Christchurch, the noblest of the churches!  How have I heard with delight its merry peal of bells, and the deep resonance of the “Mighty Tom,” that sounds with no “friendly voice” the call home of the students still, I presume, as it did so many years ago!  There is a long list of names, of no mean reputation, educated here, since the rapacious Henry VIII. seized the foundations, which had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey.  The gratitude of posterity, never very strong, has in the present case preserved the remembrance of Wolsey, if I recollect aright, by a statue of the proud man in his cardinal’s robes.  The grove of trees belonging to Christchurch, and the scenery accompanying the entire buildings, are eminently impressive.  Here, when divine service is celebrating, there is a peculiar propriety, or rather adaptation of the architecture to the feeling; the trees, and every accompaniment, are suitable to the end.  There is religion or its sentiment addressing the mind here through every sense.  All that can raise devotion in external appliances, combines in a wonderful manner; and when the sound of the organ is reverberated deeply along the vaulted roofs and walls, the effect was indescribably fine.  Christchurch walk or meadow is an adjunct to this college, such as few places possess.  I have trod it with those who will never tread it again.  I have skimmed over its smooth shaven surface when life seemed a vista of unmeasured years.  Its very beauty touches upon a melancholy chord, since it vibrates the sound of time passed away with those who lie in dust in distant climates, of whom memory alone is now the only record that they were and are not.

I remember being told by an eminent, but aged doctor in divinity, who had been the better part of his life employed in the education of youth, that he had kept an account of the history of all his pupils as far as he could obtain it, and they were very numerous.  From his own tuition—­and there were some celebrated names amongst them—­he traced them to the university, or to professions of a more active nature than a sojourn at the university would allow.  To Oxford he had sent the larger number of his pupils.  “And afterwards, doctor?” “Some came off nobly there:  others I heard of in distant parts of the globe in their country’s service:  but it is the common tale with nearly all of them—­they are dead.”  What hosts, I often thought, who had moved among, the deep shades of this university until it became entwined with their earliest affections —­who had studied within those embattled walls until the sight of them became almost a part of his existence —­what hosts of such have but served to swell the waters of oblivion, and press the associations of a common mortality upon the mind in the reflection on this very truism!  The late Sir Egerton Brydges—­a writer whose talents, though admitted, were never received as they merited to have been by the world, owing, perhaps, to an untoward disposition in other