It must not be supposed, nevertheless, that Nuneham Courtney is one of the great show-places of England.  It is merely a fair specimen of the better class of country-seats, and has a hundred rivals, and many superiors, in the features of beauty, and expansive, manifold, redundant comfort, which most impressed me.  A moderate man might be content with such a home,—­that is all.

And now I take leave of Oxford without even an attempt to describe it,—­there being no literary faculty, attainable or conceivable by me, which can avail to put it adequately, or even tolerably, upon paper.  It must remain its own sole expression; and those whose sad fortune it may be never to behold it have no better resource than to dream about gray, weather-stained, ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint Gothic ornament, and standing around grassy quadrangles, where cloistered walks have echoed to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations,—­lawns and gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed with canopies of foliage, and lit up with sunny glimpses through archways of great boughs,—­spires, 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.

For some reason which it does not concern us now to investigate, Kentucky, under the dominion of the white man, has continued to justify its native name of “Dark and Bloody Ground,” in being the scene of a remarkable number of tragedies in real life.