"Probably," says a writer in the _Saturday Review_, "there is no city in the United Kingdom, with the exception of the metropolis, which possesses such a concentration of interest as Oxford. Its historical associations are spread over a long succession of ages. Not to speak of more apocryphal reminiscences, it was a favourite residence of one of our monarchs, and the birthplace of another. It was the scene of important transactions in the troubled reign of Stephen, and witnessed an episode in the equally troubled reign of the third Henry. It beheld the seeds of the Reformation sown by Wycliff, and saw the martyrdom of Cranmer and his fellow-sufferers. It became a confessor for the Church of England as against Puritanism under the second Stuart, and as against Popery under the fourth. It has been, at least since the Reformation, a sort of head-quarters of that Church; and has witnessed, in our own day, the most remarkable theological convulsions which it has experienced since the Reformation. Its outward appearance is in keeping with its history. It bears traces of the architecture of eight centuries--from the rude belfry-tower of St. Michael's, which has been assigned on good authority to the age of the Confessor, to Mr. Scott's exquisite imitation of the Sainte Chapelle, in its immediate neighbourhood. It is true that it contains no building of the first rank; but it exhibits an almost infinite variety, under the influence of accidental yet harmonious grouping, which has a charm more akin to that of nature than that of art. In its æsthetical as well as in its moral aspect, it betrays a strong spirit of Conservatism, and, occasionally, one of studied Revivalism. We see in Oxford the shadow of the Middle Ages projected far into the region of modern life. A College is a strange compound, half club, half convent, and its daily usages are curiously intermingled with the past. For two centuries after the Reformation, Protestant founders cast their institutions in the mould of Wykeham and Waynflete: the scholastic system appears to have been a living thing at the beginning of the last century, and its ghost still haunts the academic shades. These facts have their parallel in the architecture of Oxford. The revival of mediæval art, which we have ourselves witnessed, had its precursors here in the early part of the seventeenth century. Nowhere in England--we may almost say, nowhere in Europe--shall we find such good and pure Gothic, built at a time when the style was defunct elsewhere, as is presented by the Chapels of Wadham, Lincoln, and Jesus Colleges, and in the staircase of Christchurch Hall; and as was to be seen in the chapel of Exeter College, before its destruction.