Across Bridge Street from St. John's stands St. Sepulchre's Church, almost the duplicate of the Temple Church in London, and a trifle earlier in date, the oldest of the four round Early Norman churches left in Great Britain, and supposed to be modelled in its shape from the church of the same name at Jerusalem. Pepys gave his library to Magdalen College (pronounced Maudlin), and with it the cipher manuscript of his famous Diary. Three archbishops Cranmer, Grindal, and Ussherwere fellow-members here with the gossipy chronicler. Jesus College, once a nunnery, lies by itself to the south, amid extensive and handscme grounds near the boating stretch of the river. Coleridge graduated here; and there is exquisite glass in its chapel by Morris and Burne-Jones. Cromwell and Thomas Fuller were students at Sidney Sussex College, nearer the city; and so at Christ's College on Sidney Street were Sir Philip Sidney, Latimer, Paley, and Darwin. Milton followed Spenser's example at Pembroke by planting a mulberry-tree here, which still remains. And so we come round again in the noble circuit to Emmanuel, whence we started, among whose undergraduates were Bishop Hall of Norwich, Sir William

Temple, and John Harvard, founder of the daughter university at Massachusetts Bay. Some of the Pilgrim Fathers studied here, as the college was intended for the inculcation of Puritanic ideas.

Cambridge is but threescore miles from London; but our course now lay straight across England to Oxford at the west. In the fresh of the morning we had left Cambridge's great station, and were looking out of our car-windows for glimpses of Bedford, and Bunyan's statue, which stands in its market-place. The old county jail, where the inspired tinker languished for twelve years, is no longer standing, nor is the town jail on the bridge where "The Pilgrim's Progress" was written. The bronze doors of the chapel contain reliefs from the immortal allegory, and there are also, I believe, versions of it here in some seventy languages. It is ten miles to Olney, where Cowper lived, and wrote the Olney hymns and many of his poems. At Bletchley, we crossed our northward route, and ere noon were leaving Woodstock behind us at our right, where Henry II. concealed Fair Rosamond in her labyrinthine bower, and where the Black Prince was born. Pope wrote his translation of the Iliad at

Stanton Harcourt which lies near here. A stalwart and intelligent agriculturist, a good type of the country squire, sat opposite us as we drew near Oxford. Blenheim Park was his destination, and he bore in his hand a coroneted invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough to a garden fête that day. We (E. especially) rather envied him, for it was our nearest approach to seeing the magnificent manor and enormous palace which the nation bestowed on the hero of Queen Anne's day. And we thought of the rather cruel lines upon its architect Vanbrugh,

"Lie heavy on him, earth, for he

Laid many a heavy load on thee."

But the domes and spires of Oxford are in sight at the left, and soon we are passing the old castle, which is now a prison, traversing the town's centre at Carfax, and alighting in the famous High Street, at the door of the Mitre.

VIII

OXFORD

WE

E have exchanged the low, moist lands of the east of England for the undulating country of Oxfordshire, in which, surrounded by gently swelling hills, the ancient university town sits smiling where the Cherwell joins the Thames. The latter is called by the classic name of Isis before it joins the Thame (the two names being afterwards blended into Thames) in that part of its upper course on which undergraduates are wont to disport themselves, and flows hence southwesterly toward London through very beautiful scenes. If Oxford were not otherwise Cambridge's superior, it would outrank her in being a cathedral city as well as the seat of a great university. But its superiority is unquestioned on most accounts, except perhaps by its great collegiate rival, and it was well to have visited Cambridge first. Hawthorne says, "The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is

a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime to enjoy it satisfactorily." We had considerably less than a lifetime to spend within its semi-mediæval precincts, but our satisfaction was keen. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle first gives the name Oxford in 912 A. D.; but the priory of St. Frideswide was perhaps two centuries earlier, which formed the nucleus of the cathedral. By the thirteenth century the university had no superior in Europe. Its numbers fell away during the Reformation; but it was again a most stanch adherent of the Royalists, and indeed their headquarters, during the Civil War, melting down its ancient plate unstintedly for the king's service.

And yet Oxford has often been styled (as truly as strangely) the home of "impossible causes." From the day of Wycliffe himself, who here proclaimed religious as well as intellectual liberty, it has given eager welcome to the leaders of new thought. Wesley began here his revival of a truly spiritual religion in the Church of England, of which he was himself a priest, when it was well-nigh dead to good works, stifled by the worldliness of the Georgian era. And great shame must that Church take