When he was but sixty-four, he looked eighty at least. His dress was
not elegant, "cleanliness being his chief object." He rarely left
his rooms, that were papered with MSS., and where every table and
chair had its load of books and yellow parchments from the College
muniment rooms. When strangers came to Oxford with letters of
recommendation, the recluse would leave his study, and gladly lead
them about the town, through Logic Lane to Queen's, which had not
then the sublimely classical front, built by Hawksmoor, "but
suggested by Sir Christopher Wren." It is worthy of his genius.
Wood died in 1695, "forgiving every one." He could well afford to do
so. In his Athenae Oxonienses he had written the lives of all his
enemies.
Wood, "being a mere scholar," could, of course, expect nothing but
disrespect in a place like Oxford. His younger contemporary,
Humphrey Prideaux, was, in the Oxford manner, a man of the world. He
was the son of a Cornish squire, was educated at Westminster under
Busby (that awful pedagogue, whose birch seems so near a memory), got
a studentship at Christ Church in 1668, and took his B.A. degree in
1672. Here it may be observed that men went up quite as late in life
then as they do now, for Prideaux was twenty-four years old when he
took his degree. Fell was Dean of Christ Church, and was showing
laudable zeal in working the University Press. What a pity it is
that the University Press of to-day has become a trading concern, a
shop for twopenny manuals and penny primers! It is scarcely proper
that the University should at once organise examinations and sell the
manuals which contain the answers to the questions most likely to be
set.
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