By Gordon Home [Illustration: THE OLD GATEWAY OF KING'S COLLEGE This is now the Entrance to the University Library. At the end of the short street is part of the north side of King's College Chapel.]...

"… and so at noon with Sir Thomas Allen, and Sir Edward Scott and Lord Carlingford, to the Spanish Ambassador's, where I dined the first time…. And here was an Oxford scholar, in a Doctor of Laws' gowne…. And by and by he and I to talk; and the company very merry at my defending Cambridge against Oxford. "—PEPYS' Diary (May 5, 1669). In writing of Cambridge, comparison with the great sister university seems almost inevitable, and, since it is so usual to find that Oxford is regarded as pre-emine

Roman Cambridge was probably called Camboritum, but this, like the majority of Roman place names in England, fell into disuse, and the earliest definite reference to the town in post-Roman times gives the name as Grantacaestir. This occurs in Bede's great Ecclesiastical History , concluded in A.D. 731, and the incident alluded to in connection with the Roman town throws a clear ray of light upon the ancient site in those unsettled times. It tells how Sexburgh, the abbess of Ely, needing a more p

St. John's.—With its three successive courts and their beautiful gateways of mellowed red brick, St. John's is very reminiscent of Hampton Court. Both belong to the Tudor period, and both have undergone restorations and have buildings of stone added in a much later and entirely different style. Across the river stands the fourth court linked with the earlier buildings by the exceedingly beautiful "Bridge of Sighs." To learn the story of the building of St. John's is a simple matter, for the firs

PETERHOUSE.—Taking the smaller colleges in the order of their founding, we come first of all to Peterhouse, already mentioned more than once in these pages on account of its antiquity, so that it is only necessary to recall the fact that Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded this the first regular college in 1284. Of the original buildings of the little hostel nothing remains, and the quadrangle was not commenced until 1424, but the tragedy which befell the college took place in the second hal

In the early days when the University of Cambridge was still in an embryonic state, the various newly formed communities of academic learning had no corporate centre whatever. "The chancellor and masters" are first mentioned in a rescript of Bishop Balsham dated 1276, eight years before he founded Peterhouse, the first college, and six years before this Henry III. had addressed a letter to "the masters and scholars of Cambridge University," so that between these two dates it would appear that th

Almost everyone who goes to Cambridge as a visitor bent on sightseeing naturally wishes to see the colleges before anything else, but it should not be forgotten that there are at least two churches, apart from the college chapels, whose importance is so great that to fail to see them would be a criminal omission. There are other churches of considerable interest, but for a description of them it is unfortunately impossible to find space. Foremost in point of antiquity comes St. Benedict's, or St