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21 another precedent, perhaps as pleasant, but not perhaps so wholesome as lecturing future works. He introduced the corkscrew into college-life in Oxford; and he set the example of the establishment of college wine-cellars, and the natural abolishment of the obnoxious habit of running to the tavern, across the road, for a poorer, and more harmful, grade of sherry or sack. Remains of an old tavern, across the road, in the High Street, exceedingly rich in old oak carvings and hewn beams, are still extant, and are well worth careful study. But there are at present opposite All Souls in the High Street no actual public-houses which date back to the period of Blackstone's great reformation; although The Mitre, in High Street, is not many steps away. With The Mitre the contemporary Oxford undergraduate is not altogether unfamiliar, despite the solemn fact that the statutes demand of him to refrain from all taverns, wineshops, and houses in which they sell wine, or any other drink, and the herb called nicotina or tobacco.

It may be mentioned that in the History of Lincoln we read how, in 1488, by an agreement with Margaret Parker, widow of William Dagville, that college came into possession of considerable property in Oxford, including Dagville's Inn [now The Mitre] in High Street, which was already an ancient inn when Dagville inherited it, about