The expense of maintaining a son at the University may be fixed at from 200 pounds, as a minimum, to 300 pounds a-year; the latter being the utmost needful.  But a fool may spend any amount, and get nothing for it.  The fashion of drinking has gone out to a great extent; and the present race of undergraduates are not more random and extravagant than any set of young men of the same age and number would be if thrown together for two or three years.

At the same time, it is not the place to which a father to whom economy is an object should send a son, least of all one previously educated on the milk and water stay-at-home principle.

As a general rule, it is not among the nobility, and sons of the wealthy gentry, that much excess is found to prevail; but among those who at the University find themselves for the first time without control, with money and with credit at command.

In a summer or autumnal visit, Christchurch Meadow, and some of the many beautiful walks round Oxford, should be sought out and visited alone; on such occasions, on no account be tormented with one of the abominable parrot-like guides.  These horrid fellows consider it their duty to chatter.  We have often thought that a dumb guide, with a book for answering questions, would make a great success.

In winter, when the flooded meadows are frozen over, those who love to see an army of first-class skaters will find an Oxford day ticket well worth the money—­youth, health, strength, grace, and manly beauty, in hundreds, cutting round and round, with less of drawback from the admixture of a squalid mob than in any other locality.

And then again in the hunting season, take the ugliest road out of Oxford, by the seven bridges, because there you may see farthest along the straight highway from the crown of the bridges, and number the ingenuous youth as on hunters they pace, or in hack or in dogcart or tandem they dash along to the “Meet.”  Arrived there, if the fox does get away—­if no ambitious youngster heads him back—­if no steeplechasing lot ride over the scent and before the hounds, to the destruction of sport and the master’s temper—­why then you will see a fiery charge at fences that will do your heart good.  There is not such raw material for cavalry in any other city in Europe, and there is no part of our social life so entirely novel, and so well worth exhibiting to a foreigner, as a “Meet” near Oxford, where in scarlet and in black, in hats and in velvet caps, in top-boots and black-jacks, on twenty pound hacks and two hundred guinea hunters, finest specimens of Young England are to be seen.

On returning, if the sport has been good, you may venture to open a chat with a well-splashed fellow traveller on a beaten horse, but in going not—­for an Oxford man in his normal state never speaks unless he has been introduced.