undergraduates were whipped for wearing boots, while "Puritans were
many and troublesome," and Laud publicly declared (1614) that
"Presbyterians were as bad as Papists." Did Laud, after all, think
Papists so very bad? In 1617 he was President of his college, St.
John's, on which he set his mark. It is to Laud and to Inigo Jones
that Oxford owes the beautiful garden-front, perhaps the most lovely
thing in Oxford. From the gardens--where for so many summers the
beauty of England has rested in the shadow of the chestnut-trees,
amid the music of the chimes, and in air heavy with the scent of the
acacia flowers--from the gardens, Laud's building looks rather like a
country-house than a college.

If St. John's men have lived in the University too much as if it were
a large country-house, if they have imitated rather the Toryism than
the learning of their great Archbishop, the blame is partly Laud's.
How much harm to study he and Waynflete have unwittingly done, and
how much they have added to the romance of Oxford! It is easy to
understand that men find it a weary task to read in sight of the
beauty of the groves of Magdalen and of St. John's. When Kubla Khan
"a stately pleasure-dome decreed," he did not mean to settle students
there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays, and for Greek and
Latin prose compositions. Kubla Khan would have found a palace to
his desire in the gardens of Laud, or where Cherwell, "meandering
with a mazy motion," stirs the green weeds, and flashes from the
mill-wheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows white and purple
with fritillaries.


"And here are gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree";