have come,” said the usher. Dinner was in full progress! The room is a cube of forty feet. Such a baronial banquet preparation I never saw. The oldest relic is the door leading into the court, where the fuel is kept, heavy, black, battered, iron-bound oak. From the kitchen to the refectory, with its splendid array of pictures. Going out under the tower, we heard “old Tom” ring out the hour in his sonorous tones. To Magdalen College to see the chapel with its wonderful immense window in brown sepia, three hundred years old, representing the day of judgment, and its reredos extending from the floor to the ceiling and from side wall to side wall. Then to “Addison’s Walk,” the loveliest, most sequestered, serpentine, and then long great vista of greenery, bound on either side by lovely streams and wide meadows edged with pollard willows. To New College, with its rival chapel and great window, designed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, representing Faith, Hope, and all the virtues mentionable. Anything more exquisite than Hope was never fashioned by man. The window is made, it is said, of the finest stained glass in the world. We passed by the church where Amy Robsart lies. At Warwick we saw the magnificent tomb of her cruel earl, and the effigy of himself and third wife, carved and colored, reposing thereupon. On to the Bodleian Library, with its treasures of books, rare old manuscripts, ancient illuminated works; I can’t enumerate its treasures, but one of the most curious and interesting was some papyrus rolls from Herculaneum, showing the scorch. Its picture gallery was a perfect fascination, with its portraits and busts of a long array of historical persons whom we have admired, reverenced, loved, and hated, all our lives. It was all an aggravating rush from one thing to another, that one wanted to hang over and study and steep the whole being in. I would go to the Ashmolean Museum to see a few things—Alfred’s jewel, a priceless treasure, the chatelaine watch of Queen Elizabeth, in turquoise and gold, with the chain formed of charms in different devices—two of hair. I wondered if either was her own. Cromwell’s watch right beside hers, heavy, thick, not very large, but looking as if it was meant to stand all the battering of the man’s career. One of the most interesting of all the personal trifles—shall I call them?—was a kind of charm worn by John Hampden in the civil war. This was the motto:
“Against my king I do not fight,
But for my king and kingdom’s right.”
There is not a spot in Oxford that is not enchanting. We staid at the “Mitre Hotel,” the oldest house in the city. Our room was wainscoted to the ceiling, which was divided into three compartments by rich and pretty panels in rich flowers. I did not like to leave it, though walking its floors was a feat of dexterity worthy of being chronicled, they were so sunken and irregular. We came whizzing through the loveliest lowland country, saw Windsor in a misty veil of light rain, and all at once we were in Paddington Station, in the cab, rolling through London streets and directly at our boarding house. We are delightfully situated. Sunday morning we heard Spofford Brooks. He is just across the street. In the afternoon I went to St. Paul’s to hear Canon Liddon. I was all eyes, if not ears. That splendid pile swallowed me up, mind, body and soul. And now with the din and clatter of four female tongues sounding in my ears, I will close this rambling epistle.
L. G. C.
Grosvenor Hotel, Chester, April 17, 1882.