Bishop Jewel, whose "Apology"
was for a long period the great bulwark of the English Church against
Jesuit attacks, had laid the foundations of his great learning in the
Corpus Library, still--after that of Merton--the most picturesque in
Oxford; he often spent whole days there, beginning an hour before
Early Mass, i.e. at 4 a.m., and continuing his reading till 10 p.m.
"There were giants on the earth in those days." Even more famous is
the "judicious Hooker," who resided in the college for sixteen years,
and only left it when, by the wiles of a woman, he, "like a true
Nathanael who feared no guile" (as his biographer, Isaac Walton,
writes), was entrapped into a marriage which "brought him neither
beauty nor fortune." The first editor of his great work, /The
Ecclesiastical Polity/, was a Corpus man, and it was only fitting
that the Anglican Revival of the nineteenth century should receive
its first impulse from the famous Assize Sermon (in 1833) of another
Corpus scholar, John Keble.
Corpus has been singularly fortunate in its history, no doubt because
its Presidents have been so frequently men of mark for learning and
for character.
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