The Buckinghamshire Railway has reduced the price of coal to the inhabitants from 22s. to 15s. per ton, on 150,000 tons per annum.

Bicester, commonly pronounced Bister, is thirteen miles by the road from Oxford, a town as ancient as the Heptarchy; famous for a well once sacred and dedicated to St. Edburgh, for its well attended markets and cattle fairs, and especially for its excellent ale.  It is in the centre of a capital hunting country.  The women make a little bone lace.

OXFORD.

Oxford is one of the great gates through which our rich middle classes send their sons to be amalgamated with the landed and titled aristocracy, who are all educated either there or at Cambridge.

To say of any one that he is an “Oxford man,” at once implies that he is a gentleman, and when a well-looking, well-mannered, and even moderately endowed young gentleman has passed respectably through his curriculum at Christchurch or Magdalen, Balliol, Oriel, University, or any other of the correct colleges, it rests with himself whether he runs the race of public life in England on equal terms with the sons of the oldest of the titled and untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl.  But money alone won’t do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu.  Thus Oxford interests classes who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which any capable man may cut off his plebeian entail, and start according to the continental term “noble.”

The material beauty of Oxford is great—­the situation, in a rich valley bounded by softly flowing rivers, fine—­the domes, and spires, and old grey towers rising in clusters, prepare the mind of the approaching traveller for the city where the old colleges and churches, planting out and almost composing it, afford at every bend of the long streets, at every turn of the narrow thoroughfares, some grand picture, or charming architectural effect; even our Quakers are proud of Oxford in England when they travel in America.  Then Oxford is so decorously clean, so spotlessly free from the smoke of engines and the roar of machinery; the groves and gardens, and trim green turf seen through richly-carved and corbeled archways, give such a feeling of calm study, and pleasant leisure, that we will defy the bitterest radical and the sourest dissenter not to be softened and charmed by his first impressions.

To those who arrive prepared to be pleased, stored with associations of the past, fortunate enough to have leisure and introductions to some affable don long resident, and proud to display the treasures and glories of his beloved Alma Mater, Oxford affords for many days a treat such as no other city in the world can supply to an Englishman.