PEMBROKE dates its collegiate life from 1624, but it had already existed and flourished for several centuries as Broadgates Hall. It owed its rise in the world to the benefactions of Thomas Tesdale and Richard Wightwick, burgesses of Abingdon, who desired to endow a College for the benefit of their native town, and its new name to the Earl of Pembroke, then Chancellor of Oxford. Thomas Browne, who was later to be the author of Religio Medici, being senior commoner of the Hall at this epoch, delivered a Latin oration at the opening ceremony, in which he did not fail to employ the metaphor of the Phoenix rising out of its ashes.

Architecturally, Pembroke is a little put out of countenance by the neighbouring glories of Christ Church; nevertheless, the interior of the Inner Quadrangle ("The Grass Quad.," as it is called), which is the subject of the first illustration, possesses an irregular but restful beauty. Up and down its staircases trod George Whitefield, who, as a servitor, had the ungrateful duty of seeing that the students were in their rooms at a fixed hour; yet not one syllable of discontent with so humble a vocation disfigures the pages of his diary.

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On the right hand, as one enters the Front Quadrangle, is the library, formerly the refectory of Broadgates Hall, and the only surviving part of that institution. The Chapel, renovated and decorated by Mr. C. E. Kempe in 1884, should be visited. The view of the gateway possesses an added interest from the fact that Samuel Johnson, when an undergraduate of Pembroke, lodged in a room in the second storey over the entrance. Johnson ever retained an affection for his University and College, but it is to be feared that during his residence of fourteen months poverty and ill-health combined to make him far from happy. To others, perhaps, he appeared 'gay and frolicsome,' bent on entertaining his companions and keeping them from their studies, but to Boswell he gave a different explanation. 'Ah, Sir,' he said, 'I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit, so I disregarded all power and all authority.' In a more cheerful mood he spoke of Pembroke as 'a nest of singing birds'; and it is on record that he cut lectures to go sliding on Christ Church Meadow. Dr. Johnson is Pembroke's most famous son; but she can also point to the names of Francis Beaumont, John Pym, Shenstone, Blackstone, and Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's greatest editor.