Excerpt from The Minstrelsy of Isis: An Anthology of Poems Relating to Oxford and All Phases of Oxford Life

But here, too, we must not gird at a custom which blossomed in its decrepitude into such a perfect flower as the ode which the present Archbishop of Armagh wrote in 1854 on the Installation of the Earl of Derby as Chancellor of the University.

It is sometimes said, and, what is worse, believed, that Oxford has produced very few poets of distinction. As a nest of singing-birds, to apply to the University the phrase which Dr. Johnson - with greater patriotism, perhaps, than accuracy - uttered of Pembroke College, her brood may be surpassed by that of Cambridge. Yet the Oxford poets make noble showing. In Elizabethan and Stuart days they numbered Sidney and Spenser, Raleigh, Peele, Wither, Wotton, Carew, Ford, Heywood, Beau mont, Lovelace, Braithwaite, and a score of singers of the Restoration. In the days of Queen Anne Oxford had Addison and Steele. And though in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century true poetry languished and Collins, Warton, Bowles, and Southey are a poor offset to Gray, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, Oxford can claim among her later sons Shelley, Landor, Keble, Newman, Faber, Clough, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Sir Lewis Morris, Lord de Tabley, Sir Edwin Arnold and the most distinguished of living -english poets, Mr. Swinburne, was at Balliol in the late 'fifties.

It will be seen with regret that many of these names are very sparsely represented in the pages which follow. The greatest Oxford poets - saving Matthew Arnold, the truest representative of her culture - have not written of Oxford. Shelley, the sweetest singer of all, was cast out with ignominy by University College. Addison wrote polished but tedious Latin poems on the Magdalen bowling-green and Magdalen Chapel, but never turned vma single stanza on the river-walk which now bears his name. William Morris, for all his love of Oxford and her water-meadows, has not left a line in their praise. And so on. The finest sonnet on Oxford, Wordsworth's, was the product of a stranger's love. It must be confessed that Oxford's chief poets have been remiss in showing their devotion to their Alma Mater.

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