service and sermon went on in all respects, as usual. Then, in the afternoon, there was a sermon before the University, preceded by the bidding-prayers, as in the morning; save that the preacher made special mention of Oriel College, of which he was a member, commemorating its benefactors, “such as were King Edward the Second, etc.” Then followed a powerful sermon, which evidently produced a great sensation. The Church was crowded, for the preacher was a general favourite. His manner was earnest, and often eloquent: and, in tones of most solemn and vigorous rebuke, he protested against the slavish dependence to which the State seemed resolved to reduce the Church. The Gorham case seemed to be in the preacher’s mind, and perhaps the flagrant elevation to the Episcopate of Dr. Hampden. The parochial service again followed; after which I dined in the Hall of Oriel, where I met the preacher among his old collegians, and greatly enjoyed the company in general. After dinner, we went to service in the College Chapel; and after this there were still services in several places, though I did not attend them. It would have been hard to have named an hour in the whole day when services were not going on somewhere in this City of Holy Places. In the Common-room of Oriel, I met with a very agreeable person, to whom I owed not a little of subsequent pleasure, and to whom I became warmly attached. At his instance, during the week, I substituted the more _recherché_ pleasure of a visit to Nuneham Courtenay, for the more ordinary cockney pilgrimage to Blenheim. I went in his company, and in his own carriage, and had no reason to regret my adoption of his advice. The grounds of Nuneham are proverbial for the beauty of genuine English landscape, and a range in this noble park affords continual prospects of cultivated fields, and snug hamlets, and the silvery windings of the Isis through the meads. The gardens and shrubbery are interspersed with urns and tablets and inscriptions, in the Shenstone style, and among them I observed a cenotaph of the poet Mason. The taste of the more artificial charms of Nuneham is somewhat antiquated, and smacks of the Hanoverian age, now happily departing: but it does one good to see these things, as illustrating the period to which they belong. I was all the time thinking of Jemmy Thomson, as I rambled among the elms and yews of Nuneham; and especially when I came to a clump of those spreading beeches, with smooth columnar trunks, on which his swains were wont to endite their amatory verses. Glimpses of Oxford, which one catches now and then, add a special charm to this noble demesne, and the Thames glitters here and there in the view to enliven a broad survey of rural scenery, which can hardly be said to lack anything appropriate to its English character. The Church of Nuneham is the grand mistake. It looks like a fane erected to the goddess of the wood, by some ancient Grecian,