The members of the College who remained seem to have maintained friendly relations with those who had withdrawn from it as Nonjurors, and even at this time, and certainly after the accession of George I., the sympathy of many among the Fellows was with the exiled rather than with the reigning branch of the Royal House. During the first half of the eighteenth century, indeed, politics flourished in the society more than learning; and although Gibbon’s picture of the condition of the College during his brief residence is rather highly coloured, it cannot be doubted that the general decline of academic activity which affected many of the Colleges in Oxford during the last century, affected Magdalen in no slight degree. A large part of the attention of the society seems to have been given to plans for the rearrangement or the destruction of the College buildings, and for the re-construction of the College on the pattern adopted in what are known as the “New Buildings,” erected in 1735. Some amazing designs for “College improvements” remain in the library, as a memorial of the architectural ambitions of this period. Among the Presidents of the eighteenth century, if we except Dr. Routh, whose lengthened tenure extended over the last years of that century and the first half of the nineteenth, there is but one name of mark--that of George Horne, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, once widely-known by his Commentary on the Psalms. Nor are there many names of mark among the other members of the College in the same century. The learning of Dr. Routh does not seem to have been shared in any conspicuous degree by more than a small proportion of those who passed through the College in his long Presidentship--though towards the end of that period Magdalen numbered among its members several men of note in different ways--James Mozley and William Palmer among theologians, Ferrier among philosophers, Roundell Palmer, now Lord Selborne, among lawyers, Conington among scholars, Charles Reade among novelists, Goldwin Smith among essayists, Charles Daubeny among those who laboured to advance the study of natural science.