MAGDALEN COLLEGE (1) SITE AND BUILDINGS

“Where yearly in that vernal hour
The sacred city is in shades reclining,
With gilded turrets in the sunrise shining: 
From sainted Magdalene’s aerial tower
Sounds far aloof that ancient chant are singing,
And round the heart again those solemn memories bringing.” 

          
                                                      ISAAC WILLIAMS.

Macaulay was too good a Cambridge man to appreciate an Oxford college at its full worth; but he devotes one of his finest purple patches to the praise of Magdalen, ending, as is fitting, “with the spacious gardens along the river side,” which, by the way, are not “gardens.”  Antony Wood praises Magdalen as “the most noble and rich structure in the learned world,” with its water walks as “delectable as the banks of Eurotas, where Apollo himself was wont to walk.”  To go a century further back, the Elizabethan, Sir John Davies, wrote: 

    “O honeyed Magdalen, sweete, past compare
     Of all the blissful heavens on earth that are.”

Such praises could be multiplied indefinitely, and they are all deserved.

The good genius of Magdalen has been faithful to it throughout.  The old picturesque buildings on the High Street, taken over (1457) by the Founder, William of Waynflete, from the already existing hospital of St. John, were completed by his munificence in the most attractive style of English fifteenth century domestic architecture; Chapel and Hall, Cloisters and Founder’s Tower, all alike are among the most beautiful in Oxford.  When classical taste prevailed, the architectural purists of the eighteenth century were for sweeping almost all this away, and had a plan prepared for making a great classic quad; but wiser counsels, or lack of funds, thwarted this vandalistic design, and only the north side of the new quad was built, to give Magdalen a splendid specimen of eighteenth century work, without prejudice to the old.  And in our own day, the genius of Bodley has raised in St. Swithun’s Quad a building worthy of the best days of Oxford, while the hideous plaster roof, with which the mischievous Wyatt had marred the beauty of the hall, was removed, and a seemly oak roof put in its place.  It is a great thing to be thankful for, that one set of college buildings in Oxford, though belonging to so many periods, has nothing that is not of the best.

But the great glory of Magdalen has not yet been mentioned.  This is, without doubt, its bell tower, which, standing just above the River Cherwell, is worthily seen, whether from near or far.  A most curious and interesting custom is preserved in connection with it.  Every May morning, at five o’clock (in Antony Wood’s time the ceremony was an hour earlier), the choir mounts the tower and sings a hymn, which is part of the college grace; in the eighteenth century, however, the music was of a secular nature and lasted two hours.  The ceremony has been made the subject of a great picture by Holman Hunt, and has been celebrated in many poems; the sonnet of Sir Herbert Warren, the present President, may be quoted as worthily expressing something of what has been felt by many generations of Magdalen men: