by the Protector, from which Pepys watched the flames; St. Olave's, Hart Street; St. Bartholomew's and St. Helen's were happily not among the 86 churches destroyed.

These figures help us to estimate what has been lost for ever to architecture, and may stiffen our resolve to preserve what is left of the magnificent rebuilding of Wren. And the energy of old Dolben, the royalist soldier-priest of Charles I's army, may serve as a modern example. Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, as he had become, he rose to the occasion, and assembling the Westminster boys in a strong company, rushed them through the City to the eastern limits of the fire to keep them hard at work fetching water from the back of St. Dunstan's to isolate the church. The high leaden steeple ran down in molten rivulets to the Thames, but much of the church was saved, and All Hallows with it. The Tower of London was safe, but Baynard's Castle, its westward fellow-keep by Blackfriars, was gone, and had made the most terrifying gorgeous spectacle of all. Here Wolsey had pleaded before Henry, and here Richard III received his crown. Shakespeare's house in Ireland Yard was close by well must he have known the austere pile, whose stones were stuff of our history.

The character of the men whose forbears had raised the City could surmount the disaster. Continuity in gradual growth had been a governing principle. If the Guildhall was lost, its archives, the records of its soul, were saved. The country's enemies were doomed to sad disappointment. Expansion to new suburbs began at once. Westminster was speedily linked up with its mother in the east. Meticulous care was taken in defining the boundaries of the old parishes and establishing dwelling-house sites. Pudding Lane, Idol Lane, Water Lane take their same curved path to the water as when the troops marched down from the churches to find "redy shippyng " for Crecy and Agincourt. A week after the Royal Exchange had been burnt, 3000 merchants assembled at Gresham House (" I met with many people undone," says Pepys," and more that have extraordinary great losses ") and for the most part met the demands of their foreign correspondents as though there had been no disaster. Well might Sprat, of Rochester, say "that such greatness of heart should have been found among the obscure multitude is no doubt one of the most honourable events that ever happened. A new City

is to be built, on the most advantageous site of all Europe, for trade and command."

But dearly bought wisdom enjoined in the Royal Proclamation that "no man whatever shall presume to erect any house or building, great or small, but of brick or stone." Well would it have been if other proposals could have been rigidly enforcedas that "no street should be so narrow as to make the passage uneasy or inconvenient "-as that "all noisome trades, those of brewers, dyers, sugar bakers, and the like, which by their continuous smoke make adjacent localities unhealthy" should be removed and grouped in a place to be selected. If Sir Christopher could have had his way in the rebuilding he would have crowned the river front with City Company Halls and sloping gardens a truly royal water promenade, a supreme entrance to the capital of the kingdom. But he was over-ruled, perhaps wisely, in the interest of docks, wharfs and shipping. It was not foreseen that in a few decades the river would cease to be the main highway for ordinary traffic. His other suggestion of genius, that broad, straight, main roads from Smithfield to the river, from Temple Bar to the Tower, should be driven through the heart of things, was ruled out on the score of injury to private property. But neither then could it be anticipated that in two centuries seven millions and more would be clustered round the old citadel.

Gladly now would we see Thames used again to carry onetenth of the daily workers to and from dormitory suburbs to their work. Welcomed on every count would be such legislation as should segregate the various industries with their workers in a wider flung area. Producers have in the proper nature of things no special business in the area devoted to selling, and cheap labour in the casual trades is dearly bought at the price of toilsome overcrowding and transport congestion. The need is insistent for a policy of partition. Printing has already begun to make its way to the provinces; it should be possible for manufacturers to follow afield, providing amenities of light and space and air for the families of their operatives. As distance is conquered by new and newer inventions, easy transport will bring a big dividend of health and well-being. Our fathers practised archery in Moorfields and crossed to the Surrey-side for their hunting. It made them men of might. We have yet to master some of the lessons clearly to be learnt from the Great Fire and the Plague.

"Se ipsam virtute, Europam exemplo " was the proud legend sent down by Pitt after the Napoleonic Wars for inscription on the Royal Exchange. It summarises in pithy truth the history of the growth of London. She has raised and rebuilt herself by valorous effort, and by proud example she has saved Europenot once, nor twice. The walls that forged her security have spread and widened as she has grown. They are no longer now a massy amalgam of stone and rubble, with gates and moats and drawbridge. They float now on the five seas and fly above all oceans. Yet age-long trust still abides in London's chief magistrate, who represents for one year the clear honesty and strong cunning handed down by the men who carried on a world-wide commerce from the shelter of their city walls. By right of his office the Lord Mayor of London is a Privy Councillor and a Judge, an Admiral and a General, and a Trustee of the City's Cathedral. The honour paid to him is the harvest of pledges unbroken and pacts ever maintained.

Dr. Johnson told Boswell in 1775: "Why, Sir, Fleet Street has a very animated appearance, but I think the full-tide of existence is at Charing Cross." His opinion is possibly shared by many, for the Alhambra is better known than the Mansion House and Nelson's Column more familiar than the Bank. Regent Street is thronged by thousands who have never walked Lower Thames Street. Yet the City way which connects Billingsgate and the Coal Exchange with the Bridge and the wharfs is the homely beginning of London. The Custom House, so many times burnt down, collects what the Tower guarded through the centuries, and the Mint still turns into coin of the realm. It is here that the tide begins to run which floods the world.

ARTHUR G. B. WEST

THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

A History of the University of Oxford. Vol.i.. The Mediaval University; Vol. ii., The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By Sir CHARLES EDWARD MALLET. Methuen & Co. 1924.

THES

HESE two bulky volumes are a monument of solid industry, and will serve for many a year as the standard history of the elder of the two great English Universities. There has long been room for such a book, which should incorporate all the results of modern research as to Oxford's history. It is nearly forty years since Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte published his work on the first four centuries of Academic annals; while Dean Rashdall in the chapters on Oxford in his famous "Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages" (1895) only undertook to deal with certain aspects of the subject, as was natural in a series of volumes dealing with such a broad topic as the whole of European education, from Abelard to Erasmus. Sir Charles Mallet in his first volume has set out to re-write the tale of the origins of the University of Oxford in the twelfth century, and of its stormy but virile intellectual life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when it was producing such sons as Roger Bacon; Duns Scotus, and Wycliffe, whose influence extended all over Europe. In his second volume he deals with those later centuries when the academy ceased to be so cosmopolitan, but settled down under the collegiate system to be the greatest centre of English education, if it no longer influenced the thought of the whole of Western Christendom. He has continued his narrative all through the Tudor and Stuart epochs, past the Reformation and the Great Rebellion, down to the Revolution of 1688. He reserves the story of Oxford's intellectual decay under the sleepy Whig régime of the eighteenth century, and of its resurrection as a thinking and teaching corporation in the early nineteenth century, for another book.

In one way the compilation of these two volumes could be carried out under advantageous conditions, for the amount of new information that has been put into print since Lyte's annals of the University appeared in 1886 is enormous. A series of

College histories, written by specialists and drawn straight from the muniment room, appeared in the early years of this century; and there have been issued also several books constructed on a larger scale, and incorporating masses of original medieval documents which deal with a particular institution. The registers of certain colleges have been printed, and Foster's Alumni Oxonienses gives an invaluable, if not always a complete, notice of several centuries of the members of the University. There is much more printed material to work upon than was at the disposition of Lyte and his contemporaries. But the multiplication of sources is in some ways a burden to the writer of a general history. And much even now remains unprinted-so much that the proportion of the information still in manuscript is overwhelming, when compared with that which has been committed to print. It is a testimony to the persevering zeal of Sir Charles Mallet that he has made many raids into college muniment-rooms, and extracted much information for himself, over and above that already gleaned by the college historians. What this means will best be understood by those who are acquainted with the tiresomeness of fifteenth century contractions, and the maddening illegibility of Tudor " Court hand." It was not till well into the seventeenth century that college accounts became easy to read.

We find Sir Charles then, well based on the knowledge that can be gained from the modern series of college histories, and able to supplement it with much new information of his own. Rightly or wrongly, he resolved to make his book a history not only of the University at large, but also of its various component parts-the colleges and halls. This determination has led to considerable difficulties of arrangement. When once the collegiate system had developed, the story of Oxford's intellectual life lost the simplicity of the earlier times. There was no longer a single thread of narrative to be followed, as there was in the days when the academic body had no large fixed units of separatist tendencies, but consisted of a mass of masters and scholars living scattered in small and generally ephemeral halls, which were to them hardly more than lodging houses, and made no great demands on their local patriotism. In 1250 the University was everything, and the halls counted for little. By 1400, and still more by 1500, the separate histories of the colleges were becoming