Every College has its own ideal, and that of Balliol has been by a steady policy adapted to the modern spirit of work, employing the best materials not so much for learning as an end in itself as a means towards practical success in life. In this field, in the distinctions of the schools, of the courts, and of public life, it has been seldom rivalled by any other College. But it is remarkable that in the long and distinguished list of its men of mark we find, speaking only of the dead, no Statesman and not many scholars of the first rank. The College has excelled rather in its practical men of affairs, diplomatists, judges, members of parliament, civil service officials, college tutors, and schoolmasters. At the present moment it counts among former members no less than seven of her Majesty’s Judges and seven Heads of Oxford Colleges. But to show that another side of culture has been represented at Balliol in the present reign, we must not forget the band of Balliol poets, Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. III. MERTON COLLEGE.[123] BY THE HON. GEORGE C. BRODRICK, D.C.L., WARDEN OF MERTON COLLEGE. In the year 1274, “the House of the Scholars of Merton,” since called Merton College, was solemnly founded, and settled upon its present site in Oxford, by Walter de Merton, Chancellor to King Henry III. and King Edward I. Ten years earlier, in the midst of the Civil War, this remarkable man had already established a collegiate brotherhood, under the same name, at Malden, in Surrey, but with an educational branch at Oxford, where twenty students were to be maintained out of the corporate revenues. The Statutes of 1264 were very slightly modified in 1270; the Statutes of 1274, issued on the conclusion of the peace, and sealed by the King himself, were a mature development of the original design, worked out with a statesman-like foresight. These statutes are justly regarded as the archetype of the College system, not only in the University of Oxford, but in that of Cambridge, where they were adopted as a model by the founder of Peterhouse, the oldest of Cambridge Colleges. In every important sense of the word, Merton, with its elaborate code of statutes and conventual buildings, its chartered rights of self-government, and its organized life, was the first of English Colleges, and the founder of Merton was indirectly the founder of Collegiate Universities.