following century; in the great building period of the first two
Stuarts the old models were still faithfully copied. It was the
genius of Wren, which, by its magnificent success in the Sheldonian,
ultimately caused the new style to prevail over the late Gothic, of
which his own college, Wadham, is so striking an example.

In Wadham the conservative Oxford workmen were inspired by the
presence of Somerset masons, whom the Foundress brought up from her
own county, so rich in the splendid Gothic of the fifteenth century.
Hence the chapel of Wadham (shown in Plate XXII) is to all intents
and purposes the choir of a great Somerset church. So marked is the
old style in its windows that some of the best authorities on
architecture have maintained that the stonework of these could not
have been made in the seventeenth century, but must have survived
from some older building; Ferguson, the historian of architecture,
when confronted with the fact that the college has still the detailed
accounts showing how, week by week, the Jacobean masons worked, swept
this evidence aside with the dictum--"No amount of documents could
prove what was impossible." But here the "impossible" really
happened.

The permanence of Gothic in Oxford is a point for professional
students; the studied simplicity, which is the great secret of
Wadham's beauty, concerns everyone. The effect of the garden front is
produced simply by the long lines of the string-courses and by the
procession of the beautifully proportioned gables. Neither here nor
in any part of the college is there a piece of carved work, except in
the classical screen, which marks the entry to the hall. It may be
noted that at Wadham and at Clare, Cambridge, the same effect is
produced by the same means; different as the two colleges are, the