The Charm of Oxford by Joseph Wells
page 69 of 102 (67%)
page 69 of 102 (67%)
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reign of Elizabeth. It is well shown in our picture, as are also
Foxe's charming low buildings, almost unaltered since the time of their Founder. But it has been on the humanistic, rather than on the scientific, side that Corpus men have specially distinguished themselves. The first century of the College existence produced the two great Elizabethan champions of Anglicanism. Bishop Jewel, whose "Apology" was for a long period the great bulwark of the English Church against Jesuit attacks, had laid the foundations of his great learning in the Corpus Library, still--after that of Merton--the most picturesque in Oxford; he often spent whole days there, beginning an hour before Early Mass, i.e. at 4 a.m., and continuing his reading till 10 p.m. "There were giants on the earth in those days." Even more famous is the "judicious Hooker," who resided in the college for sixteen years, and only left it when, by the wiles of a woman, he, "like a true Nathanael who feared no guile" (as his biographer, Isaac Walton, writes), was entrapped into a marriage which "brought him neither beauty nor fortune." The first editor of his great work, /The Ecclesiastical Polity/, was a Corpus man, and it was only fitting that the Anglican Revival of the nineteenth century should receive its first impulse from the famous Assize Sermon (in 1833) of another Corpus scholar, John Keble. Corpus has been singularly fortunate in its history, no doubt because its Presidents have been so frequently men of mark for learning and for character. Even in the dark period of the eighteenth century it recovered sooner than the rest of the University, and one of its sons records complacently that "scarcely a day passed without my having added to my stock of knowledge some new fact or idea." A charming |
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