At Oxford Pater was steeped in the continuities of tradition. Not that change was entirely absent from Oxford life in the late nineteenth century. After decades of resistance, certain key figures in government and at Oxford – Pater's friends Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison amongst them – accepted the need for the university to broaden its curriculum and its outlook to better serve the needs of the nation. Yet despite broad alterations, as noted in an earlier chapter, ‘the spirit of the place remained the same’ (V. H. H. Green 152). His position as a Fellow at Brasenose allowed Pater to maintain a pace of life determined more by his body's rhythms than by external time, according to which he often stayed in bed till midday (Wright I, 89). Otherwise he organised his days according to the very principle of habit he had purported to reject in his early work when he wrote: