however, more likely to be remembered because his subserviency, when
he was Dean of Westminster to James II, has earned him an unenviable
place in Macaulay's gallery of Revolution worthies and unworthies.
Sprat, it should be added, was an exception to the prevailing Whig
tradition of Wadham, which found a worthy exponent in Arthur Onslow,
the greatest Speaker of the House of Commons, who ruled over that
august body for a record period, thirty-four years (1727-1761), and
formed its rules and traditions in the period when it was first
asserting its claim to govern.

[Plate XXIII. Wadham College : The Hall Interior]

Two centuries later than the Royal Society days at Wadham, another
group of philosophers was trained there, who thought that the views
of their master, Auguste Comte, were going to make as great a
revolution in human thought as the views of a Bacon or a Newton. All
the leading English Positivists were at Wadham--Congreve, Beesley,
Bridges, Frederic Harrison, of whom the last alone survives, to fight
with undiminished vigour for the causes which he championed in Mid-
Victorian days. Positivism had less influence than its adherents
expected, but it powerfully affected for a time the political and the
religious thought of England.

Forty years later another famous group of young men were at Wadham
together. As they are all alive, it is impossible, and would be
unbecoming, to estimate what their influence on English life and
thought will be; but it was a curious coincidence that sent to Wadham
together, in the 'nineties, Lord Birkenhead, who reached the Woolsack
at the earliest age on record; Sir John Simon, who, if he had wished,
could have lowered that record still further, and C. B. Fry, once a