Wadham also produced, among other early members of the Royal Society, its historian, Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, who somehow, as “Pindaric Sprat” (he was the friend and also the editor of Abraham Cowley), found his way into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets; he is, however, more likely to be remembered because his subserviency, when he was Dean of Westminster to James II, has earned him an unenviable place in Macaulay’s gallery of Revolution worthies and unworthies.  Sprat, it should be added, was an exception to the prevailing Whig tradition of Wadham, which found a worthy exponent in Arthur Onslow, the greatest Speaker of the House of Commons, who ruled over that august body for a record period, thirty-four years (1727-1761), and formed its rules and traditions in the period when it was first asserting its claim to govern.

 [Plate XXIII.  Wadham College :  The Hall Interior]

Two centuries later than the Royal Society days at Wadham, another group of philosophers was trained there, who thought that the views of their master, Auguste Comte, were going to make as great a revolution in human thought as the views of a Bacon or a Newton.  All the leading English Positivists were at Wadham—­Congreve, Beesley, Bridges, Frederic Harrison, of whom the last alone survives, to fight with undiminished vigour for the causes which he championed in Mid-Victorian days.  Positivism had less influence than its adherents expected, but it powerfully affected for a time the political and the religious thought of England.

Forty years later another famous group of young men were at Wadham together.  As they are all alive, it is impossible, and would be unbecoming, to estimate what their influence on English life and thought will be; but it was a curious coincidence that sent to Wadham together, in the ’nineties, Lord Birkenhead, who reached the Woolsack at the earliest age on record; Sir John Simon, who, if he had wished, could have lowered that record still further, and C. B. Fry, once a household name as the greatest of British athletes.

Three groups of Wadham men have been spoken of; one other name must be mentioned of one who stood alone at college, and for a long time in the world outside, in his attitude to the social problems of our day.  Whatever may be the future of the Settlement movement, its leader, Samuel Barnett, “Barnett of Whitechapel,” is not to be forgotten, for his name is associated as a pioneer and an inspiring force with every movement of educational and social advance in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  M. Clemenceau, no friendly judge of the ministers of any religious body, pronounced him one of the three greatest men he had met in England.  Certainly he was great, if greatness means to anticipate the problems of the future before the rest of the world sees their urgency, and to make real contributions to their solution.