Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/117

 of Magdalen College, Cambridge, and a kindly conscientious man, who wore himself out in his efforts to improve the condition of the infant seminary. The first college building, as distinguished from Eaton’s own dwelling, was finished, and appeared to the gratified colonists “very fair and comely within and without, having in it a spacious hall, where they daily meet at the Commons, Lectures, and [religious] Exercises.”

Of this hastily and cheaply constructed edifice, which unfortunately began to fall to pieces only fifteen years after it was erected, we have no satisfactory description, but one point is clear. It was not the rude log school-house that might have been expected. Indeed it was “thought by some to be too gorgeous for a Wilderness.” True to their British craving for conventionality, the founders had somehow managed to put together, with no better materials than the virgin forest afforded, a full working model, so to speak, of a contemporary English college—small and roughly made, but complete in all