In Merton Chapel a little mural tablet bears the crest, the name, and
the dates of the birth and death, of Antony Wood. He has been our
guide in these sketches of Oxford life, as he must be the guide of
the gravest and most exact historians. No one who cares for the past
of the University should think without pity and friendliness of this
lonely scholar, who in his lifetime was unpitied and unbefriended.
We have reached the period in which he lived and died, in the midst
of changes of Church and State, and surrounded by more worldly
scholars, whose letters remain to testify that, in the reign of the
Second Charles, Oxford was modern Oxford. In the epistles of
Humphrey Prideaux, student of Christ Church, we recognise the foibles
of the modern University, the love of gossip, the internecine
criticism, the greatness of little men whom rien ne peut plaire.

Antony Wood was a scholar of a different sort, of a sort that has
never been very common in Oxford. He was a perfect dungeon of books;
but he wrote as well as read, which has never been a usual practice
in his University. Wood was born in 1632, in one of the old houses
opposite Merton, perhaps in the curious ancient hall which has been
called Beham, Bream, and Bohemiae Aula, by various corruptions of the
original spelling. As a boy, Wood must have seen the siege of
Oxford, which he describes not without humour. As a young man, he
watched the religious revolution which introduced Presbyterian Heads
of Houses, and sent Puritanical captains of horse, like Captain James
Wadsworth, to hunt for "Papistical reliques" and "massing stuffs"
among the property of the President of C. C. C. and the Dean of Ch.
Ch. (1646-1648). In 1650 he saw the Chancellorship of Oliver
Cromwell; in 1659 he welcomed the Restoration, and rejoiced that "the