As I came into Oxford, from Cuddesdon, I heard the bells of St. Mary’s in full peal, and experienced an exhilarating emotion that greatly heightened my impressions. After my arrival in the Turl—a name which indicates that the street was once a country-lane, guarded by a _turn-stile_—I took my second walk through the city, my first having been on the previous Sunday, passing from St. Ebbe’s to Wadham College, with the Bishop. Now, beginning with New College and the glories of William of Wykeham, I felt a new impulse of wonder and admiration, as if the half had not been told me. In vain does the pedant complain of the architecture here displaying the genius of that munificent founder, and tell us that it marks a decline from the elevation of the decorated period; for who can but see, in what is called decline, something much more like an elaborate adaptation of sacred art to academic purposes, exhibiting high invention, and a sense of the fitting and appropriate, which proves a taste truly refined, and a fancy rich and creative? So, at least, it strikes me; and the moral element is not less observable, the very stones seeming vital and instinct with the designer’s great soul and spirit. Thus the gateways, as has been well remarked, exhibit strength and utility, with little to advertise what is within; the domestic part is simple, and chaste and homelike; the hall bespeaks a generous hospitality, and suggests the social and civilizing character with which religion invests the table and the meal, and elevates it to a feast of reason; while, at last, the chapel is full of divine majesty, and commands abasement of self in the house of God, and at the gate of heaven. Wykeham was, for his day, a reformer, as really as Wyckliffe, and nothing is more certain than that the true Anglican alone has a right to glory in his achievements. They mark a period of contest with the papacy, every step of which contributed to the ultimate liberation of the Church of England from its Italian yoke, and they were perfected in that English spirit, against which the Pope was always at war, and which late apostates from our Nicene faith detest and anathematize as schism. True it is that we differ with Wykeham and Waynefleet in many items of opinion and practice, in which they were no wiser than their times; but they are one with us, historically, in the communion of the Church of England, in the maintenance of her individuality and independence, and in the confession of the Nicene Creed, as the authorized symbol of Christendom. These impressions, forced upon me within these walls, and growing on me every day that I spent in England, returned with ten-fold power after I had seen the Continent, and again beheld English Churches and colleges, and felt their essential antagonism to what is Italian and Tridentine, and their almost physical tendency towards the production of such a Church, in their ultimate