Oxford (England) -- Description and travel; University of Oxford
went with Duke Humphrey’s to the University library, where a room was
made for them, over the quiet Divinity School then being built between
St. Mary’s and Durham Hall. Tiptoft was the most striking type of
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE LIBRARY, ALL SOULS’ COLLEGE
At the extreme east end of the Library is a seated marble figure of
Sir William Blackstone, by Bacon, the standing figure on the north
side in the recess being that of Sir Christopher Codrington, the
Founder of the Library, by Sir Henry Cheere.
Behind the statue is placed a case containing ancient articles
discovered in excavations on the site of the College.
Book-rests and chairs for students are placed at intervals in the
Library, which is nearly 200 feet long by over 30 feet wide.
Bronze busts of Fellows alternate with vases on the cornice of the
upper bookcases.
The colour of this Library is especially suited to its purpose,
being quiet and restful to the eye; the proportions are excellent,
and help the dignity of the room.
]
the Renaissance, of English blood. But it was the Italian Renaissance;
and after his death the direct influence of Italy was small in Oxford.
It was, however, an Italian, Vitelli, who uttered the first words of
Greek in Oxford. Plato was soon to enjoy a new life there, and to be
woven into the past of Oxford, as if he had really been of its children.
_It comes et paribus curis vestigia figit._ It was an age of great,
unpopular men who came and went suddenly and obscurely in Oxford, like
the first lecturers of the twelfth century. They were divinely inflated
with the beauty of Greek--a language always more strange and exotic and
fascinating to Englishmen than Latin--and with admiration of the
restorers of that beauty, Chrysoloras, Chalcondila, Politian. Grocyn, a
Magdalen man, fresh from Italy, taught Greek in the hall of Exeter.
Linacre, a great physician and Grecian, was Fellow of All Souls’. The
refined, persuasive Colet, whose “sacred fury” in argument Erasmus
praised, was also a Magdalen man, and founder of St. Paul’s school. Sir
Thomas More, the most perfect, but unhappily not the most influential
type of the English Renaissance, was at St. Mary Hall. Erasmus met them
all in Oxford, within that old gateway of St. Mary’s College in New Inn
Hall Street. As they stepped out after the symposium, one pointed to a
planet in the sky:
“See how Jupiter shines; it is an omen,” said he.
“Yes,” said another, “and we have been listening to Apollo.”
For a time the Grecians were ridiculed and attacked in the streets by
men who called themselves Priam, Hector, and Paris, and behaved--like
Trojans. In that first enthusiasm men seemed very near to the
inaccessible gods. Perhaps some were disposed to follow Pico della
Mirandola in pursuit of them. There was therefore a party which opposed
the study of Greek as heretical; and More was withdrawn from Oxford to
avoid the danger.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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