of their own age, and thought that men would wear the same dress till the end of time. They had no idea that fifty shillings a year would ever cease to be a comfortable income for a Scholar; or that a Warden, in making his annual progress round the estates of his college, would ever be able to travel more rapidly and conveniently than on horseback. And in truth, if they had thought that the poetry and enjoyment of traveling would never be greater than it was in those annual rides in the summer-time through woods and over hills, by castle and abbey and feudal town, not from hotel to hotel, but from one country grange to another, their error would not have been great. Merton allows his Warden and Fellows to make new rules as occasion might require, in addition to those he gave them, and in this he shows himself a liberal legislator for his day. He was scarcely in his grave, however, before his inability, as a mortal, to mould his fellow-men exactly according to his will became apparent in deviations from his rule: and we have the Visitor of his college, Archbishop Peckham, fulminating against the admission of interdicted studies, the neglect of the rule of indigence, and other violations and perversions of the founder's law.

was to be a grammarian-for the benefit, probably, of the children of the founder's kin who were to be brought up in the house. The rule of study was simply that of the schools of the university. The rule of life prescribed common meals, at which the Fellows were to sit in silence, after the monastic fashion, and listen to the reader; uniform dress; the use of the Latin tongue; strict obedience; surveillance of the juniors by the seniors; and periodical inquiries, like those made at the monastic chapters, into the character and conduct of all the members of the society. Attendance at the canonical hours and the celebration of masses was enjoined on all, and, for this purpose, those of the society were required to be in priest's orders. Masses were said in this, as in all medieval foundations, for the founder's soul. The college was to be governed by a Warden-"a man circumspect in spiritual and in temporal affairs." There were also to be subordinate officers for discipline, and for managing the estates and keeping the accounts; and every year, after harvest, the Warden was to make his progress through the estates, and report to the society on his return. The annual stipend of each Fellow was to be fifty shillings, subject to mulets for absence from the schools. The Warden was to have fifty merks for his table and two horses for his progress. The number of Fellows was to increase with the estate, and this increase none, under pain of their founder's high displeasure, were to oppose, saving in very urgent cases, such as a heavy debt, a suit with a powerful adversary (when, in those days, gold would have been too needful to obtain justice), losses by fire, a murrain among the flocks, general collections for poor students, the ransom of the prince or a prelate, a public contribution for the defense of the Holy Land. Each Fellow at his election was to take an oath to obey the statutes; and though power is given to the society to make new rules, no power is given to alter those of the founder. The last regulation proved very fatal in after-slaves, but into “living corpses," and when his times to the welfare of Merton's foundation, and to that of the other foundations which were modeled after the pattern of his, because it kept them stationary while all around was moving, unchanging while all around was changed. But it evinces no special illiberality or tyrannical tendency on the part of its good author. The men of his generation, the men of many generations after his, having no extensive knowledge of history, would have no conception of the great onward movement of humanity which the study of history, ranging over long periods of time and including great revolutions, has revealed, and which would convict of an arrogance bordering on insanity the man who should, in these times, presume to bind his own ideas on any community as an inviolable and immutable law. To them all seemed fixed and unchanging as the solid earth, of the revolutions of which they were as little conscious as they were of the progress of the political, social, and intellectual world. They painted the Apostles in the dress

The necessity of respecting individual freedom was as little understood in the Middle Ages as that of making provision for reasonable changes in institutions. Men saw no evil in absolutely surrendering their individuality into the hands of a founder, whether he were the founder of a monastic order such as St. Dominic or St. Francis, or the founder of a college such as Merton. As little did a founder see any evil in accepting and enforcing the surrender. And in those simple times of faith and devotion both parties erred in ignorance, and therefore in comparative innocence. But the error of both grew more conscious and less innocent when Loyola deliberately set himself to turn his followers not only into intellectual

followers renounced the freedom to which they had been called to become the instruments of his design.

Merton's College was ecclesiastical, as all literary institutions and learned men were in the Middle Ages, when, in fact, society was divided into the soldier, the priest, the burgher, and the serf. But it belonged to the secular, not to the regular clergy. No monk was to be admitted among the Fellows; and in case the Visitor should exercise his office by deputy, the deputy was not to be a monk-provisions which I seem to denote that the founder's leaning was to the party of nationality and independence, not to the Papal party, of which the monkish orders were the most zealous and effective supporters. And in truth the sons of Dominic hardly succeeded in gaining a firm ascendency over the native independence of the Anglo-Saxon mind. England was never in the dominions of the Inquisition.

The enactment that the Fellows of Merton

If this description is as true as it is genial and vivid, "Oxenforde" had no reason to be ashamed of her "clerks." Though their philosophy produced no gold, they must have been very far from an ignoble or worthless element in the nation.

should all be indigent had, no doubt, as its primary object, the fulfillment of the founder's charitable intentions toward poor students. But the men of those times also entertained an ascetic preference for poverty, as the higher spiritual state an error, as we all know, if the doctrine be applied to the wages of honest labor, Such was the most ancient of these commuand not merely to those who live in idleness and nities, the thread of whose corporate lives has luxury by the sweat of another brow; yet an er-run through so many centuries, and survived so ror more respectable than the worship of wealth, and in this respect to be classed with the other chimerical but not ignoble fancies of the time. Poor men were also the most likely to render perfect obedience, for the sake of their founder's bread, to all the requirements of his rule. Nor was there any lack of indigence in medieval Oxford. Many of the youths who had found their way from the bonds and darkness of feudalism to the light, freedom, and hope of the University were, as was before said, actual mendicants. They were in the habit of receiving regular licenses from the Vice-Chancellor to beg.

Our picture of a medieval college would hardly be complete without the servants-the manciple, cook, butler, barber, and porter, and the groom who kept the horses for the annual progress. There were in some colleges regular members of the foundation, with "commons" or allowances like the Head and Fellows. Chaucer has described the manciple of a temple (that is, a college of lawyers in London), and the description will serve equally well for the manciple of a college at Oxford. Domestic service then was not a commercial contract, but a sort of personal allegiance, like the fealty of a vassal to his lord, and probably, as a general rule, it lasted through life. It now seems, in America at least, to have almost reached its last stage of existence.

I have cited Chaucer. He has given, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, a picture (not the least admirable in that gallery of social portraits) of an Oxford student of this, or of a rather later period, which will no doubt represent to us sufficiently well the inmates of the House of Merton :

A clerk there was of Oxenforde also,
That unto logike hadde long ygo.
As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fat I undertake;
But loked holwe and thereto soberly.
Ful thredbare was his overest courtepy,
For he hadde geten him yet no benefice,
Ne was nought worldly to have an office.
For him was lever han at his beddes hed
A twenty bokes, clothed in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes rich, or fidel, or sautrie.
But all be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre:
But all that he might of his frendes hente,
On bokes and on lerning he it spente;
And besily gan for the soules praie
Of him that yave him wherewith to scolaie.
Of studie took he moste cure and hede;
Not a word spake he more than was nede;
And that was said in forme and reverence,
And short and quike and ful of high sentence.
Souning in moral vertue was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.

many revolutions; in whose domestic archives are recorded the daily habits and expenses of so many successive generations. Would that they had left a record of their thoughts and feelings too, or even of the events that passed before their eyes!

If you come to Merton, or to any of the colleges of which it was the type, in the present day, you will see the old buildings and feel their influence, but you will trace only the faint and fading remains of the original institution. You will find the Fellows still dining together, and still unmarried; but you will have no reader at meals, nor will the meal be silent, nor will the speech be in the Latin tongue. What is of more importance, the scholars of Merton, who have assumed the common name of Fellows, instead of being students in the schools of the University, have themselves become teachers, engaged in the tuition of the students who fill the extended buildings of the college. This is a change which has taken place in the colleges generally since the date of their foundation, though in some, especially those of later date, the rudiments of the system of college tuition are discernible in the original statutes. Junior members have generally been added to the foundation, if they were not originally a part of it, who receive stipends from the college, and wear a special gown to distinguish them as foundationers, but are not members of the governing body. To these the name of Scholars is now appropri ated, though in the earlier colleges it was given to those who are now the Fellows. Such of the Fellows as are still students study in London, in the precincts of the law or in the great schools of medicine.

Balio is of earlier date than Merton as a foundation, but it was not till a later period, and probably in imitation of Merton, that it took the shape of a regular college. John Baliol-the father of that Baliol who was King of Scotland for a day-besought his wife Dervorguilla, on his death-bed, to continue the charitable assistance which he had given to poor Oxford scholars during his life. The "noble and virtuous lady," in fulfillment of this request, bought a house in Oxford, and placed her husband's scholars in it. She gave them a short and sensible code of statutes, enjoining them to attend divine service on festivals, and on other days to frequent the schools of the university; to pray for her husband's soul; and to observe some simple rules of life. A young scholar, or servitor, was to be fed with the broken meat from their table. As the foundation of a Baliol, the college is a monument of the close connec

TRYING-ON FOR THE DOLLS' DRESS-MAKER.-[SEE APRIL NUMBER, PAGE 653.]

CHAPTER V.

ly followed with her eyes and ears. There was an apartment at the side of the Boffin mansion,

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO BAD COM-known as Mr. Boffin's room. Far less grand than

WERE

PANY.

ERE Bella Wilfer's bright and ready little wits at fault, or was the Golden Dustman passing through the furnace of proof and coming out dross? Ill news travels fast. We shall know full soon.

the rest of the house, it was far more comfortable, being pervaded by a certain air of homely snugness, which upholstering despotism had banished to that spot when it inexorably set its face against Mr. Boffin's appeals for mercy in behalf of any other chamber. Thus, although a On that very night of her return from the Hap- room of modest situation-for its windows gave py Return, something chanced which Bella close-on Silas Wegg's old corner-and of no preten