The best known route from London is by the Great Western Railway, which, according to the original plan, would have passed close to the city.  But all the University and ecclesiastical dignitaries were up in arms; they saw, in their mind’s eye, the tender, innocent undergraduates flying from the proctor-guarded precincts, where modesty, virtue, and sobriety ever reign, to the vice-haunted purlieus of London, at all hours of the night and day.  The proctors and professors triumphed; the railway was obliged to leave a gap of ten miles of common road between its invading, unhallowed course, and the sacred city; and great was the rejoicing in the Convocation Chamber, and many the toasts in the Senior Common Rooms to the health of the faithful sons of Oxon, who in Parliament had saved the city from this commercial desecration.

But as even Grosvenor-square was at length glad to admit gas after abiding longest of all in the genteel gloom of oil lamps, so was Oxford in the end glad to be put on a branch, as it could not be put on a main line; and now, beside the rail on which we are travelling, Worcester, Banbury, and Wolverhampton, and two roads to London and Birmingham are open to the wandering tastes of the callow youth of the University; as may be ascertained by a statistical return from the railway stations whenever a steeple-chase or Jenny Lind concert takes place in or near any of the towns enumerated.

The entrance from Bletchley is, perhaps, the finer, as rolling round a semicircle, we sweep into sight of the dome of Radcliffe Library and the spire of St. Mary’s Church, descend, enter the city by the Cheltenham-road, and passing through an inferior suburb, reach the head of High-street, of which a great German art critic declared, “that it had not its equal in the whole world.”  Wide, long, and gently curving, approached from either end, it presents in succession the colleges of Lincoln, Brasenose, University, All Souls, Queen’s, St. Mary’s Church, with peeps of gardens with private houses, and with shops, which do not detract, but rather add, to the dignity and weight of the grand old buildings.

Having slowly sauntered up and down, and scanned the various characters peculiar to the City of Universities—­as, for instance, an autocrat in the person of a Dean of Christchurch, a Principal of Balliol, or a Master of Jesus, a Proctor newly made, but already endowed with something of the detective police expression; several senior fellows, plump, shy, proud, and lazy—­walking for an appetite, and looking into the fishmongers on their way to the parks; a “cocky” Master of Arts, just made, and hastening to call on all his friends and tradesmen to show off his new dignity, and rustle the sleeves of his new gown; three lads, just entered from a public school (last month they laid out tip in Mother Brown’s tarts), on their way to order three courses and dessert at the Mitre, where very indifferent fare is provided for fashionable credit prices; a pale student, after Dr. Pusey’s own heart, in cap and gown, pacing monk-like along, secretly telling his beads; a tuft (nobleman) lounging out of the shop of a tailor, who, as he follows his lordship to the door, presents the very picture of a Dean bowing to a Prime Minister, when a bishop is very sick.