"Ye profound
And serious heads, who guard the twin retreats
Of British learning, give the studious boy
His due indulgence. Let him range the field,
Frequent the public walk, and freely pull
The yielding oar. But mark the truant well,
And if he turn aside to vice or folly,
Show him the rod, and let him feel you prize
The parent's happiness, the public good."
Magdalen might fairly claim that a place so beautiful as it is,
justifies itself by simply existing, and the perfection of its
buildings and the beauty of its music must appeal, even to our own
utilitarian age. But it has many other justifications besides its
beauty; its great wealth is being continually applied to assist the
University by the endowment of new professorships, especially for the
Natural Sciences, and to aid real students, whether those who have
made, or those who are likely to make, a reputation as researchers.
It is needless to mention names: every Oxford man and every lover of
British learning knows them.
[Plate XIV. Magdalen College : The Open-Air Pulpit]
For the world in general, which cares not for research, the success
of the College under its present President, Sir Herbert Warren,
himself at once a poet and an Oxford Professor of Poetry, will be
evidenced by its increase in numbers and by its athletic successes.
They will judge as our King judged when he chose Magdalen for the
academic home of the Prince of Wales. The Prince, unlike other royal
persons at Magdalen and elsewhere, lived (1912-14) not in the
lodgings of the President, or among dons and professors, but in his
own set of rooms, like any ordinary undergraduate. He showed, in
Oxford, that power of self-adaptation which has since won him golden
opinions in the great Dominion and the greater Republic of the West.
BRASENOSE COLLEGE
"Of the colleges of Oxford, Exeter is the most
proper for western, Queen's for northern, and
Brasenose for north-western men."
FULLER, /Worthies/.
[Plate XV. Bresenose College, Quadrangle and Radcliffe Library]
Brasenose college is in the very centre of the University, fronting
as it does on Radcliffe Square, where Gibbs' beautiful dome supplies
the Bodleian with a splendid reading-room. And this site has always
been consecrated to students; where the front of Brasenose now stands
ran School Street, leading from the old /Scholae Publicae/, in which
the disputations of the Mediaeval University were held, to St. Mary's
Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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