The chapel is the memorial of the devotion to Lincoln of another churchman, more successful than Wesley from a worldly point of view, but now forgotten by all except professed students of history.  John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln from 1621 to 1641, was the last ecclesiastic who “kept” the Great Seal of England.  He had the misfortune to differ from Laud on the Church Question of the day, and was prosecuted before the Star Chamber for subornation of perjury, and heavily fined.  There seems no doubt that he was guilty; but it was to advocacy of moderation and to his dislike of the king’s arbitrary rule that he owed the severity of his punishment.  Whatever his moral character, at all events he gave his college a beautiful little chapel, which is often compared to the slightly older one at Wadham; that of Lincoln is much the less spacious of the two, but in its wood carvings, at any rate, it is superior.

Lincoln had the ill-fortune, in the nineteenth century, to produce the writer of one of those academic “Memoirs,” which reveal, with a scholar’s literary style, and also with a scholar’s bitterness, the intrigues and quarrels that from time to time arise within college walls.  Mark Pattison is likely to be remembered by the world in general because he is said to have been the original of George Eliot’s “Mr. Casaubon”; in Oxford he will be remembered not only for the “Memoirs,” but also as one who upheld the highest ideal of “Scholarship” when it was likely to be forgotten, and who criticized the neglect of “research.”  The personal attacks were those of a disappointed man; the criticisms, one-sided as they were, were certainly not unjustified.

A university should certainly exist to promote learning, and Mark Pattison, with all his unfairness, certainly helped its cause in Oxford.  But a university exists also for the promotion of friendships among young men, and for the development of their social life.  Of this duty, Oxford has never been unmindful, and perhaps it is in small colleges like Lincoln that the flowers of friendship best flourish.  It is needless to make comparisons, for they flourish everywhere; but it is appropriate to quote, when writing of one of the smaller Oxford colleges, the verses on this subject of a recent Lincoln poet (now dead); they will come home to every Oxford man: 

    “City of my loves and dreams,
     Lady throned by limpid streams;
     ’Neath the shadow of thy towers,
     Numbered I my happiest hours. 
     Here the youth became a man;
     Thought and reason here began. 
     Ah! my friends, I thought you then
     Perfect types of perfect men: 
     Glamour fades, I know not how,
     Ye have all your failings now,”

But Oxford friendships outlast the discovery that friends have “failings”; as Lord Morley, who went to Lincoln in 1856, writes:  “Companionship (at Oxford) was more than lectures”; a friend’s failure later (he refers to his contemporary, Cotter Morison’s Service of Man) “could not impair the captivating comradeship of his prime.”