ENLARGEMENT OF THE OLD HALL.

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Common Room by Sir Martin Shee has been engraved by Cousins. Dr. Hall's second lieutenant, WILLIAM BEACH THOMAS (classical Tutor, 1826-30, and Dean; Public Examiner, 1827-28), was a fine scholar, a conscientious and courteous don. Mr. Thomas became canon of St. David's in 1859. He died July 21, 1876, aged seventy-seven. His brother FRANCIS (Fellow 1831-43) was denounced by the Times for a magisterial decision. Archdeacon GEORGE HOUGH, senior Colonial Chaplain at the Cape, was Fellow 1812-3. He died Aug. 1, 1867. A well-remembered kin-Fellow of this time (afterwards Bursar), was JOHN SHEFFIELD Cox (Fellow 1820-60), described by one who knew him in the fifties as a good instance of the old style Senior Fellow-cracked and eccentric, exhibiting a mixture of shrewdness with some absurdity; a fisherman of course. At one time a hardworking curate of Spitalfields, he died Rector of Sibston. Many absurd anecdotes of him are remembered there. RICHARD FRENCH LAURENCE (Fellow 1821-3) was Bodley's Sub-Librarian (1822) and afterwards Treasurer of Cashel. Ob. Sept. 29, 1882.

Dr. Hall married a Miss Kennedy, aunt of the famous scholar. His elder son, GEORGE CHARLES HALL (Scholar 1830-1), was Select Preacher 1845-6; another, WILLIAM DAVID HALL (matriculated 1834), became a Fellow of New College.

Early in 1824 it was resolved that, 'the 29th June ensuing being the two-hundredth anniversary of the day on which the Letters Patent of King James the First were dated, constituting Broadgates Hall a College by the name of Pembroke College, the same be observed as a grand Gaudy or day of rejoicing.' Three years before, the Hall had been somewhat enlarged and beautified from the designs of Mr. Harris. At the eastern end part of the passage communicating with the Back Lodgings was taken in; to the west the room was lengthened by four feet, and the oriel, with painted glass by Egginton, thrown out. The old window had in it the arms of the University only. At the same time the position of the side windows was altered, the roof of the transverse

1 He was descended from Elizabeth Dewe, granddaughter of Richard Tesdale. Her great-grandson, Mr. Cox's great-grandfather, married Catherine Sophia, daughter of John Duke of Buckingham, and it was at Althorp that Mr. Cox was baptized (Jan. 7, 1799). Dr. Sergrove the Master was Elizabeth Dewe's greatgreat-grandson.

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2 July 27, 1620. Thomas James, Doctor in Divinitye Justice of Peace undertaketh to glasse one of the windowes of the Hall at his owne charges.

'(Note.) The greatest windowe in the new Hall is glassed at his charge. 'August 7, 1620. Lionell Day, Bachelour in Divinity Rector of Whichford in the County of Warwicke, undertaketh to build a whole windowe in the new Hall, stone work, iron, glasse, &c.' (From Principal Clayton's Contributors' Book.)

430

BICENTENARY GAUDY.

portion of the hall raised, and the ornamental cornice with its armorials added. Warmth was obtained by a hot-air dispenser placed in the old buttery. A handsome high table and side-board were given by the Master; the Gothic chairs used in the present Hall were given chiefly by the Vicegerent and Fellows. Among the other contributors were Dr. Maurice Swabey, the eminent civilian, Sir John Sewell, Davies Gilbert, Dr. Valpy, and Dean Durand of Guernsey. The total expense to the end of 1824 was £1,839 8s. 3d., in which is included the making a new passage from the quadrangle to the Back Lodgings. The College itself contributed £450.

The following account of the Bicentenary celebration is from the Oxford Herald of July 3, 1824:

'On Wednesday last, the day of the public Commemoration of Benefactors to the University, the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College celebrated the commencement of the third century from the endowment of the College by a sumptuous entertainment in the hall, to which such of the present and former Members of the College were invited as, from their local situation, could be expected to attend. At half-past five the company sat down to dinner, all the tables being filled. After the toast "To the pious Memory of the first Founders of Pembroke College,” an appropriate Latin Oration was delivered by Mr. Edmund Goodenough Bayly, the Senior Founder's-kin Scholar on the Tesdale Foundation'. The evening was spent in the greatest hilarity, amid the pleasing recollection of past intimacies, and with lively and reiterated demonstrations of that reciprocal esteem and attachment which, in a well regulated society, will ever exist between the governors and the governed.'

On the same morning, Dr. Hall being then Vice-Chancellor, he, 'accompanied by the Heads of Houses, the young Nobility of the University, &c., proceeded in their dress robes from Pembroke College to the Theatre' for the Encaenia. His vice-cancellariate had been uneventful. On being admitted to office in 1820 he spoke of himself as 'primus qui fasces in Collegium suum introduxerat.' There is a drawing of Dr. Hall by W. Wright in the Hope collection, dated Sept. 1824.

After the erection of the Chapel the College buildings had undergone no further change till the early days of the Gothic movement. Any reaction from the prevailing utilitarian meanness of the closing Georgian era would have been respectable, and this movement was at first an enthusiasm, the handmaid of a revival of Faith. Yet it effaced a thousand artistic charms, to give us a machine-like imitation by inferior workmen of an inimitable past. We do things better now,

1 Entered 1820. Vide supra, p. 426.

THE OLD QUADRANGLE TRANSFORMED.

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but in an eclectic spirit, sticking angels or fiends here and coats of arms there, without believing much either in the supernatural or in chivalry.

I make these remarks because, so far as I am aware, the Pembroke new frontage was the earliest specimen, on any scale, of revived medieval building in Oxford, where however the tradition of the Pointed style had never quite died out'. The doctrinal revival of 1833 followed the architectural renaissance, both of course being parts of the same movement of mind. Restoration, more or less on the lines of the old design, had begun at Magdalen as early as 1822. The Perpendicular oriel of the present Pembroke Library, as stated above, was thrown out in 1821 2. In 1825 however Balliol was building in the classical style. The Gothic front of Pembroke dates from 1829. Within a year or two St. Mary Hall, All Souls, and Exeter were being transformed in that taste.

The description of the work in Carlos's Skelton, 1843, will not be generally accepted. The entire front of the College has been recently new faced in the Gothic style, of which it is a poor example.' However ill-advised the disguising of a good old building behind a mask of modern fifteenth-century masonry, the design has both grace and proportion. The result however is that a visitor casually examining the College buildings would find nothing except the Grecian chapel to suggest to him that Pembroke College had any existence before the time of William IV. There are worse looking Colleges in Oxford, but there is none so entirely divested of any marks of antiquity. About the unhappy transformation of St. Aldate's Church-pictorially and historically a unit with Pembroke a word has already been spoken.

In Lewis's Topographical Dictionary the Old Quadrangle is described as 'the work of different periods, but regularly built. The interior has been newly faced with Bath stone, and altered from the Palladian to the later English style. The northern front and Master's lodging were also originally Palladian, and have been appropriately decorated after a design of Mr. Daniel Evans of Oxford. The oriel over the gateway is constructed on the model of the remains of one in John of Gaunt's palace at Lincoln.' More alteration was made on the exterior than the inside of the quadrangle. The outside dormers were

See Gentleman's Magazine, LX. (1790), pt. ii. p. 789.

'The striking Almanack top of 1824 represents the building from this side. I know of no picture of its earlier appearance, except Storer's cuts of 1821. One gives 'Summaster's' and a bit of the Hall; but the Hall is almost hidden by a shrub. The other (in Chalmers) shows an oblong west window.

432 TRANSFORMATION OF THE OLD QUADRANGLE.

now masked by a parapetted third storey, and the fenestration altered to alternately a large and a small window, two large ones being together in the middle of each row. All the windows were given hoodmouldings. The classical gate-tower, transformed to match the rest of the frontage, was raised one storey, and crowned by an elegant parapet of open stone work, the design of which was suggested by Mr. Cleoburey, one of the Fellows. A prominent and handsome pinnacled oriel, adorned with sculptured heads of founders and worthies, now overhung the gateway, and another shallower oriel answered to it further east. It will be noticed that at the eastern corner is carved a bust of her present Majesty, with her new crown and sceptre, and the date 1838. In Skelton's print, however (1831), and in Mackenzie's (1836), the work is shown as finished, but the east end differs from the present design. The Almanack top of 1838 gives the front as it actually is. The explanation is that, in the hope of acquiring the Wolsey Almshouse, demolishing it, and then building a handsome front towards Christ Church, the College left the eastern end in a plain and unfinished state. But when this hope was abandoned, the eastern end was completed by the same architect, Mr. Evans. This was resolved upon on the first anniversary of the Queen's Accession. In Ollier's Views of Oxford (1843) there is a large plate by Delamotte showing the completed frontage and part of St. Aldate's, viz. Docklinton's aisle and the chamber over it. Carl Rundt, painter to the King of Prussia, has a plate of the front, looking east, in Views of the Most Picturesque Colleges, Part I. But in his drawing it lacks a parapet.

In the interior of the quadrangle an embattled parapet now ran over the second row of windows, just showing the roof, and the dormers in their old positions. The ground-floor and first-floor windows were re-arranged, but united as before with stringcourses. The large dormers were Gothicized and crowned with parapets. The drawing here presented, which I take from N. Whittock's Microcosm of Oxford, gives a view of the interior of the quadrangle in 1829, just before the alterations. A vignette in Napier's Boswell, by C. Stanfield, R.A., shows it during the alterations. Mackenzie shows it in 1836. The roof has been newly covered (in 1870) with excellent green Stonesfield slates, but the inferior stone with which the building was faced, and the introduction, everywhere but in the attics, of sashes and large panes have sadly robbed it of its character, much as sightless eyeballs make a face expressionless. The old masonry can be seen outside the east end, from the Almshouse. Over Brewers Street, the irregular back of the