Meantime certain improvements were taking place in the city. Under the Commissioners Act (1771) the streets were widened and paved, and most of the walls and gates removed--Bocardo along with them. Turnpike Roads and the Enclosures Acts led to the disappearance of the highwaymen, by whom coaches, ere railways took the place of the "flying coach," which first went to London in one day "with A. W. in the same coach" (1669), had so frequently been held up near Oxford. Curiously enough highwaymen were most popular with the fair sex, and the cowardly ruffians occasionally returned the compliment so far as to allow them to ransom their jewels with a kiss. Dumas, the prince of highwaymen, after capturing a coachful of ladies, was satisfied with dancing a coranto with each in turn upon the green. He was executed at Oxford. He had maintained his nonchalance to the end; played "Macheath" in the prison, and threw himself off at the gallows without troubling the hangman. It was not death, he declared, but being anatomised that he feared. And, lest their hero should be put to so useful a purpose, a large body of bargemen surrounded the scaffold, carried off the body in triumph to the parish church and buried it in lime forthwith. At length, after the Age of Reason and Materialism, came the Age of Revival and Romance. The spirit of mediævalism summoned up by Sir Walter, was typified in Oxford architecture by Sir Gilbert Scott and Pugin. In the University the beginning of a new order of things, which was to end in throwing open the Universities to the whole Empire and rendering them on every side efficient places of education, was begun in 1800 by the system of Honours Lists, long advocated by reformers like John Eveleigh of Oriel and brought into being by the energy of Cyril Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, and Parsons, Master of Balliol. The work of nationalising the Universities was developed by the two University Commissions and by that "Extension" movement, of which the pioneer was William Sewell, a remarkable tutor of Exeter, who, in 1850, urged that "It may be impossible to bring the masses to the University, but may it not be possible to carry the University to the masses?" This development of the University, which must ever be closely connected with the name of Dr Jowett, Master of Balliol, and has received a further significance from the last testament of Cecil Rhodes, of Oriel, is illustrated on every side by new buildings; by the Indian Institute, the Nonconformist colleges, Mansfield and Manchester, the Women's Halls, the Science Buildings and the new foundation of Hertford College, grafted on that of old Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall by Mr Baring. Intellectually the spirit of revolt produced by the French Revolution at the beginning of this period, is illustrated by the careers of Shelley and Landor, and the musical lyrics of Swinburne; the deep questionings prompted by the Tractarian Movement are voiced in the poems of Clough, Keble and Arnold.