which lies below passed Queen Elizabeth--’Virgo Pia Docta Felix’--after being royally entertained with sumptuous pageants and the play of ’Palamon and Arcyte’ in the Christ Church hall. Over the Cherwell, in the troublous times of the Civil Wars, rode the Royalist horse to beat up the Parliamentary quarters below the Chiltern hills and among the woods of the Buckinghamshire border--enterprising undergraduates perhaps taking an _exeat_ to accompany them. Here it was that certain scholars of Magdalen, having a quarrel with Lord Norreys by reason of deer-stealing, ’went up privately to the top of their tower, and waiting till he should pass by towards Ricot’ (Rycote) ’sent down a shower of stones upon him and his retinew, wounding some and endangering others of their lives’--and worse might have happened had not the ’retinew’ taken the precaution, foreseeing the assault, to put boards or tables on their heads. At a later day Pope entered Oxford by this road, and there is a pretty description of the scene in one of his letters--it will no doubt appeal to the nineteenth-century visitor who departs through slums to the architecturally unimpressive station of the Great Western. ’The shades of the evening overtook me. The moon rose in the clearest sky I ever saw, by whose solemn light I paced on slowly, without company, or any interruption to the range of my own thoughts. About a mile before I reached Oxford all the bells tolled in different notes, the clocks of every college answered one another, and sounded forth (some in a deeper, some in a softer tone) that it was eleven at night. All this was no ill preparation to the life I have led since among those old walls, venerable galleries, stone porticos, studious walks, and solitary scenes of the University.’ Jerry-built rows of lodging-houses rather militate against the romance of the Iffley Road as we know it now. [Illustration: _THE DEER PARK, MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD. By J. H. Lorimer._]