towers, and turrets, each with its history and legend,--dimly
magnificent chapels, with painted windows of rare beauty and brilliantly
diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of richest gloom,--vast
college-halls, high-windowed, oaken-panelled, and hung round with
portraits of the men, in every age, whom the University has nurtured to
be illustrious,--long vistas of alcoved libraries, where the wisdom
and learned folly of all time is shelved,--kitchens, (we throw in this
feature by way of ballast, and because it would not be English Oxford
without its beef and beer,) with huge fireplaces, capable of roasting a
hundred joints at once,--and cavernous cellars, where rows of piled-up
hogsheads seethe and fume with that mighty malt-liquor which is the true
milk of Alma Mater: make all these things vivid in your dream, and you
will never know nor believe how inadequate is the result to represent
even the merest outside of Oxford.

We feel a genuine reluctance to conclude this article without making our
grateful acknowledgements, by name, to a gentleman whose overflowing
kindness was the main condition of all our sight-seeings and enjoyments.
Delightful as will always be our recollection of Oxford and its
neighborhood, we partly suspect that it owes much of its happy coloring
to the genial medium through which the objects were presented to us,--to
the kindly magic of a hospitality unsurpassed, within our experience, in
the quality of making the guest contented with his host, with himself,
and everything about him. He has inseparably mingled his image with our
remembrance of the Spires of Oxford.




CYRIL WILDE.