Happy days, two hundred and sixty years ago! There was music at All Souls, “voices and theorbos,” performed by “ingenious scholars.” And Dr. Barlow, the learned Librarian,[191] took them over the Bodleian, and showed them all the treasures, including the 800-years-old manuscript of the Venerable Bede. The Divinity School vied with the Physical and Anatomical School in entertaining the visitors; and, at St. John’s, the Library was almost eclipsed by poor Laud’s gift of mathematical instruments, and by “2 skeletons, finely cleaned and put together.” New College Chapel, much to Evelyn’s satisfaction, was still _in statu quo_, “notwithstanding the scrupulosities of the times”; and at Christ Church they saw the “Office of Henry VIII,” the gift of Cardinal Wolsey, with its wonderful miniatures and gilding, and the famous painted windows of the Cathedral, now “much abused.” In Magdalen Chapel, everything was in its “pontificall order,” except that the Altar had been “turn’d table-wise;” and there the famous musician, Mr. Gibbon, kindly played to them upon the double organ. The Physick garden was visited, “where the sensitive plant was shewed us for a greate wonder.” Canes, olives and rhubarb grew there, “but no extraordinary curiosities, besides very good fruit, which, when the ladys had tasted, we return’d in our coach to our lodgings.” And the _Encænia_ festivities wound up with midday dinner at Wadham. “We all din’d at that most obliging and universally-curious Dr. Wilkins’s at Wadham College.” There, after dinner, they were shown the Warden’s new transparent beehives, from which the honey could be drawn without destroying the bees, and Evelyn was presented with an empty hive to carry back with him to his own garden at Deptford. Mr. Christopher Wren, that “prodigious young scholar,” that “miracle of a youth,” was of the company; and everybody wandered at will among Dr. Wilkins’s scientific and mechanical curiosities, conic sections, magnets, thermometers, “way-wisers,”[192] and all the rest, in the upper rooms and gallery of the Warden’s lodging. The Warden, it may be observed, was still a bachelor: it was not till two years later that he married Cromwell’s sister. At the time of Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn’s visit to Oxford, that lady was still Mrs. French, wife of the worthy Canon of Christ Church, who had preached on the text, “Behold, a greater than Solomon is here!” This, then, was the Oxford of 1654 that was to welcome Robert Boyle. He had evidently been there, looking about him, during his flying visit from Ireland in 1653; and Lady Ranelagh—an experimentalist too in her own way—had gone to Oxford afterwards to inspect the lodgings selected by her brother.[193] “MY BROTHER,