Amid so many recollections of a graver character, there is one connected with Oxford which never revives without exciting a smile. I went one day into the _House of Convocation_, where the Vice-Chancellor was conferring degrees, in a business way, very few, besides those immediately interested, being present. Among the candidates was one very portly individual, who, either from his advancing years, or because of some new preferment, had felt it his duty to incur the expense of being made, in course, a Doctor of Divinity. It was evidently many years since the proposing Doctor had been familiar with University forms and ceremonies; and it appeared to me that some very rustic parish had probably, in the meantime, enjoyed the benefit of his services. When the performance required him to do this, or that, it was apparent that the worthy divine was not a little confused, while it was still more painfully clear, that his confusion afforded anything but feelings of regret to the junior portion of the academical body which surrounded him. When required to kneel before a very youthful looking proctor, an audible titter went the rounds, as his burly figure sank to the floor, amid the balloons of silk with which he was invested, to say nothing of the gaudy colours which he now wore, for the first time, with ill-suppressed satisfaction. But the _Oath of Abjuration_ was to be administered, and this proved the most critical part of the proceedings: for, oath as it was, it was made almost a farcical formality, by the manner in which it was taken. As this oath is a little antiquated, at any rate, and seems hardly demanded by the present relations between a powerful sovereign and the mere shadow of a pontiff who now apes Hildebrand, on the Seven Hills, it would seem good taste to go through with it with as little display of furious Protestantism as possible. So evidently thought the proctor, but not so the Doctor elect, whose powerful imagination probably suggested to him that Victoria was Queen Elizabeth, and Dr. Wiseman a Babbington, as no doubt he is. If her Majesty labours under similar impressions, she has at least one loyal subject, and it would have done her heart good to have heard the utterance of his loyalty on this occasion; for with most earnest emphasis did he swear, that “he did from his heart detest and abjure, as impious and heretical, that damnable doctrine and position, that princes excommunicated by the Pope, _may be deposed or murthered by their subjects_,” &c., &c. So, no doubt, thought and felt all present; but as the Doctor seemed to consider himself, for the moment, a sort of Abdiel, and spoke with an epic dignity somewhat unusual to the Convocation house, it was irresistibly ludicrous to behold the smothered merriment of the youthful Oxonians, who shook their sides while the Doctor fulmined, and who seemed to think both him and the Pope a little too old for Young England and the nineteenth century.