"For the house of Balliol is builded ever
By all the labours of all her sons,
And the great deed wrought and the grand endeavour
Will be hers as long as the Isis runs."
F. S. BOAS

The story is told of the old Greek admirals, after their victory at
Salamis over the Persian king, that, when invited to name the two
most deserving commanders, they each put their own name first, and
then one and all put the Athenian Themistocles second. If a vote, on
these principles, were taken in Oxford as to which was the best
college, there is little doubt that Balliol would secure most of the
second votes.

It is one of the three oldest colleges, and actually has been in
occupation of its present site longer than any other of our Oxford
foundations--for more than six centuries and a half. Yet its
greatness is but a thing of yesterday compared to the antiquity of
Oxford, and it is fitting that a college which has come to the front
in the nineteenth century should be mainly housed in nineteenth
century buildings.

Balliol has indeed ceased to be the "most satisfactory pile and range
of old lowered and gabled edifices," which Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in
the "fifties" of the last century. The painful imitation of a French
chateau, the work of Sir Alfred Waterhouse, which forms the main part
of our picture, was put up about 1868 (mainly by the munificence of
Miss Hannah Brackenbury), and only the old hall and the library,
which lie behind, remain of Pre-Reformation Balliol.