recorded Doctor of
Divinity at Oxford. But this theory is very doubtful, and Hearne,
most famous of Oxford antiquarians, and probably the best known
member of St. Edmund Hall, did not believe it. In any case, most of
the buildings of the hall date long after St. Edmund, and belong to
the middle of the seventeenth century. Hearne himself is sufficient
to give interest to any foundation. He was a great scholar and a
careful editor of the early English Chroniclers in days when learning
was decaying in Oxford; even now his work as an editor is not
altogether superseded. But it is not to this that he owes his fame;
it is rather to the fact that he has high rank among the diarists of
England, and the first place among those of Oxford. For thirty years
(1705-1735) in which latter year he died, he poured into his diary
everything that interested him--scholarly notes, political rumours,
personal scandal, remarks on manners and customs. The 150 volumes
came into the possession of his fellow Jacobite, Richard Rawlinson,
the greatest of the benefactors of the Bodleian, and only now are
they being fully edited; ten volumes have been issued by the Oxford
Historical Society, and still there are a few more years of his life
to cover. As a specimen of Hearne's style may be quoted his remarks,
when the sermon on Christmas Day, 1732, was postponed till 11 a.m.

"The true reason is that people might lie in bed the longer. . . .
The same reason hath made them, in almost all places in the
University, alter the times of prayer, and the hour of dinner (which
used to be 11 o'clock) in almost every place (Christ Church must be
excepted); which ancient discipline and learning and piety strangely
decay." Hearne was critical rather of past history than of present-
day rumour; he records complacently (in 1706) that at Whitchurch,
when the dissenters had prepared a great quantity of bricks "to erect
a capacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and spoyled
them all, and confounded their Babel." Hearne would by no means have
approved of the Methodist principles of six members of his hall in
the next generation, who were expelled for their religious views
(1768). A furious controversy, with many pamphlets, raged over them,
and the Public Orator of the University wrote a bulky indictment of
them, which was answered by another pamphlet with the picturesque
title of "Goliath Slain." Pamphleteers were more free in their
language in those days