advocates, promising amendments even before they were proposed; while Mr Blackett, as the organ of the “root-and-branch” men, puzzling himself how to deal with the sop thrown to him and his party—sweet to the taste but far from satisfying—tendered his best thanks for a measure which he concluded by saying “the Liberal members of that House could never adopt.” The truth is, that there is an apathy in the public mind upon this great question which has reacted upon its representatives. The University Commission, as a political speculation, has been a failure, and the game of Academical Reform has lost much of its piquancy by a change in the players. Setting aside the question of the legality of parliamentary interference, it was found, somewhat to the surprise of a large section of those who had swelled the cry for a commission—well-meaning, but ill-informed on such subjects—that the most active, as they were the most able university reformers, were to be found within the walls of the University itself. That there was also a section to whom such a discovery was a disappointment, we have little doubt. At all events, from that time the public interest in the subject appears to have gradually died away. Visible excitement of men’s minds, since the issuing of the Commission, there has been none. And since the presentation of the Report, when even the warmest imagination could no longer picture the goodly revenues of Oxford transferred to the London University, or handed over to a Whig minister of education, the extremes of both parties, obstructive and destructive, must have felt their occupation gone;—moderate non-academical politicians began to vote the whole thing rather a bore—and the _Oxford Blue Book_, of which more copies were sold we believe than of any similar publication, went the way of all blue books, and was seen no more except on Tutors’ tables. In no circles, political or social, in town or country, did University Reform become the topic of the day. If you heard three people together in conversation on the subject, two at least were Oxford men. They, indeed, with that propensity charged against them, with some truth, of “talking shop,” as it is called—and which, with deference be it said in this large-minded and Catholic generation, is better at all events than talking nonsense—they “ventilated” the subject sufficiently, each having usually some pet scheme of his own for the regeneration of Alma Mater, under which, if you were to believe the author, she was to come forth in the renewed beauty of her youth, without losing aught of the reverend features of age.