it was clothed in the Latin language, though in a form of that language so much altered and debased from the classical as to become, in fact, a literary vernacular of the Middle Ages. Then her schools, her church porches, her very street corners, every spot where a professor could gather an audience, were thronged with the aspiring youth who had flocked, many of them begging their way out of the dark prison-house of feudalism, to what was then, in the absence of printing, the sole centre of intellectual light. Then Oxford, which in later times became from the clerical character of the headships and fellowships the great organ of reaction, was the great organ of progress, produced the political songs which embodied, with wonderful force, the principles of free government, and sent her students to fight under the banner of the university in the army of Simon de Montfort. It was in the thirteenth century that University College was really founded. The founder was William of Durham, an English ecclesiastic who had studied in the University of Paris. The universities were, like the church, common to all the natives of Latin Christendom, that ecclesiastical and literary federation of the European States, which, afterwards broken up by the Reformation, is now in course of reconstruction through uniting influences of a new kind. William of Durham bequeathed to the University a fund for the maintenance of students in theology. The university purchased with the fund a house in which these students were maintained, and which was styled the Great Hall of the University, in contra-distinction to the multitude of little private halls or hospices in which students lived, generally under the superintendence of a graduate who was their teacher. The hall or college was under the visitorship of the University; but this visitorship being irksome, and a dispute having arisen in the early part of the last century whether it was to be exercised by the University at large, in convocation, or by the theological faculty only, the college set up a claim to be a royal foundation of the time of King Alfred, the reputed founder of the University, and thus exempt from any visitorship but that of the Crown. It was probably not very difficult to convince a Hanoverian court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys the intensity of their wrath.