trative, are discussed anywhere else; a Sheldonian debate is
fortunately very rare.

[Sidenote: Its History.]

The building is well suited for the purpose for which it was erected,
and so has not unnaturally been used as the meeting-place of the
nation's legislators, when, as has several times happened, Parliament
has been gathered in Oxford. Charles I's House of Commons met here in
1643, when Oxford was the royalist capital of England; and in 1665, when
Parliament fled from the Great Plague, and in 1681, when Charles II
fought and defeated the last Exclusion Parliament, the House of Commons
again occupied this House. It was on the latter occasion just preparing
to move across to the Sheldonian, and the printers there were already
packing up their presses to make room for the legislators, when Charles
suddenly dissolved it, and so completed his victory over Shaftesbury and
Monmouth.

A less suitable use for the Convocation House was its employment for
Charles I's Court of Chancery in 1643-4.

For the reasons given above, degree days are now much more important
functions than they used to be, and the Convocation House, never very
suitable for the ceremony, is now seldom used.

[Sidenote: Divinity School.]

But the Divinity School, which lies at a right angle to the Convocation
House, under the Bodleian Library proper, is a room which by its beauty
is worthy to be the scene of any University ceremony, for which it is
large enough, and degrees are still often conferred there as well as in
the Sheldonian.

The architecture of the School makes it the finest room which the
University possesses. It was building through the greater part of the
fifteenth century, which Professor Freeman thought the most
characteristic period of English architecture; and certainly the
strength and the weakness of the Perpendicular style could hardly be
better illustrated elsewhere. The story of its erection can be largely
traced in the _Epistolae Academicae_, published by the Oxford Historical
Society; they cover the whole of the fifteenth century, and though they
are wearisome in their constant harping on the same subject--the
University's need of money--they show a fertility of resource in
petition-framing and in the returning of thanks, which would make the
fortune of a modern begging-letter writer, whether private or public.
The earliest reference to the building of the proposed new School of
Divinity is in 1423, when the University