"
The approach to the hall, seen in Plate XVIII, is later than Wolsey's
work, but is fully worthy of him. The beautiful fan tracery, which
hardly suffers by being compared with Henry VII's Chapel at
Westminster, was put up, extraordinary as it may seem, in the middle
of the seventeenth century, by the elder Dean Fell; all we know of
its origin is that it was the work of "Smith, an artificer of
London," surely the most modest architect who ever designed a
masterpiece. The staircase itself is later, the work of the notorious
Wyatt, who for once meddled with a great building without spoiling
it.
The history of Christ Church is very largely the history of the
University of Oxford. It is still our wealthiest and largest
foundation, although the disproportion between it and other colleges
is by no means so great as it once was; and, thanks to its having
been ruled by a series of famous and energetic deans, its periods of
inglorious inactivity have been fewer than those of most other
colleges. The roll of deans contains such names as those of John
Owen, the most famous of Puritan preachers, John Fell, theologian and
founder of the greatness of the Oxford Press, Henry Aldrich,
universally accomplished as scholar, logician, musician, architect,
Francis Atterbury, Jacobite and plotter, Cyril Jackson, who ruled
Christ Church with a rod of iron, and who ranks first among the
creators of nineteenth-century Oxford, Thomas Gaisford and Henry
George Liddell, great Greek scholars.
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