Each of the old dials usually had its monitory inscription; and although the former have mostly disappeared, the mottoes have been preserved, so that all their good is not lost. The stately city of Oxford, which Waagen declared it was worth a special journey from Germany to see, has, upon its churches and colleges, and in their lovely gardens, several dials. Christopher Wren, when a boy of fifteen at Wadham College, designed on the ceiling of a room a reflecting dial, embellished with various devices and two figures, Astronomy and Geometry, with accessories, tastefully drawn with a pen, and bearing a Latin inscription; but his more elaborate work is the large and costly dial which he erected at All Souls’ College, of which he was a Fellow. The Rev. W. Lisle Bowles was a sincere respecter of dials. In the garden of his parsonage at Bremhill he placed a Sun-dial—a small antique twisted column, gray with age, and believed to have been the dial of the abbot of Malmesbury, and counted his hours at the adjoining lodge; for it was taken from the garden of the farmhouse, which had originally been the summer retirement of this mitred lord: it is of monastic character, but a more ornate capital has been added, which bears the date of 1688; it has the following inscription by the venerable Canon: To count the brief and unreturning hours, This Sun-dial was placed among the flowers, Which came forth in their beauty—smiled and died, Blooming and withering round its ancient side. Mortal, thy day is passing—see that Flower, And think upon the Shadow and the Hour. From beneath a venerable yew, which has seen the persecution of the loyal English clergy, you look into the adjoining churchyard of Bremhill, on an old Sun-dial, once a cross. Bowles tells us: “The _cross_ was found broken at its foot, probably by the country iconoclasts of the day. I have brought the interesting fragment again into light, and placed it conspicuously opposite to an old Scotch fir in the churchyard, which I think it not unlikely was planted by Townson on his restoration. The accumulation of the soil of centuries had covered an ascent of four steps at the bottom of this record of silent hours. These steps have been worn in places, from the act of frequent prostration or kneeling by the forefathers of the hamlet, perhaps before the church existed.” Upon this old dial Bowles wrote one of his most touching poems, of which these are the opening verses: So passes silent o’er the dead thy shade, Brief Time! and hour by hour, and day by day, The pleasing pictures of the present fade, And like a summer-vapour steal away. And have not they, who here forgotten lie (Say, hoary chronicler of ages past), Once more the shadow with delighted eye, Nor thought it fled,—how certain and how fast?