There flashes upon us also, here and there throughout the several clauses—though made to assume as unobtrusive a form as possible—the shadow of a giant influence, as yet rather felt than seen. Any vacancy in the number of Commissioners to be appointed by Parliament for the purposes of this Act,—and with the selection of whose names, as at present understood, we are fully satisfied,—is to be filled up by the Minister of the day. A report of the “state, receipts, and expenditure, and other particulars,” of every college, is by clause liii. to be forwarded, if required, to “one of Her Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State.” There is a remarkable and mysterious article in clause xliv., forbidding the Commissioners to “appoint any person extraneous to a college to exercise any authority therein,” without the consent of a majority of the Fellows of the said college. There are no scholia on this obscure passage, but we suspect it is pregnant with possibilities, and, like some other dark sayings of old, the interpretation may come too late. It is no use, in short, to try to shut our eyes to the fact, that Government has got a hold upon the colleges, and intends, as far as possible, to keep it. Against the diversion of college revenues to the general purposes of the University,—the founding of new professorships, &c.,—the feeling at Oxford is so nearly unanimous, and so reasonable,—while those colleges upon whom alone the University had any claims of this nature, have for some time been so fully prepared to recognise them—Magdalen proposing to devote £750 per annum “at least” to the founding of prælectorships, Corpus appropriating £600 to the endowment of a professorship of Latin, and Merton promising assistance; and when these are excepted, there remain so few colleges containing the number of fellowships (20) required, in order to justify such an appropriation,—that we may hope the justice and discretion of the Commissioners may safely be trusted not to make such a diversion in the case of any college whose authorities may be conscientiously unwilling to sanction it.