WADHAM
Wadham is young enough to dwell, in part, in buildings erected by its founder, Nicholas Wadham, and by Dorothy Wadham, the wife and widow and executrix of Nicholas, in the second decade of the Seventeenth Century. The Front Quadrangle stands as they left it; the Hall bears the date 1613, over its entrance, but the Chapel was restored in 1834.
One of the most far-reaching of the Literary Landmarks of Wadham is the fact that it was the cradle of the Royal Society.
Mr. J. Wells, a Fellow of Wadham, quotes Bishop Sprat as telling how "the first meetings were made in 1649 in Dr. Wilkins's lodgings, in Wadham College, which was then the place of resort for virtuous and learned men; "and Mr. Wells places these meetings" by tradition in the great room over the Gateway, although this," he considers, "more than doubtful." Evelyn jots down in his "Diary" (July 13, 1654), that "We all dined at the most obliging and universally-curious (with a hyphen) Dr. Wilkins's at Wadham College." Whether the hyphenated words "universally-curious" as applied to Dr. John Wilkins, Divine, Mathematician, and Philosopher, mean that he was possessed of an universal curiosity to find things out, or was simply a man curious in mind and character, in an universal way, Evelyn does not explain.
Wilkins himself, whom nobody reads now, was quite a voluminous writer, who attempted, in one book, to prove that the moon may be habitable, and who, in another work, undertook to show how the moon might be reached; thus antedating M. Jules Verne by more than three centuries. Unfortunately he did not turn his attention to Mars or to its people. He was a brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell.
It seems to be an established fact that before the Royal Society was born Wilkins had changed his abode from "over the Gateway"—now the Tower Library—to the rooms in the northwest corner of the West Quadrangle, which the Warden of Wadham still occupies.
John Wilkins was graduated from Magdalen Hall in 1631, and he became Warden of Wadham in 1648. Wood thought that there was nothing deficient in Wilkins, but a constant mind and settled principles.
It is comparatively easy, from the alliteration, to remember that the head of Wadham is Warden, especially when his name is Wilkins; but Pembroke is ruled by a Master, Magdalen by a President, Lincoln by a Rector. And the stranger who has to address these rulers, and who wishes, naturally, to do so in the proper manner, has to grope in the dark, or to feel his way in the Oxford Directory.
It may be straining a point, perhaps, to call Christopher Wren a Literary Landmark, but he was an universal genius, and a Professor of Astronomy; and the rooms "over the Gateway," which claim to have rocked the Royal Society in its swaddling clothes, certainly did shelter the great Architect in his cap and gown.
Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, who entered Wadham as early as 1651, was an original member of the Society, and its historian. Macaulay did not admire him; but those who read him in his own day said that he had a good prose style; and the inevitable Anthony Wood pronounced him "an excellent poet."
Apropos of the Royal Society, with its farreaching results and its long and honorable career, it is curious to read of a Society which the undergraduates of Oxford attempted to organize "for Scientific and Literary Disquisition" in 1794. Their constitution was submitted respectfully to the Vice-Chancellor for his approval. It forbade the discussion of all topics bearing upon religion or politics; but nevertheless, while it did not seem to contain anything subversive of academic discipline, the Vice-Chancellor felt that he could not foresee how it might operate; and he was constrained to interdict the meetings of the Society in the manner proposed.
This was some thirty years before the foundation of the Oxford Union Society, the social, literary, and debating club so important now in Oxford University life; and it was some thirty years after the inception of "The Well Meaning" and "The Plain Dealing" Societies of the College of New Jersey; still existing, and now bearing the more familiar names of "Clio" and "Whig." In these the undergraduates of the University of rinceton still dispute upon Scientific and Literary subjects. Thus, as in some other respects, has the young Princeton been the senior of the old Oxford in the practice of Plain Doing and Well Speaking.
A contemporary of the respectable Bishop of Rochester, at Wadham, was the wicked Earl, who bore the title of Rochester. He went up in 1660, at the age of twelve; he was dubbed a Master of Arts when he was fourteen, and he eloped with a very rich wife at the age of eighteen, to die, when he was thirty-two, owing bad debts to everybody, even to posterity. He was, perhaps, too young in his Wadham days to have developed a great deal of evil, although no doubt he tried his best to be wicked even then.
Wood says that at the time of the Earl of Rochester's receipt of his degree of Master of Arts, he, and none else, was admitted very affectionately into the fraternity by a kiss on the left cheek from the Chancellor of the University.
Rochester, adds Wood, was "a person of most rare parts, and his natural talent was excellent. . . . But the eager tendency and violent impulses of his natural temperament inclined him to the excesses of pleasure and mirth, which, with the pleasantness of his inimitable humor, did so engage the affection of the dissolute towards him, as to make him delightfully ventrous and frolicsome to the utmost degree of riotous extravagance."
A little later than the Rochesters at Wadham was one Doctor Robert Pitt, who entered in 1669, obtained a Scholarship in 1670, and a Fellowship in 1674, and was also a member of the Royal Society. He wrote one book, important in its time and in its matter, but absolutely forgotten now. It was called "The Craft and Fraud of Physic Exposed," and it was a serious and learned protest against the taking of too much physic, especially in the form of "powdered vipers." He might be called one of the fathers of the High Dilutionists, who now powder their vipers very, very fine; even when, by the rule that like-cures-like, they want to remove snakes from the brain.