No Oxford colleges are in this picture, though a small part of Exeter, one of Sir Gilbert Scott’s least happy erections in Oxford, appears on the right, and a little piece of Trinity on the left; the last-named is the college of Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, better known as “Q,” one of the most delightful of Oxford’s minor poets.  The opening lines of his poem, “Alma Mater,”

    “Know ye her secret none can utter,
       Hers of the book, the tripled crown? 
     Still on the spire the pigeons flutter,
       Still by the gateway flits the gown,
     Still in the street from corbel and gutter
       Faces of stone look down,”

may well have been inspired by this very scene in the Broad, for the grim faces of stone that surround the Sheldonian are one of the features and the puzzles of Oxford.  Are they the Roman Emperors, or the Greek Philosophers, or neither?  It does not matter, for they are unlike anything in heaven or in earth, and yet they are loved by all true Oxford men for their uncompromising ugliness, which has been familiar to so many generations.

BALLIOL COLLEGE

    “For the house of Balliol is builded ever
     By all the labours of all her sons,
     And the great deed wrought and the grand endeavour
     Will be hers as long as the Isis runs.” 
                                             F. S. Boas

The story is told of the old Greek admirals, after their victory at Salamis over the Persian king, that, when invited to name the two most deserving commanders, they each put their own name first, and then one and all put the Athenian Themistocles second.  If a vote, on these principles, were taken in Oxford as to which was the best college, there is little doubt that Balliol would secure most of the second votes.

It is one of the three oldest colleges, and actually has been in occupation of its present site longer than any other of our Oxford foundations—­for more than six centuries and a half.  Yet its greatness is but a thing of yesterday compared to the antiquity of Oxford, and it is fitting that a college which has come to the front in the nineteenth century should be mainly housed in nineteenth century buildings.

Balliol has indeed ceased to be the “most satisfactory pile and range of old lowered and gabled edifices,” which Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in the “fifties” of the last century.  The painful imitation of a French chateau, the work of Sir Alfred Waterhouse, which forms the main part of our picture, was put up about 1868 (mainly by the munificence of Miss Hannah Brackenbury), and only the old hall and the library, which lie behind, remain of Pre-Reformation Balliol.

In the background of our picture (Plate V) can be seen the Fisher Building, known to all Balliol men for the still existing inscription, “Verbum non amplius Fisher,” which tradition says was put up at the dying request of the eighteenth-century benefactor.