crafty device whereby the owner of the advowson could appropriate the tithes of a benefice to the support of any corporation which might be considered a religious foundation. The old monasteries had benefited to some extent from this disendowment of the secular clergy, the Augustinian canons, during the twelfth century, being the chief gainers by the pillage. When the rage for founding colleges came in, and the awful ravages of the Black Death had depopulated whole districts, the fashion of alienating the revenues of the country parsons and diverting them into the new channel grew to be quite a rage. The colleges of secular priests living together in common, or what it is now the fashion to call a clergy house, might be and were strictly religious foundations; and could the colleges of scholars, of teachers and learners who presumably were all priests, or intended for the priesthood, be regarded as less religious than the others? So it came to pass that the tithes of parish after parish were diverted into a new channel, and these very colleges at Cambridge which were professedly meant to raise the standard of education among the seculars were endowed at the expense of those same secular clergy. In order that the country parsons might be better educated, it was arranged that the country parsons should be impoverished! Seven new colleges opened in less than thirty years at Cambridge alone! Think what this must have meant. I suspect that Oxford had attracted the reading men, and Cambridge possessed charms for the fast ones. How else are we to explain Archbishop Stratford's stringent order in 1342 for the repression of the dandyism that prevailed among the young scholars? These young Cantabs of the fourteenth century were exquisites of the first water. Their furtrimmed cloaks and their tippets; their shoes of all the colours of the rainbow; their dainty girdles, bejewelled and gilt, were a sight to see. And then their hair! positively curled and powdered, and growing over their shoulders, too; and when they passed their fingers through the curls, look you, there were rings on their fingers! Call you these scholars? Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenforde' was of a very different type: For all that he might of his frendes hente Nevertheless it can hardly have been but that the foundation of so many colleges at Cambridge brought in a stricter discipline; the new collegiate life of the scholars began. Perhaps for the majority of readers no part of Mr. Clark's great work will prove so attractive as the last four hundred pages, with their delightful essays on The Component Parts of a College.' Here we have traced out for us, in the most elaborate manner, the gradual development of the collegiate idea, from the time when it expressed itself in a building that had no particular plan, down to our own days, when colleges vie with one another in architectural splendour and in the lavish completeness of their arrangements. At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of assuming that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It is almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was adopted very gradually. Again, we are often assured that the colleges at the two older universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly be propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding of the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an attempt to supersede them. More startling still is the fact that a college did not at first necessarily imply that there was a chapel attached. So far from this being the case, it is certain that Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge, never had a chapel till the present building was consecrated in 1632. It was with great difficulty that the Countess of Pembroke in 1366 was allowed to build a chapel within the precincts of her new college; and, so far from these convenient adjuncts to a collegiate establishment having been considered an essential in early times, no less than eight of the college chapels at Cambridge and four at Oxford date from a time after the Reformation. In the fourteenth century and later the young scholars, as a rule, attended their parish church. Sometimes the college added on an aisle for the accommodation of its members; sometimes it obtained a licence to use a room in which Divine Service might be conducted for a time; once the founder of a college erected a collegiate quire in the middle of the parish church, a kind of gigantic pew, for the accommodation of his scholars. Downing College has never had a chapel to the present hour. Of all the developments, however, in the college idea, none has been more remarkable than that of the master's lodge. In the fourteenth century the master of a college was but primus inter pares, and the distance between him and his fellows or scholars was less than that which exists now between the commanding officer of a regiment in barracks and his brother officers. The master had no sinecure; the discipline of the place depended upon him almost entirely, for in those days the monarchical idea was in the ascendant ; the king was a real king, the bishop a real bishop, the master a real master. Everything was referred to him, everything originated with him, everything was controlled by him. But as for the accommodation asigned to him in the early colleges, it was very inferior indeed to that which every undergraduate at Trinity or St. John's expects to find in our time. The Provost of Oriel in 1329 was permitted by the statutes to dine apart if he pleased, and to reside outside the precincts of the college if he chose to provide for himself another residence; but this was clearly an exceptional case, for the master was at this time the actual founder of the college, and Adam de Brune might be presumed to know what was good for his successors in the office for which he himself had made provision. But for generations the master enjoyed no more than a couple of chambers at the most, and it was not till the sixteenth century that an official residence was provided, and then such residence consisted only of lodgings a little more spacious and convenient than those of any of the fellows, and in no case separated from the main buildings of the college. Even when masters of colleges began to marry (and the earliest instance of this seems to have been Dr. Heynes, Master of Queen's College, in 1529), it was long before the master's wife was so far recognised as to be received within the precincts; and as late as 1576, when the fellows of King's complained of their provost's wife being seen within the college, Dr. Goad replied that she had not been twice in the college Quad' in her life, as far as he knew. When the great break-up came in the next century, then the establishment of the master demanded increased accommodation for his family, and the master's lodge began to grow slowly, until university architects of the nineteenth century displayed their exalted sense of what was due to the dignity of a head of a house' by erecting two such palaces as the lodges of Pembroke and St. John's Colleges ; for the glorification of the artist, it may be, but whether for the advantage of the college, the university, or the occupants of the aforesaid lodges may be reasonably doubted. One master's lodge in Cambridge is at this moment let, presumably for the benefit of the head of the house, whose official residence it is; and, if things go on as they are tending, the day may come-who knows how soon?-when Cambridge shall at last be able to boast of a really good hotel, 'in a central and very desirable situation, commanding a delightful view of what shall we say ?-fitted up with every convenience, and formerly known as the Master's Lodge of St. Boniface College.' I am inclined to think that there is such a thing as architecture run to seed. If any one imagines that it would be possible within the limits of a single essay to follow Mr. Clark through the exhaustive processes of investigation which he has gone through, or to summarise at all satisfactorily the results which he has arrived at and set forth in so masterly a manner, let such an one spend only a single hour in turning over the leaves of these splendid volumes. The exquisite illustrations alone (which count by hundreds), and the elaborate maps and ground-plans, are full of surprises; they speak with an eloquence of their own to such as have eyes to see and in whom there is a spark of imagination to enlighten the paths along which their accomplished guide can lead them. Do you think that such VOL. XX.-No. 117. 3 F a work as this tells us no more than how the stone walls rose and the buildings assumed their present form, and court was added to court, and libraries and museums and lecture-rooms and all the rest of them were constructed by the professional gentlemen who drew the plans, and piled up by the masons and the bricklayers? Then you will do it a grievous injustice. Horizons rich with trembling spires On violet twilights, lose their fires if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The authors of this architectural history knew better than anyone else that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great national institution. They knew that these walls-some so old and crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely-bear upon them the marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred years. Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you must study the life; and the converse is true also. Either explains, and is the indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the other. Mr. Clark could not have produced this exhaustive history of university and collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound insight into the student life of Cambridge from the earliest times. How did they live, these young scholars in the early days? Through what whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed? As the centuries have rolled on, have the youth of England become better or wiser than their sires? Neither better nor wiser seems to be the answer. The outer man is not as he was; the real moral and intellectual stamina of Englishmen has at least suffered no deterioration. Our habits are different; our dress, our language, the look of our homes, are all other than they were. Our wants have multiplied immensely; the amount of physical discomfort and downright suffering which our ancestors were called upon to endure sent up the death-rate doubtless to a figure which to us would be appalling. We start from a standing-point in moral, social, and intellectual convictions so far in advance of that of our forefathers that they could not conceive of such a terminus ad quem as serves us as a terminus a quo. In other words, we begin at a point in the line which they never conceived could be reached. Yet the more closely we look into the past the more do we see how history in all essentials is for ever repeating herself-impossible though it may be to put the clock back for ourselves. How significant is the fact that through all these centuries of building and planting, of pulling down and raising up, the makers of Cambridge-that is, the men who achieved for her her place in the realms of thought, inquiry, and discovery-never seemed to have thought that Death could play much havoc among them. In the old monasteries there was always a cemetery. The canon or the monk who passed into the cloister came there once for all— to live and die within the walls of his monastery. The scholar who came to get all the learning he could, and who settled in some humble hostel or some unpretentious college of the old type, came to spend some few years there, but no more. He came to live his life, and when there was no more life in him-no more youthful force, activity, and enthusiasm-there was no place for him at Cambridge. There they wanted men of vigour and energy, not past their work. Die? No! as long as he was verily alive it was well that he should stay and toil. When he was a dying man, better he should go. No college at Cambridge had a cemetery. Let the dead bury their dead! Indeed, it must have been hard for the weak and sickly-the lad of feeble frame and delicate organisation-to stand that rugged old Cambridge life. College rooms' in our time suggest something like the ne plus ultra of æsthetic elegance and luxury. We find it hard to realise the fact that for centuries a Fellow of a college was expected to have two or three chamber fellows who shared his bed-room with him; and that his study was no bigger than a study at the schoolhouse at Rugby, and very much smaller than a fourth-form boy enjoys at many a more modern public school. At the hostels, which were of course much more crowded than the colleges were, a separate bed was the privilege of the few. What must have been the condition of those semi-licensed receptacles for the poorer students in the early times, when we find as late as 1598 that in St. John's College there were no less than seventy members of the college' accommodated' (!) in twenty-eight chambers. This was before the second court at St. John's was even begun, and yet these seventy Johnians were living in luxury when compared with their predecessors of two hundred years before. 'In the early colleges the windows of the chambers were unglazed and closed with wooden shutters; their floors were either of clay or tiled; and their halls and ceilings were unplastered.' We have express testimony that at Corpus Christi College not even the master's lodge had been glazed and panelled before the beginning of the sixteenth century. By an inventory which Mr. Clark has printed, dated July 3, 1451, it appears that in the master's lodge at King's College, 'the wealthiest lodge of the university, there was then only one chair; that the tables were supported on trestles; and that those who used them sat on forms or stools.' As for the chambers and studies, not only were they destitute of anything in the shape of stoves or fire-places, but their walls were absolutely bare, while in the upper chambers there were not even lath and plaster |