One of the true College stories runs to the effect that Warden Griffiths used the account-book to refute the contention of a great historian of British architecture that Wadham College must have been built at different dates, because its architecture is of different styles--an improper combination of Jacobean and Perpendicular. Dr Griffiths was the kindliest of men, but the most accurate, and it gave him, for he was human, great pleasure to correct mistakes. He listened silently to the great man's argument: next morning, at a large breakfast party given in the College Common Room to the members of the British Association which met at Oxford in the year 1847, he quietly laid the Account-Book beside the plate of the unhappy dogmatist. The fact that the Chapel is Perpendicular while the Quadrangle is late Gothic has been explained by the late Mr J. H. Parker's reasonable, perhaps fanciful, suggestion that "the architect desired to emphasise by this variation of style the religious and secular uses of the several structures."[1]
Wadham has been described by Ayliffe, and without much protest, as being "in respect of beauty the most regular and uniform of any in the University." It is the best specimen of that late Gothic style which makes the charm of Oxford, and which Mr Jackson has helped to preserve by his work there and elsewhere.
The beauty of Wadham is of a singularly quiet and simple kind, the effect of proportion, of string-courses and straight lines, marred by little decoration. Except for buildings annexed from time to time, so plain that they are no disfigurement, the College stands as it stood three centuries ago. Mr Andrew Lang has remarked that it is "the only College in Oxford which has not been fiddled with"; this is high praise, and gratefully accepted. One defect the College has: the resources of the Founders sufficed to build only one quadrangle; they had not counted the cost of the stately Chapel and Hall, and little was left for College rooms. When will our benefactor come? But it would be ungracious in Wadham men to criticise the Founders of their College, to whom they owe the most beautiful of homes. It stood fifty years ago almost in the country, with nothing north or east of it save the Museum and green fields. It is still in a great measure what it was called, the Country College; for though it has neighbours close to it in Mansfield and Manchester Colleges, yet these and the cricket-grounds, which lie between Wadham and the Cherwell, and further north, the Parks, make one spacious region of almost country,--a region of grass and trees and silence, broken only by the sounds of birds, and the shouts of Matthew Arnold's "young barbarians all at play."
