The beauty of Wadham is of a singularly quiet and simple kind, the effect of proportion, of string-courses and straight lines, marred by little decoration. Except for buildings annexed from time to time, so plain that they are no disfigurement, the College stands as it stood three centuries ago. Mr Andrew Lang has remarked that it is "the only College in Oxford which has not been fiddled with"; this is high praise, and gratefully accepted. One defect the College has: the resources of the Founders sufficed to build only one quadrangle; they had not counted the cost of the stately Chapel and Hall, and little was left for College rooms. When will our benefactor come? But it would be ungracious in Wadham men to criticise the Founders of their College, to whom they owe the most beautiful of homes. It stood fifty years ago almost in the country, with nothing north or east of it save the Museum and green fields. It is still in a great measure what it was called, the Country College; for though it has neighbours close to it in Mansfield and Manchester Colleges, yet these and the cricket-grounds, which lie between Wadham and the Cherwell, and further north, the Parks, make one spacious region of almost country,--a region of grass and trees and silence, broken only by the sounds of birds, and the shouts of Matthew Arnold's "young barbarians all at play." It is a quiet old College,--not old as age is reckoned in Oxford,--like some great Elizabethan or Jacobean country-house turned into a College, splendid yet homely, possessing that double charm which no palace or castle or cathedral possesses in the same degree,--the charm of stately beauty and the charm of human interest which belongs to the home of generations who have spent there the happiest years of life, preparing for themselves distinction and success, or obscurity and failure. As you stand in the well-known College garden, one side of which is bounded by the chapel and long line of wall and gables showing half-white half-grey against the sward from which they rise, you might fancy, if you were a Platonist, that here Plato might have realised the dream of his Republic, and made a home for the chosen youths who were to rule and defend his state; here amid things beautiful "from which come effluences wholesome for the soul, like a breeze bringing health from blessed regions." The Educated Woman, with her unerring perception of the fitness of things, has already, it is whispered, marked Wadham for her own when the day of reckoning comes, and men will have to share with women not merely degrees but buildings and endowments. She has chosen well, for Tennyson could have imagined no fitter home for the Princess and her companions.