Whenever there was important academical business afoot the Vice-Chancellor and Sculls met in solemn conclave in Golgotha, the state room in the Clarendon building. The room was handsomely decorated and wainscotted. The wainscot was said to have been put up by order of a man of humour who went up to Oxford for a degree without “any claim or recommendation.” He promised, however, in exchange for the degree to become a benefactor of the university. The Sculls thereupon hurriedly engaged workmen who began running up the wainscot, and they “clapp’d a degree upon his back.” But as soon as the degree had been granted, the benefactor disappeared, and the Sculls were left to pay the workmen with money out of their own pockets--which, of course, had been previously plundered from the university. It was in this room that all the weighty business of the university was conducted. In the amusing words of Amhurst, “if any sermon is preach’d, if any public speech or oration is deliver’d in derogation of the church, or the university, or in vindication of the Protestant succession, or the Bishop of Bangor, hither the delinquent is summon’d to answer for his offence, and receive condign punishment. In short, all matters of importance are cognisable before this tribunal: I will instance only one, but that very remarkable. A day or two before the late Queen died, a letter was brought to the post-office at Oxford, with these words upon the outside of it, _we hear the queen is dead_; which, being suspected to contain something equally mischievous within, was stopt, and carried to the Vice-Chancellor, who immediately summon’d his brethren to meet him at Golgotha about a matter of the utmost consequence: when they were assembled together he produced the letter before them; and having open’d it, read the contents of it in an audible voice; which were as follow:-- “‘ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, _July 30, 1714_.