closing of one of her last
letters to the Warden and Fellows: "Above all things, I would have you
to avoid contentions among yourselves, for without true charity there
cannot be a true Society."--(Wells' 'History of Wadham,' p. 44.) Sh