Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ALL SOULS ALL SOULS The full name of " All Souls " is " The College of the Souls of All the Faithful Persons Deceased in Oxford." It was founded in 1437, as a Memorial to the Brave Warriors who fell at Agin- court in 1415; and it thereby antedates the discovery of America by over half a century. It took seven years to complete the buildings, at a cost of a little over four thousand pounds. The account-books, which have been preserved, make very pleasant reading to those of us who have, in recent days, been paying for the erection of private homes, or of public institutions, in the New World. The workmen were the most skilful that could be procured; and we learn that sawyers and carpenters were paid sixpence a day; masons eight pence j laborers four pence half penny; daubers—otherwise painters—five pence, and all female laborers five pence. A horse, purchased for the Warden, in 1451, cost sixty shillings ; a pair of boots two and eight pence; and, most interesting of all, the bill for a small pig and a capon—it is not recorded for whose consumption —amounted to twelve pence—say a quarter of a dollar—for the pair. All Souls, despite its comparative antiquity and its annual income now of eighteen thousand and eighty-six pounds sterling, is not particularly rich in Literary Associations. Linacre, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Christopher Wren, Edward Young, Blackstone and Heber may be counted among its Fellows; but its Undergraduates, and Graduates, seem to have left very few Landmarks on the Road of Letters. It is not an easy matter, even for the Oxford man himself, to say exactly what a Fellow is. There are, in Oxford, all sorts of Fellows. Good Fellows, Bad Fellows, Odd Fellows, and just plain Fellows. " The Century Dictionary" thus defines him : " In England [a Fellow is] a gr...