Some of these Halls still remain. But the form of university life they represented, and to a great extent the buildings themselves, have gone as completely as the Oxford of the Religious. The colleges swallowed most of them. New College accounts for ten, Merton for eight. From old prints one can gain a notion of the splendid jumble of gables and chimneys of all degrees of dignity that enriched the streets; and one is tempted to regret that some of the colleges gave up the picturesque grouping and domestic style of the clustered halls for the more monotonous and pretentious manner of their latter shape. As Henry suppressed the religious houses, so Laud suppressed the private halls, leaving five only as academic halls. Of these, one--Magdalen Hall--has left its beautiful bell-tower to Magdalen College, and its second site to Hertford. Of the rest, three are now absorbed in colleges. The great date in college history is 1264, when Walter de Merton gave statutes to the college he had founded. University Hall, afterwards University College, had already been founded from a legacy administered by the University. But in Merton the idea of a great college was first clearly struck out, and its statutes were an exemplar for all succeeding societies both at Oxford and Cambridge. Merton, however was not built in one heat. The old quad and parts of the chapel are early work, but the tower and other parts are later. The chapel is so large, because it is not only chapel to the college, but church to the parish of St. John, a great part of which the college absorbs. The library is one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most ancient rooms in Oxford.