Sidney Sussex College. By C. W. Scott- Giles. (From the
College Office. 6s. 6d.) THE history of an Oxford or Cambridge college is in one sense a domestic affair. Many of the men who figure in it have done great service to their society, as adminis- trators or teachers, but made no name for themselves outside it. Yet a college history tends to touch national history at every point, particularly when the college is, like Sidney, the nursing mother of such men as Oliver Cromwell, and when it is built on the site, and in part from the material, of a Franciscan convent going back to 1230 or thereabouts. The college itself dates from 1596. It is therefore far from being one of the older, as it is far from being one of the larger, foundations in the university. It has had its vicissitudes, like all colleges, es- pecially in the exercising times of the Civil War, when it gave some of its plate to the King's cause, but could do little more than that, since Cambridge became the Parlia- mentary headquarters for the Eastern Counties, with two old-Sidney men, Major- General the Earl of Manchester and Colonel Oliver Cromwell, in control. All this story Mr. Scott-Giles tells extremely well, achiev- ing the necessary but difficult task of com- pression without descending more than was inevitable to the merely annalistic. But he should not misquote Ecclesiasticus xliv. " Living peaceably [not peacefully] in their
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