scholars. There also is a great hall, where the
scholars dine. The funds for the support of this college are very
considerable; the masters live in a very good figure, and their
maintenance is sufficient to support it. They have all separate
dwellings in the house, and all possible conveniences appointed them.

The scholars have exhibitions at a certain time of continuance here, if
they please to study in the new college at Oxford, built by the same
noble benefactor, of which I shall speak in its order.

The clergy here live at large, and very handsomely, in the Close
belonging to the cathedral; where, besides the bishop's palace mentioned
above, are very good houses, and very handsomely built, for the
prebendaries, canons, and other dignitaries of this church. The Deanery
is a very pleasant dwelling, the gardens very large, and the river
running through them; but the floods in winter sometimes incommode the
gardens very much.

This school has fully answered the end of the founder, who, though he was
no great scholar, resolved to erect a house for the making the ages to
come more learned than those that went before; and it has, I say, fully
answered the end, for many learned and great men have been raised here,
some of whom we shall have occasion to mention as we go on.

Among the many private inscriptions in this church, we found one made by
Dr. Over, once an eminent physician in this city, on a mother and child,
who, being his patients, died together and were buried in the same grave,
and which intimate that one died of a fever, and the other of a dropsy:

"Surrepuit natum Febris, matrem abstulit Hydrops,
Igne Prior Fatis, Altera cepit Aqua."

As the city itself stands in a vale on the bank, and at the conjunction
of two small rivers, so the country rising every way, but just as the
course of the water keeps the valley open, you must necessarily, as you
go out of the gates, go uphill every wry; but when once ascended, you
come to the most charming plains and most pleasant country of that kind
in England; which continues with very small intersections of rivers and
valleys for above fifty miles, as shall appear in the sequel of this
journey.

At the west gate of this city was anciently a castle, known to be so by
the ruins more than by any extraordinary notice taken of it in history.
What they say of it, that the Saxon kings kept their court here, is
doubtful, and must be meant of the West Saxons only.