onounced by some good
judges to be the most beautiful in Oxford. This is not, however, the
usual opinion, nor is it my own, though, perhaps, it might be
accepted if modified into the statement that Wadham is the most
complete and perfect example of the ordinary type of college. However
that may be, there are three points as to these buildings which are
indisputable, and which are also most interesting to any lover of
English architecture. They are:
(1) Wadham is less altered than any other college in Oxford.
(2) It is the finest illustration of the fact that the Gothic
style survived in Oxford when it was being rapidly superseded
elsewhere.
(3) No building in Oxford (very few buildings anywhere) owe their
effect so completely to their simplicity and their absence of
adornment.

These three points must be illustrated in detail.

Wadham is the youngest college in Oxford, for all those that have
been founded since are refoundations of older institutions (but, as
its first stone was laid in 1610, it has a respectable antiquity);
yet the Front Quad is completely unaltered in design, and of the
actual stonework, hardly any has had to be renewed. Could the
Foundress return to life, she would find the college, which was to
her as a son, completely familiar.

The second point is a more important one. In the reign of Elizabeth,
classical architecture was being rapidly introduced; Gothic was
giving way before the style of Palladio, even as the New Learning was
banishing the schoolmen from the schools. This change is markedly
seen in the Elizabethan buildings at Cambridge, especially in Dr.
Caius' work, so far as it has been allowed to survive in the college
that bears his name. But in Oxford the old style went on for half the
following century; in the great building period of the first two
Stuarts the old models were still faithfully copied. It was the
genius of Wren, which, by its magnificent success in the Sheldonian,
ultimately caused the new style to prevail over the late Gothic, of
which his own college, Wadham, is so striking an example.

In Wadham the conservative Oxford workmen were inspired by the
presence of Somerset masons, whom the Foundress brought up from her
own county, so rich in the splendid Gothic of the fifteenth century.
Hence the chapel of Wadham (shown in Plate XXII) is to all intents
and purposes the choir of a great Somerset church. So marked is the
old sty