Oxford owes much of her beauty to the humidity of the atmosphere, for the Thames Valley is generally humid, and when the floods are out, and that is not seldom, Oxford rises from the flooded meadows like some superb Venice of the North, centred in a vast lagoon. And just as the beauty of Venice is the beauty of coloured marbles blending with the ever-changing colour of water and water-laden air, so, to a large extent, the beauty of Oxford is due to this soft stone of Headington, which blends with the soft humid atmosphere in ever fresh and tender harmonies, in ever-changing tones of purple and grey. By virtue of its fortunate softness this stone ages with remarkable rapidity, flakes off and grows discoloured, and soon lends to quite new buildings a deceptive but charming appearance of antiquity. Arriving, then, at the top of Headington Hill, let the traveller turn aside, and, pausing awhile by "Joe Pullen's" tree, gaze down at the beautiful city which lies at his feet. Her sombre domes, her dreaming spires rise above the tinted haze, which hangs about her like a delicate drapery and hides from the traveller's gaze the grey walls and purple shadows, the groves and cloisters of Academe. For a moment he will summon up remembrance of things past; he will fancy that so, and from this spot, many a mediæval student, hurrying to learn from the lips of some famous scholar, first beheld the scene of his future studies; this, he will remember, is the Oxford of the Reformation, where, as has been said,[1] the old world and the new lingered longest in each other's arms, like mother and child, so much alike and yet so different; the Oxford also of the Catholic reaction, where the young Elizabethan Revivalists wandered by the Isis and Cherwell framing schemes for the restoration of religion and the deliverance of the fair Mary; the loyal and chivalrous Oxford of the Caroline period, the nursery of knights and gentlemen, when camp and court and cloister were combined within her walls; the Oxford of the eighteenth century, still mindful of the King over the water, and still keeping alive in an age of materialism and infidelity some sparks of that loftier and more generous sentiment which ever clings to a falling cause.