fulfilled;” in short, he is of Dr Johnson’s opinion, though he puts it into much more complimentary language—that “those who are fond of the country are fit to live in the country.” But if we cannot allow our French friends to imagine that all English country clergymen have their lot cast in the pleasant places of Kingsford and Lynmere, still less, we fear, must they consider them (or their wives) such wonderful economists as, like Mr Norris, to maintain all the quiet elegancies of a gentleman’s establishment in a handsome Gothic chateau (and to travel in Switzerland besides), upon an ecclesiastical income scarcely exceeding, after all necessary deductions, two hundred pounds a-year. True, Mr Norris takes pupils and writes for reviews—highly respectable vocations, and profitable enough in some hands, but scarcely open to the majority of his brethren, and not safe to be depended upon, as a supplementary income, by young clergymen on small preferments who may feel no vocation for celibacy. Mr Norris, indeed, is peculiarly favoured in many respects as regards money matters; for he has been fortunate enough to have enjoyed an exhibition at Oxford in days when the word “exhibition” (as we are informed in a note) meant “a gratuitous admission to the University.” Here we are certainly stepping out of the ground of real English life, where the writer has so pleasantly guided us, into a highly imaginative state of things. It would have been a noble boast, indeed, for us to have made to foreigners, if it could have been made truly, that Oxford, out of her splendid endowments, offered, even occasionally, “gratuitous admissions” to poor and deserving scholars. It was what the best of her founders and benefactors intended and desired—what they thought they had secured for ever by the most stringent and solemn enactments; but what, unhappily, the calm wisdom of the University itself has been as far from carrying out as the busy sweeping of a Reform Commission. The foreign visitor is naturally very much impressed by an English cricket-match. The puzzled admiration which possesses him on the occasion of his “assisting” at a “_fête du cricket_” is very amusingly expressed. Throughout all his honest admiration of the English character, there peeps out a confession that this one peculiar habit of the animal is what he has failed to account for or comprehend. He tries to philosophise on the thing; and, like other philosophical inquirers when they get hold of facts which puzzle them, he feels bound to present his readers with a theory of cause and effect which is evidently as unsatisfactory to himself as to them. He falls back for an explanation on that tendency to “solidarity” in the English temperament which he has admired before.