The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-11-08

combined the two styles.
 Wadham is such a particularly good example of the last phase of Gothic architecture that I shall allow myself to speak of it at some length. It is al most unique among Oxford colleges in retaining all it's original buildings un- changed and with very inconsiderabIe additions, while from an architectural point of view it is perhaps, as a whole, the most satisfactory of them all. The front quadrangle is of the conventional type, and except for more perfect taste than is to be found in the build ings reared in the latter half of the century does not differ from those of several other colleges.
 But as seen from the garden it re sembles a beautiful manor house rath- CT than a college, a home of ancient peace, where quiet people whose family had lived there for centuries might spend long years of placid enjoyment rather than the brief halting place of transitory youth. It is, as l have al ready suggested, that it's arch itects have imported into a building, still Queto1~ NliSlOuo dIAu oCllll-lllOlA1ttoAlN III | its intention, the essential homeliness of those houses about which one feels | that there, at least, men must have been able to lead fine and happy lives.
 Wadham is also an admirable eXam- pie of that blending of the Gothic style with the Renaissance of which have 1 spoken. It os impossible to speak of 1t as belonging to either style; for, while most of the buildings are Gothic, or what passed for Gothic in the seven- | teenth century, over the entrance to the hall is a frontispiece with pillars of different classical orders placed above each other, and at the same time the doorway itself is Gothic in character under a classic architrave. But 1t is the chapel which is most surprising Here we have a building erected in 16lO with lofty pointed arches in the ante chapel which might we'll date from the fourteenth century, with windows in the chapel itself of the ordinary per- pendicular pattern, while the windows 1 in the ante-chapel, of the same shape and size, have (like those of the halD the incongruous tracery, full of classi- cal feeling, which the Renaissance architects sometimes chose to put into IGothic windows, lastly, the beautiful Jacobean screen and stalls are purely Renaissance both in feeling and de- sign Truly the architects of this col- lege can be said to have belonged to no school and adhered to no artistic creed; they chose what seemed to them best of the styles they knew and, by some divine good fortune, achieved a whole unsurpassed for pleasant harmo- ny and quiet charm.
 IA few miles from Oxford, remote from any high road, there stands amid rich pastures beside the little Cherwell stream a house which embodies all the graces of early Jacobean building. Water Eton Manor House Is not a great mansion and, though it is proba- ble that in the time of Lord Lovelace lit possessed another wing which has since disappeared, it can never have been more than quiet country house; but preserving as it does it's chapel, barns and separate offices, it presents a singuarly complete example of the English manor It is of about the same date as Wadham, and it's little chapel, like that of the college, is of a much purer Gothic style than most bildings of the period, the foliation of the windows being even reminiscent of decorated early English; and yet the beautiful screen, pulpit and pews, which are contemporary with the building itself, have, like those of Wad- ham chapel, no trace of Gothic feeling
 What a fine critical taste these archi- tects of James Is reign must have possessed, and what independence of judgment! It is so seldom that the masters of a living style in art can re- cognize, in practice at least, the mer- its of those that have gon,J before, and it is even rarer that the eclectic artist produces work that can be really said to live. But the architecture of this fortunate generation, when the native English style was not yet dead and classic Journalism had not yet begun to dominate the country, is spoiled neith- Ter by the dogmatic exclusiveness of the champions of the new and the defend CTS of the old, nor by the insipidity of those who, having no ideas of their town, make lifeless arrangements of the ideas of rs.-Macmillan's Mag