le in its windows that some of the best authorities on
architecture have maintained that the stonework of these could not
have been made in the seventeenth century, but must have survived
from some older building; Ferguson, the historian of architecture,
when confronted with the fact that the college has still the detailed
accounts showing how, week by week, the Jacobean masons worked, swept
this evidence aside with the dictum--"No amount of documents could
prove what was impossible." But here the "impossible" really
happened.

The permanence of Gothic in Oxford is a point for professional
students; the studied simplicity, which is the great secret of
Wadham's beauty, concerns everyone. The effect of the garden front is
produced simply by the long lines of the string-courses and by the
procession of the beautifully proportioned gables. Neither here nor
in any part of the college is there a piece of carved work, except in
the classical screen, which marks the entry to the hall. It may be
noted that at Wadham and at Clare, Cambridge, the same effect is
produced by the same means; different as the two colleges are, the
one Gothic, the other classical, they have a restful and complete
beauty which makes them specially attractive. And this is due more
than anything else to the unbroken lines of the stonework, to which
everything is kept in due subordination. Clare was building during
half a century; Wadham was finished in three years; but both have
been fortunate in being left alone; they have not been "improved" by
later additions.

The chapel at Wadham has another feature of great interest for those
who visit it; the glass in it (not that in the ante-chapel) is all
contemporary with the college, and is a first-rate example of the
taste of early Stuart times. The apostles and the prophets of the
side windows have few merits, except their age, and the fact that
they illustrate what local craftsmen could do in the reign of James
I; but the big east window is of a very different rank. The college
authorities quarrelled with the local workmen, and introduced a
foreign craftsman, Bernard van Ling from London. In our day he would
have been called a "blackleg," and mobbed: perhaps, even in the
seventeenth century, he needed protection, for the college built him
a furnace in their garden, and he there produced the finest specimen
of seventeenth century glass that Oxford can show. Even for those who
are not students of glass, the