How much harm to study he and Waynflete have unwittingly done, and
how much they have added to the romance of Oxford! It is easy to
understand that men find it a weary task to read in sight of the
beauty of the groves of Magdalen and of St. John's. When Kubla Khan
"a stately pleasure-dome decreed," he did not mean to settle students
there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays, and for Greek and
Latin prose compositions. Kubla Khan would have found a palace to
his desire in the gardens of Laud, or where Cherwell, "meandering
with a mazy motion," stirs the green weeds, and flashes from the
mill-wheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows white and purple
with fritillaries.
"And here are gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree";
but here is scarcely the proper training-ground of first-class men!
Oxford returned to her ancient uses in 1625. Soon after the
accession of Charles I. the plague broke out in London, and Oxford
entertained the Parliament, as six hundred years before she had
received the Witan. There seemed something ominous in all that
Charles did in his earlier years--the air, or men's minds, was full
of the presage of fate. It was observed that the House of Commons
met in the Divinity School, and that the place seemed to have
infected them with theological passion. After 1625 there was never a
Parliament but had its committee to discuss religion, and to stray
into the devious places of divinity.
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