and of "impossible ideals," which ought to be made possible. Late as it is, and open to the structural criticism of all Perpendicular work, it is most deservedly admired. The staircase itself must not be laid to Fell's charge; it is the work of the James Wyatt. Dean Aldrich built Peckwater Quad, which is a decent work of its kind, too grim and gloomy to be as attractive as All Saints Church, and dreadfully disfigured by the strange tendency to moulder away that besets Headington stone, from which Oxford as a whole has suffered so much. The Library in Peckwater Quad was begun in 1716 (designed by Dr. G. Clerke), and finished in 1761, the original intention having been to leave an open piazza beneath it; but its columns were connected, in the end, by a wall. It contains a few first-rate pictures (including an exquisite Francescà) among a great many palpable shams, and a collection of drawings mainly by fifteenth and sixteenth century artists, which are said to have given Ruskin his first enthusiasm for Italian art, when he was an undergraduate at the House. Wyatt was the architect of Canterbury Gate. Dean Liddell built the Meadow Buildings nearly thirty years ago; the architect was Mr. T. Deane. They are as bad as the other college buildings in Oxford of the same period. CHAPTER III. THE INTERIOR. The cathedral is best entered through the handsome porch in Tom Quad which was cut by Mr. Bodley through one of the canonical houses; in order, perhaps, to announce that the old _régime_ had passed away, and the time at last arrived when "the teachers of theology no longer dwell on the ruins of the church they should protect," as a writer fifty years back had half-despairingly foretold. This porch is a happy compromise between the old heart-breaking descent into a half-ruined nave, and the rather impossible scheme of continuing the church into the middle of the Quad. The former spoilt the cathedral, the latter would have spoilt the college; but by the present arrangement the church serves very creditably for both its purposes, and one may well spend a day there without remembering what Wolsey did to the nave.