And it does not require much imagination for a student, in a building
like Merton Library, to conjure up the picture of his mediaeval
predecessor, sitting on his hard wooden bench, with his chained MSS.
volume on the shelf above, and poring over the crabbed pages in the
unwarmed, half-lighted chamber. If the picture brings with it the
thought of the transitoriness of human endeavour, and if the words of
the Teacher seem doubly true, "Of making of books there is no end,
and much study is a weariness of the flesh," yet in the fresh life of
young Oxford, such reflections are only salutary; pessimism, despair
of humanity, are not vices likely to flourish among undergraduates in
the healthy society of modern colleges.

Those only, it might be said, can properly reform the present who
understand the past, and it is perhaps the spirit of the Merton
Library, at once old and new, which has inspired the statesmen whom
Merton has sent to take part in the government of Britain during the
last half-century. Lord Randolph Churchill, the founder of Tory
democracy, his present-day successor in the same role, Lord
Birkenhead, and the ever young Lord Halsbury are men of the type
which Walter de Merton wished to train, "for the service of God in
Church and State," men who champion the existing order, but who are
willing to develop and improve it on the old lines.




ORIEL COLLEGE


"Here at each coign of every antique street