On the sides of the rooms are hung a series of 120 portraits of ecclesiastics, poets, philosophers (these are few), statesmen, and noblemen, representing distinguished students of the College.

The dinner hour, when the dean and chief officers sit in state on the dais, masters and bachelors at the side tables, and undergraduates at the lower end, is an impressive sight, recalling feudal times.  The feeding is the worst of any in Oxford, much to the advantage of the taverns and pastrycooks.

When in 1566 Queen Elizabeth visited Oxford, a play was performed before her in this hall by the students, in the course of which, “a cry of hounds belonging to themselves” having been counterfeited in the quadrangle, the students were seized with a sudden transport; whereat her Majesty cried out, “O excellent! these boys in very truth are ready to leap out of the window to follow the hounds.”

Amid the many changes of taste and opinion since the days of Queen Bess, the love of hunting still prevails in Christchurch, not one of the least healthy tastes, in an age of perpetual competing work; and the Christchurch drag is one of the stock amusements anathematized toward the end and permitted at the beginning of every hunting term, for the glory of the chief tuft and the benefit of hard-reading men, who cannot waste their time in trotting from cover to cover dependent on the vagaries of such an uncertain animal as a fox, and are therefore content to hunt a “cad” armed with a red herring over the stiffest country he can pick.

After the Hall, the Kitchen should be visited.  It is the most ancient part of the building, for Wolsey, with a truly ecclesiastical appreciation of the foundation of all sound learning, began with the kitchen, and it survived him.  Agriculture, gardening, cooking, and confectionery, were among the civilizing arts brought to great perfection by religious houses and lost for a long period after the Reformation, which, like other strong medicines, cleared our heads at the expense of our stomachs.

In Wolsey’s kitchen may be seen the huge gridiron on which our ancestors roasted sheep whole and prepared other barbarous disgusting dishes.

In the Peckwater Quadrangle are to be found the Library and the Guise collection of pictures, which contains curious specimens of that early school which the mad mediaevalists are now fond of imitating, and a few examples of the famous Italian masters who rose on the force of genius, which did not disdain study but did disdain imitation.

Wickliff was a warden, and Sir Thomas More a student, in Canterbury Hall, which was amalgamated in Wolsey’s College.

The Chapel of Christchurch is the Cathedral of Oxford.  The oldest parts belonged to the church of St. Frideswide’s Priory, consecrated A.D. 1180.  Wolsey pulled down fifty feet of the nave and adapted it to the use of his college.  The stained glass windows, without which every Gothic cathedral has a bare, naked, cold appearance, and which were peculiarly fine, nearly all fell a sacrifice to puritanical bigotry.