the deliberate purpose of the governing body, who resolved that
everyone who entered the college, however Protestant his views,
should bow his head under the statue of the Blessed Virgin above. At
any rate, one New College man in the seventeenth century attributed
his perversion to "the lively memorials of Popery in statues and
pictures in the gates and in the chapel of New College."

Certain it is that under Elizabeth, after the purging of the college
from its recusant fellows, who contributed a large share of the Roman
controversialists to the colleges of Louvain and Douai, Wykeham's
foundation sank, as has been said, into inglorious ease for two
centuries. Yet, during this period, it had the honour of producing
two of the Seven Bishops who resisted King James II's attack on the
English Constitution--one of them the saintly hymn writer, Thomas
Ken. And to the darkest days of the eighteenth century belongs the
most famous picture of the ideal Oxford life: "I spent many years, in
that illustrious society, in a well-regulated course of useful
discipline and studies, and in the agreeable and improving commerce
of gentlemen and of scholars; in a society where emulation without
envy, ambition without jealousy, contention without animosity,
incited industry and awakened genius; where a liberal pursuit of
knowledge and a genuine freedom of thought was raised, encouraged,
and pushed forward by example, by commendation, and by authority."
These were the words of Bishop Lowth, whose great work on /The Poetry
of the Hebrews/ was delivered as lectures for the Chair of Poetry at
Oxford.

The spirit of Oxford has never been better described, and even that
bitter critic, the great historian Gibbon, admits that Lowth
practised what he preached, and that he was an ornament to the