The view in Plate XX of the tower is taken from the front of
Pembroke, and must have been often admired by Oxford's devoted son,
Samuel Johnson, when, as a poor scholar of Pembroke, "he was
generally to be seen (says his friend. Bishop Percy) lounging at the
college gate, with a circle of young students round him, whom he was
entertaining with his wit and keeping from their studies."
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
[Plate XXI. St. John's College : Garden Front]
"An English home--gray twilight poured
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep, all things in order stored,
The haunt of ancient Peace."
TENNYSON, Palace of Art.
St. John's shares with Trinity and Hertford the distinction of having
been twice founded. As the Cistercian College of St. Bernard, it owed
its origin to Archbishop Chichele, the founder of All Souls', and it
continued to exist for a century as a monastic institution. At the
Reformation it was swept away with other monastic foundations by the
greed of Henry VIII, but it was almost immediately refounded, in the
reign of Mary, by Sir Thomas White, one of the greatest of London's
Lord Mayors. In all these respects it has an exact parallel in
Trinity, which had existed as a Benedictine foundation, being then
called "Durham College," and which was refounded, in the same dark
period of English History, by another eminent Londoner, Sir Thomas
Pope. It is characteristic of England and of the English Reformation
that men, who were undoubtedly in sympathy with the old form of the
Faith, yet gave their wealth and their labours to found institutions
which were to serve English religion and English learning under the
new order of things.
For the first generation after the Founder, St. John's was torn by
the quarrels between those who wished to undo the work of the
Reformation altogether, and those who wished to carry it further and
to destroy the continuity of English Church tradition. The final
triumph of the Anglican "Via Media" was the work, above all others,
of William Laud, who came up as scholar to St. John's in 1590, and
who, for most of the half century that followed, was the predominant
influence in the life of the University. First in his own college and
then in Oxford generally, he secured the triumph of his views on
religious doctrine and order. Of these, it is not the place to speak
here, nor yet of Laud's services to Oxford as the restorer of
discipline, the endower and encourager of learning, the organizer of
academic life, whose statutes were to govern Oxford for more than two
centuries; but it is indisputable that Laud takes one of the highest
places on the roll of benefactors, both to the University as a whole
and to his own college.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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