Jesus, whose old quadrangle, chapel, and hall belong to early Stuart times, was the first distinctly Protestant College. This its name, in contrast with Colleges named after Saints, denotes. The second Protestant College was Wadham, the buildings of which stand in their pristine beauty, vying with Magdalen, perhaps even excelling it in the special air of a house of learning, and proving that to be interesting and impressive it is not necessary to be mediæval. At the same time Wadham shows how long the spirit of the Middle Ages clung to Oxford; for the style of the Chapel is anterior by a century and a half to the date. Here we have a conscious desire, on the part of the architect, to recall the past. The Founder, Sir Nicholas Wadham, was a wealthy Western land-owner. We may dismiss the tradition that his first design was to found a College of Roman Catholic priests in Italy, and his second to found a Protestant College at Oxford, as at most significant of the prolonged wavering of the religious balance in the minds of a number of the wealthier class. The statutes were, in the main, like those of the mediæval Colleges, saving in making the Fellowship terminable after about twenty-two years, thus more clearly designating the College as a school for active life. The prohibition of marriage was retained, not as an ascetic ordinance, but as a concomitant of the College system. In the mediæval Colleges it was not necessary to extend the prohibition to the Heads, who, being priests, were bound to celibacy by the regulations of their Order; but marriage being now permitted to the clergy generally, the prohibition was in the statutes of Wadham expressly extended, in the interest of the College system, to the Head. Hence it is an aspersion on the reputation of Dame Dorothy Wadham, who, after her husband's death, carried out his design, and whose effigy kneels opposite that of her loving lord in the old quadrangle, to say that she was in love with the first Warden, and because he would not marry her, forbade him by statute to marry any other woman. [Illustration: WADHAM COLLEGE--GARDEN FRONT.] * * * * *