Among the ‘dons’ the centre of social life has always been the combination room. It represents that pledge of civilisation the with-drawing-room, the room contiguous to the banqueting-hall, where the pleasures of the spirit steal an advantage over the pleasures of the table. The rudeness which marked the period of the early renascence, from court to convent, in England, clung also to our academic life, and it is not till the last quarter of the xvi century that we find the fellows first provided with table napkins, and learn that the enterprising college which made the innovation exacted a fine of a penny from those who continued to wipe their fingers on the tablecloth. The temptation to this latter practice must indeed have been great; for the fork which made its appearance at the dawn of the renascence in France was unknown in England two hundred years later. It is only in the course of the next, the xviith, century that the combination room emerges as a more or less luxurious apartment; the subsequent addition of newspapers, magazines, and easy chairs marking in turn the rise of journalism and the higher standard of comfort. The dons of Charles II.’s time who had to be content with the “London Gazette” supplemented the lack of news by social clubs. “The Ugly Faces” club dined periodically in what was then the ugliest of college halls--Clare. “The Old Maids’ Club” flourished in the early xix century, with Baker the antiquary, Tonstall, and Conyers Middleton as members. The first “news letter” was however laid on the table of Kirk’s coffee-house in Charles’s reign. The first flying-coach, following the example of Oxford which had run a coach to London in one day, sped to the Capital in 1671.[339]