Then when we look closer at this large mass of Gothic work, of great establishments squeezed into the old shapes, and elbowing scanty strips and corners of the displaced houses, the notable point about most of the work is, not how old, but how new it is. The Gothic is late, even belated. Little of it is earlier than the Perpendicular Period; much of it is more recent still, and of a kind to which purists grudge even the name of Gothic. It is true that in Oxford buildings, when made of local stone not cunningly laid, become shabby and theatrically aged in the shortest time. They look not venerable, but battered and burned, the stone hanging in rags, and leaving where it falls raw yellow patches. Mouldings and carvings drop away; pinnacles, battlements, and gables, and all outstanding features, thaw like blackened snow; walls are suddenly found wasted and thin, the rooms and towers depending on the merest crust of stone. The heads about the Sheldonian Theatre shed their beards of a rainy night. But all this is a very sham antiquity. Some of the later buildings suffer from it most, and some of the oldest look, and are, newest because of sedulous restoration. One has to search diligently for hints of the older work, and to entrap it as it looks out of its new body in some favourable light. It is the churches, the parish churches and the towers of St. Frideswide's and St. Mary's, that seem most to promise age in a distant prospect, and to strike a recurrent note of antiquity as one goes about the town. The old Town Church of St. Martin at Carfax, with its picturesque altered gables and clock and "penniless bench," is much wanted; but it was pulled down inconsiderately and rebuilt in haste. But St. Peter's, St. Michael's, St. Mary Magdalen's, and St. Giles's, are rich in beauty and interest. The lovely spire of St. Mary's, panelled with pomegranates for Queen Eleanor, stands almost alone of the old University Church. There is, indeed, on the north of the chancel, and set at a divergent angle, a yet older building--the two-storeyed Ancient House of Congregation. Its two storeys simulate on the outer side the appearance of one to conform with the new church, but the groined roof remains of the lower room, now half-buried and given to lumber. This and the old church were the real centre of the University. In the five chapels the regents of the five faculties assembled for the Act at which disputations were held and degrees given. Not only the Schools and Theatre and Convocation House, but the University Library, too, hived off from these buildings. The first books were kept in chests in the "soler," or upper room, and there, too, those other chests were stored that were the earliest form of University endowment. In them the money left by benefactors was kept, and lent out to poor students, who in return pawned books and daggers and other articles of value.