Among famous men nurtured at this College were Raleigh, Prynne, Bishop Butler, and Gilbert White, the naturalist; but it was in the first half of the nineteenth century that Oriels intellectual renown was at its highest. To recall the names of Pusey, Keble, Newman, Whately, and Thomas Arnold suffices to indicate the subject which most preoccupied the Oxford of that epoch. Oriel seemed fated to be the seat of religious controversy, from the seventeenth century days of Provost Walter Hodges, whose _Elihu_, a treatise on the Book of Job, brought him into suspicion of favouring the sect of Hutchinsonians. Happily there was some tincture of humour in the differences of those days. When this Provost resented the imputation, his detractors told him that a writer on the Book of Job should take everything with patience. Controversy apart, any College might be proud of a group of Fellows of whom one became an archbishop, another a really great headmaster, and a third a cardinal. Oriel has had poets, too, within her gates, for in a later day Clough and Matthew Arnold won fellowships here. [Illustration: 0128] [Illustration: 0129] But Oriel has had no more dutiful son, if liberality is any measure of dutifulness, than Cecil Rhodes. It is too soon to appraise the value of his scholarship scheme, which provides an Oxford education for numerous colonial and foreign students; but his old College, which benefited so largely by the provisions of his will, can have no hesitation in including him among its benefactors. QUEEN'S COLLEGE |OPINIONS will differ as to whether the Italian style, of which this College is a fine example, is as suitable for collegiate buildings as the Gothic, and whether the contrast which Queen's presents to its neighbour, University, is not more striking than pleasing; but the intrinsic splendour of its façade, as viewed from "The High," is indisputable. "No spectacle," said Dr. Johnson, "is nobler than a blaze"; and those who saw the west wing of the Front Quadrangle of Queen's in flames, one summer night in 1886, must have felt their regrets tempered by admiration, so imposing was the sight. Happily the damage was mainly confined to the interior of the building. A fire had already devastated the same wing in 1778. On that occasion, as Mr. Wells narrates in _Oxford and its Colleges_, the Provost of the day "nearly lost his life for the sake of decorum. He was sought for in vain, and had been given up, when he suddenly emerged from the burning pile, full dressed as usual, in wig, gown, and bands." This recalls Cowley's story of a gentleman in the Civil Wars, who might have escaped from his captors had he not stayed to adjust his perri-wig. Less fortunate than the Provost, his sense of ceremony cost him his life. [Illustration: 034] [Illustration: 035]