Lunching with my friend Bishop Mitchinson, the {34} little Master of Pembroke, I was shown his new portrait in the hall--quite a good painting, but not a bit like him, though not in that respect singular among our Oxford portraits. The supposed picture of Devorguilla, foundress of Balliol, is, I have been assured, the likeness of an Oxford baker's daughter, who was tried for bigamy in the eighteenth century. An even more barefaced imposture is the "portrait" of Egglesfield (chaplain to Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III, and founder of Queen's), which hangs, or hung, in the hall of that college. It is really, and manifestly, the likeness of a seventeenth-century French prelate--probably Bossuet--in the episcopal dress of the time of Louis XIV! Most of our Magdalen portraits are, I think, authentic; but then they do not profess to represent personages of the early Middle Ages! The best and most interesting portraits at Oxford belong to the nineteenth century. I always enjoyed showing my friends those of Tait and Manning, side by side in Balliol Hall, and recalling how their college tutor once remarked, when they had left his room after a lecture: "Those two undergraduates are worthy and talented young men: I hope I shall live to see them both archbishops!" His prophetic wish was duly fulfilled, though he had probably never dreamt of Canterbury and Westminster! I remember pleasant visits this autumn to the Abingdons at Wytham Abbey, their fine old place, set in loveliest woods, within an easy drive of Oxford. "Why Abbey?" I asked my host, who did not seem to know that the place had never been a monastery, though part of the house was of the fifteenth century. Lord Abingdon himself was a kind {35} of patriarch,[15] with a daughter married four and twenty years, and a small son not yet four. He was trying to dispose of some of his land for building, but without great success. The Berkshire side of the Thames (to my mind far the most beautiful and attractive) was not the popular quarter for extensions from Oxford, which was spreading far out towards the north in the uninteresting directions of Banbury and Woodstock.