In its progress towards what is most admired in modern Oxford, Balliol is the most interesting college. Nearly all other colleges have indeed acquired a more or less thorough resemblance to Balliol in its good and bad points, but no other college has been so long, so persistently, and so progressively devoted to the same ideal. Even those who do not wholly like that ideal cannot fail to admire the consistency and energy of the men who have achieved it, or could find the like to any comparable extent in colleges that cherish other affections. But nowhere has there been an entire rupture with the past, or anything new which has not in a sense been laid reverently upon the foundations of the old. If one could see Keble College without its buildings, it might well seem to be not the youngest of the colleges. So, too, with Hertford College, which is indeed but the rejuvenation of the old homes of Hobbes, Selden, and Matthew Hale: it has doffed knee-breeches and periwig, and even those perhaps unwillingly, since its fellowships are lifelong for the celibate. And in the architecture of Oxford, some of the most novel effects of last century were produced by work in the same spirit of reverence for the past. Here, a window received back its casements again; there, a fine roof was rescued from its burial under the impertinent superimpositions of more egotistic innovators. No other age and city perhaps would have been so curious and fortunate in restoring the old, as when at Christ Church the old floral marble base of St. Frideswide’s shrine was restored after three hundred years in the wilderness. Part was found in the cemetery wall, part in a well-side, part in a staircase, part in a wall: and almost the whole now rests in the Cathedral again. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST CHURCH At the east end of the choir is seen the wheel-window with two circular-headed windows underneath, restored in 1871. Above these rises the late groined roof of the Choir, its richness contrasting well with the Norman arches below, which spring from corbels attached to the pillars. The Cathedral is also the College Chapel. ] DONS ANCIENT AND MODERN CHAPTER III DONS ANCIENT AND MODERN MODERN