The annals of our University in the eighteenth century are of an inglorious order; and New College exhibits in an intensified form the characteristic tendencies of Oxford at large. The building of the “new common chamber” (one of the first in Oxford) and of the garden quadrangle, at the end of the seventeenth century (finished 1684), seem to herald the age in which the increase of ease, comfort, and luxury kept pace with the decay of study, education, and learning. The _Vimen Quadrifidum_ of Winchester still indeed kept alive a tradition of classical scholarship which even the possession of an Academic sinecure at eighteen, with total exemption from University examinations and exercises, could not quite extinguish; but there was a significant proverb about New College men which ran, “golden Scholars, silver Bachelors, leaden Masters.” One of the last men of learning whom New College produced was John Ayliffe, D.C.L., the author of the _Past and Present State of the University of Oxford_ (1714), who was expelled the University, deprived of his degree, and compelled to resign his Fellowship for certain “bold and necessary truths” contained in that book, partly of a personal, partly of a political (_i. e._ Whiggish) character. Perhaps the most respectable and yet characteristic product of New College during the _ferrea aetas_ which succeeded were Robert Lowth, the scholarly antagonist of the slipshod Warburton, and author of the famous lectures _On the Poetry of the Hebrews_, successively Bishop of St. David’s, Oxford and London. Towards the close of the century New College harboured a staunch defender of the Church (including some of its abuses), but a staunch assailant of much else in that old _régime_ to which it belonged. Sydney Smith came up from Winchester in 1789, having been Prefect of Hall and third on the roll; but though in the College, he was little of it. It is curious that the most brilliant talker of the century does not seem to have left much reputation behind him in College society. Perhaps his extreme poverty may have something to do with it.