OXFORD AND ITS COLLEGES. THE CITY AND UNIVERSITY. 66 HERE is, perhaps, no city in Europe which in proportion to its size is so impressive and interesting as Oxford. It has been well called the "City of Palaces," and travellers have liked to compare the distant view of Oxford: to the first view they have obtained of Rome. The beautiful city lies girdled about with waters and gardens. The elm-shaded and. 'lilied" Cherwell, the clear broad Isis, .flow through a fair English landscape, adorned by wonderful architectural effects, and endeared by a thousand associations. The imposing streets, of great breadth and noble frontage, the magnificent public buildings, the stately libraries and halls, the cathedral-like chapels, the armorial gateways, the smooth verdant lawns, the embattled walls, the time-worn towers, the wilderness of spires and pinnacles, the echoing cloisters, the embowered walks, create an impression-which familiarity only deepens-of beauty and wonder. We can well understand how Wordsworth recognised B here a "presence" which "overpowered the soberness of reason." Those who have been disappointed in most places acknowledge that Oxford has surpassed their expectations, however highly raised. For when the eye has drunk in, with unexhausted pleasure, its many aspects of beauty, there still remains a whole wealth of recollections of the great and good, to invest it with new charms. Several impressions perpetually recur to the visitor in moving about the streets of Oxford and Cambridge. There is of course, that vivid contrast, ever present, of the antiquity of the edifices and the youth of the fast-fleeting generations that stream through them. Then, again, there are the fusion of things new and old, the constant demolitions and reconstructions, the preservation of whatever is most precious in the past, and the constant addition of what is useful and beautiful in our modern life. The general course of English history is almost spelt out in the material structures around us; we may read sermons in the very stones of the edifices. In each university the antiquarian may go back to the Saxon period; he advances through the Norman and Plantagenet times; in the Tudor, in the Stuart, in the Georgian days, he traces an orderly progress and development. He will observe also how the rude studies of mediæval times have gradually expanded into the extended culture and wonderful perfection of our own day. He will come to the happy conviction that, in the Victorian era, the Universities have attained the highest known point of culture and efficiency they have yet reached. Such a history symbolises and harmonises with the history of our country, a history of reform, not of revolution, where modern spirit and development are freely taken up into the ancient system, and find full scope and expansion there. The name of Oxford used to be thought, like the Greek Bosphorus, to mean "a ford for oxen," and that is the etymology |