The Great Hall of the University was not, when first founded, a perfect college. It was only a house for some eight or ten graduates in arts who were studying divinity. The first perfect college was founded by Walter de Merton, the Chancellor of Henry III., to whom is due the conception of uniting the anti-monastic pursuit of secular learning with monastic seclusion and discipline, for the benefit of that multitude of young students who had hitherto dwelt at large in the city under little or no control, and often showed, by their faction fights and other outrages, that they contained the quintessence of the nation's turbulence as well as of its intellectual activity and ambition. The quaint old quadrangle of Merton, called, nobody seems to know why, "Mob" Quad, may be regarded as the cradle of collegiate life in England, and indeed in Europe. Still University College is the oldest foundation of learning now existing in England; and therefore it may be not inappropriately dedicated to the memory of the king who was the restorer of our intellectual life as well as the preserver of our religion and our institutions. Mr. Freeman, as the stern minister of fact, would, no doubt, cast down the bust of Alfred from the Common Room chimney-piece and set up that of William of Durham, if a likeness of him could be found, in its place. But it may be doubted whether William of Durham, if he were alive, would do the same. Marcus Aurelius, Alfred and St. Louis, are the three examples of perfect virtue on a throne. But the virtue of St. Louis is deeply tainted with asceticism; and with the sublimated selfishness on which asceticism is founded, he sacrifices everything and everybody--sacrifices national interests, sacrifices the lives of the thousands of his subjects whom he drags with him in his chimerical crusades--to the good of his own soul. The Reflections of Marcus Aurelius will be read with ever increasing admiration by all who have learned to study character, and to read it in its connection with history. Alone in every sense, without guidance or support but that which he found in his own breast, the imperial Stoic struggled serenely, though hopelessly, against the powers of evil which were dragging heathen Rome to her inevitable doom. Alfred was a Christian hero, and in his Christianity he found the force which bore him, through calamity apparently hopeless, to victory and happiness.