Page:Oxford men and their colleges.djvu/216

 263

ALL SOULS' COLLEGE.

264

commenced in 17 16, took many years to build, but at last stood completed, a far more successful work than the hall which faces it across the quadrangle. It is 200 feet long, and holds with ease the 70,000 books to which the College Library has now swollen. A public reading-room was added to it in 1867, and it is for students of law and history as much of an institu- tion as the Bodleian itself.

The eighteenth century gave All Souls' many brilliant Fellows, but it destroyed the original purpose of the foundation, and ended by making it an abuse and a byword, owing to an unhappy misinterpretation of its statutes which led to the idea that the founders' kin had a preferential right to fellowships whenever they chose to present themselves as candidates.

Archbishop Cornwallis in 1777 ruled that it was not obligatory upon the College that more than ten of the Fellows should be of Founder's kin, and from this time forth the claim o" Founder's kin had no direct influence upon the elections. But the doctrine had done its work. It brought the Fellow- ships within a charmed circle of country families, outside of which the College rarely looked when the morrow of All Souls' Day came round.

The effect of this was to create a society of an abnormal sort in the midst of a group of Colleges which, whatever their shortcomings may have been, continued to make a. profession of study and teaching. The Fellows were men of good birth, and usually of good private means, but they were wholly unacademic in their tastes.

. . . . Gradually the College drew more and more apart from its neighbours, until the Fellows made it a point to know nothing and to care nothing about the teaching, the study, or the business that was going on just outside their walls.

To the great advantage of the College the University Commission of 1854 swept away the rights of Founder's kin, together with many other

provisions of the Statutes of Chichele, appropriated ten Fellowships to the endowment of chairs of Modern History and International Law, and threw open the rest to competition in the subjects of Law and Modern History. The Commission of 1877 threatened graver changes, and for a while it was doubtful whether All Souls' might not become an undergraduate College of the ordinary type. But in the end the College was allowed to retain, by means of non-resident Fellow- ships, its old connection with the world outside, while in other ways its endowments were utilized for study and teaching. On the whole it cannot be said to have suffered more than others from the want of con- structive genius in the Commissioners. It is and will be a College of many Fellows and several Professors, with liabilities to contribute annual sums to Bodley's Library and to undergraduate education. The Fellowships are terminable in seven years, but may be renewed in limited numbers and on a reduced emolument. Their regular distribution has done much to encourage the studies of Law and History in the University. For the former, All Souls' is certainly the centre and focus of all academic instruction.

Under these new conditions All Souls'— though still somewhat scantily inhabited — is no longer given over during a great part of each year to the bats and owls. It now plays a useful and important part in the University. Its Hall and lecture-rooms are crowded with undergraduates, its reading-room is full of students of Law and History, and its Warden and Fellows have produced in the last ten years about twice as many books as any two other Colleges in the University put together. Last, but not least, it has continued most loyally to fulfil its obligation of providing prize Fellowships ; no other foundation can say, though several are far richer than All Souls', that it has regularly offered Fellowships for competition for twenty consecutive years. — The Colleges of Oxjord.

WOODEN ORNAMENT FROM STALL, NEW COLLEGE CHAPEL. — Pugitl.