that the stonework of these could not have been made in the seventeenth century, but must have survived from some older building; Ferguson, the historian of architecture, when confronted with the fact that the college has still the detailed accounts showing how, week by week, the Jacobean masons worked, swept this evidence aside with the dictum—­“No amount of documents could prove what was impossible.”  But here the “impossible” really happened.

The permanence of Gothic in Oxford is a point for professional students; the studied simplicity, which is the great secret of Wadham’s beauty, concerns everyone.  The effect of the garden front is produced simply by the long lines of the string-courses and by the procession of the beautifully proportioned gables.  Neither here nor in any part of the college is there a piece of carved work, except in the classical screen, which marks the entry to the hall.  It may be noted that at Wadham and at Clare, Cambridge, the same effect is produced by the same means; different as the two colleges are, the one Gothic, the other classical, they have a restful and complete beauty which makes them specially attractive.  And this is due more than anything else to the unbroken lines of the stonework, to which everything is kept in due subordination.  Clare was building during half a century; Wadham was finished in three years; but both have been fortunate in being left alone; they have not been “improved” by later additions.

The chapel at Wadham has another feature of great interest for those who visit it; the glass in it (not that in the ante-chapel) is all contemporary with the college, and is a first-rate example of the taste of early Stuart times.  The apostles and the prophets of the side windows have few merits, except their age, and the fact that they illustrate what local craftsmen could do in the reign of James I; but the big east window is of a very different rank.  The college authorities quarrelled with the local workmen, and introduced a foreign craftsman, Bernard van Ling from London.  In our day he would have been called a “blackleg,” and mobbed:  perhaps, even in the seventeenth century, he needed protection, for the college built him a furnace in their garden, and he there produced the finest specimen of seventeenth century glass that Oxford can show.  Even for those who are not students of glass, the Wadham windows are attractive with their two Jonahs and two whales, “The big one that swallowed Jonah, and the little one that Jonah swallowed” (to quote an old college jest).

The gardens at Wadham are famous; they have not the magnificence of St. John’s or the antiquarian charm of the old walls at New College or Merton; but, for the variety and fine growth of their trees, they are unsurpassed, though the glory of these is passing.  Warden Wills planted them in the days of the French Revolution, and trees have their time to fall at last, even though they long survive their planters.