But then, of course, Henry VIII never lived in
Toronto.
The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students,
living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called "quadrangles,"
"closes" and "rooms"; but I am so broken in to the usage of my
student days that I can't help calling them boarding houses. In many
of these the old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten
generations of students: the windows have little latticed panes:
there are old names carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick
growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding house at St. John's
College dates from 1509, the one at Christ Church from the same
period. A few hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace these
old buildings with neat steel and brick structures like the normal
school at Schenectady, N.Y., or the Peel Street High School at
Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement was indeed attempted last
autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls, but the result was
unsatisfactory and they are putting it back. Any one could have told
them beforehand that the mere removal of the ivy would not brighten
Oxford up, unless at the same time one cleared the stones of the old
inscriptions, put in steel fire-escapes, and in fact brought the
boarding houses up to date.
But Henry VIII being dead, nothing was done.
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