This cross of Scott's was one of the first new works at Oxford of the Gothic revival. Wyatt and others had already worked at what they called restoration, and Pugin's gateway, lately removed, had been set up at Magdalen the year before. Oxford has suffered its full share of buildings that were the costly grammatical exercises of men learning a dead tongue. In architecture such exercises are more expensive and obtrusive than in any other art, and it will be long perhaps before people will have the courage and sacrifice to pull them down again. Some are merely learned and lifeless, like Buckler's Magdalen School and Jesus, and Scott's Chapel of Exeter. Others are hopeless, sullen blocks, like Scott's extensions of Exeter and New College, and Butterfield's new buildings at Merton. Others are fancifully bad, like the conscientious ugliness of the Museum, and the _recherché_ ugliness of Balliol, and the mixture of both in the Meadow Buildings of Christ Church. Butterfield in Balliol Chapel and Keble College shows a great power of geometrical invention in form and colour, an invention for the most part greatly astray. It is refreshing among all this to come upon the strong, though wayward artistic temperament of Burges in the decoration of the hall and chapel of Worcester, or even the respectable classic Taylorian buildings of Cockerell, unpleasant in colour and jarring on the spirit of the place as they are. [Illustration: THE 'VARSITY BARGE.] Very different work has been done of late years. There is less about it of defiant expression of undesirable artistic personality, or pedantic exhibition of a style--more recognition of the power of the place, more actual artistic instinct. Even the much abused Indian Institute of Champneys, in spite of the heavy frivolity of its details and interior, is, in the disposition of the wall and window space, the invention of its tower, and the way the whole building takes its place in the picture, a piece of architecture, which such things as Balliol are not. The space of blank wall on its corner tower is worth more than all the geometrical troubles that fret the face of Keble. At Magdalen, again, the genius of the old buildings has been lovingly reproduced by Mr. Bodley in the new. His tower is not good, and it was carrying faithfulness too far to reproduce the stupid gargoyles and grotesques of the original; but much of the rich decoration in wood and stone is refined in design and workmanship. One can praise, too, the extension of St. John's. It may be said of all the new Oxford buildings that they are apt to be heavy within, owing a good deal to the fear of fire that makes all the staircases of stone.