absence from the College was by statute very sparingly allowed, and seldom could the young Scholar pay what, in the days before the letter post, must have been angel's visits to the old people on the paternal homestead. The ecclesiastical and ascetic system of the Middle Ages had little regard for domestic affection. It treated the boy as entirely a child of the Church. In times of pestilence, then common, the inmates of the Colleges usually went to some farm or grange belonging to the College in the neighbourhood of Oxford, and those were probably pleasant days for the younger members. Oaths of fearful length and stringency were taken to the observation of the statutes. They proved sad traps for conscience when the statutes had become obsolete, a contingency of which the Founders, ignorant of progress and evolution, never dreamed. * * * * * In the interval between the foundation of New College and the revolution, religious and intellectual, which we call the Reformation, were founded Lincoln, All Souls', Magdalen, and Brasenose. Lincoln, All Souls', and Brasenose lie immediately round us, close to what was the centre of academical life. Magdalen we recognise in the distance by the most beautiful of towers. Lincoln was theological, and was peculiar in being connected with two of the Churches of Oxford, which its members served, and the tithes and oblations of which formed its endowment. Its Founder, Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had as a graduate resident at Oxford been noted for sympathy with the Wycliffites. But when he became Bishop of Lincoln, the fact dawned upon him that the Scriptures too freely interpreted were dangerous. He went over to the Reaction, burned Wycliffe's body, and determined to found a little college of true students in theology, who would "defend the mysteries of the sacred page against those ignorant laics who profaned with swinish snouts its most holy pearls." His successor, Bishop Rotherham, being of the same mind, carried forward the work, and gave the College statutes enjoining the expulsion of any Fellow convicted of favouring in public or in private heretical tenets, and in particular the tenets of "that heretical sect lately sprung up which assails the sacraments, diverse orders and dignities, and properties of the Church." Rotherham had evidently a keen and just sense of the fact, that with the talismanic sacraments of the Church were bound up its dignity and wealth. The two orthodox prelates would have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that their little College of true theologians would one day number among its Fellows John Wesley, and that Methodism would be cradled within its walls. They would not less have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that such a chief of Liberals as Mark Pattison, would one day be its Rector. The history of these foundations is full of lessons for benefactors who fancy that they can impress their will upon posterity.