The stroke told. Henry VI. echoed the idea in Eton and King's College, Cambridge. In Oxford, the chapel and cloisters of Chichele's All Souls' were imitated from New College. But a richer reverberation followed. Waynflete's Magdalen is another New more magnificent, and later by a hundred years. It is not more beautiful. Feature by feature is reproduced, with just that luxury of virtue and grace that one would expect from Mary the Magdalen walking in the footsteps of Mary the Virgin. The chapels are planned alike, and in either college set back to back with the hall. Magdalen has a cloister quad, a more spacious one; a higher and richer tower, wider and more lordly grounds. But one can turn from the baffling and haunting charm of Magdalen Tower to be satisfied with the simple fighting tower of New College; and it is dangerous to go from the blackened walls and gaunt arches, the austerely divided daylight of the cloistered walk at New College, to the coarser forms and less single purpose of the other. The older cloister is still the walk of a recluse, overlooked only by the tower and gable of the chapel, and interrupted by rare and funeral writing on the walls. The other is built in an easier temper. Staircases open upon it below, and many windows occupy it above. It is the covered thoroughfare of the College. [Illustration: STONE PULPIT, MAGDALEN.] It should be remembered, however, that Magdalen cloisters have suffered much. They have been pulled down almost throughout and rebuilt. An upper storey has gone from the north side, ugly Westmorland slate has replaced the grey Stonesfield kind, and windows have been made bigger and more regular. Historically it is to be noted that Magdalen superseded a collegiate building of another kind, the old hospital or almshouse of St. John the Baptist. The stone pulpit in St. John's Quad marks this. On the saint's day a sermon used to be preached from the pulpit, and the quad was strewn with rushes and hung with boughs to represent a wilderness. At last a Principal caught his death of cold by going out into the wilderness, so they gave it up, and had the sermon in chapel instead. There was some grudging show made of keeping up the almshouse. A low vault under a chapel was given over to the poor. A report was drawn up for the year 1596 giving the following cheerful particulars:--"In sommer the resort is greater, in winter very smale, bycause of the coldnes and onwholesomenes of the vault; which is in verie deed so moyst and dampish that we have the last yeare removed the beddes into another house not far of, for that everie winter they are subject to rottennes." However, they were going to repair the floor "as well for the safetie of our beddes as for the health and ease of the poore."[2]