ey
most indisputably was at Christchurch. Old George Chapman, who I suppose
was young once, was (I believe) at Oxford, though I have known Cambridge
to claim him. Lodge and Peele were at Oxford, so were Francis Beaumont
and his brother Sir John. Philip Massinger, Shakerley Marmion, and John
Marston are of Oxford, also Watson and Warner. Henry Vaughan the
Silurist, Sir John Davies, George Sandys, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Donne,
Lovelace, and Wither belong to the sister University, so did Dr.
Brady--but Oxford must not claim all the merit of the metrical version of
the Psalms, for Brady's colleague, Dr. Nahum Tate, was a Dublin man.
Otway and Collins, Young, Johnson, Charles Wesley, Southey, Landor,
Hartley Coleridge, Beddoes, Keble, Isaac Williams, Faber, and Clough are
names of which their University may well be proud. But surely, when
compared with the Cambridge list, a falling-off must be admitted.

A poet indeed once came into residence at University College, whose
single name--for, after all, poets must be weighed and not counted--would
have gone far to right the balance, but is Oxford bold enough to claim
Shelley as her own? She sent him down, not for riotous living, for no
purer soul than his ever haunted her courts, but for wanting to discuss
with those whose business it was to teach him questions of high
philosophy. Had Shelley only gone to Trinity in 1810, I feel sure wise
and witty old Dr. Mansel would never have sent him down. Spenser,
Milton, and Shelley! What a triad of immortal fames they would have
made. As it is, we expect Oxford, with her accustomed composure, will
insist upon adding Shelley to her score--but even when she has been
allowed to do so, she must own herself beaten both in men and metal.

But this being so--why was it so? It is now my turn to own myself
defeated. I cannot for the life of me tell how it happened.

BOOK-BUYING.

The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great as he is in many
directions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything
else, has been overheard mournfully to declare that there were more
booksellers' shops in his native town sixty years ago, when he was a boy
in it, than are to-day to be found within its boundaries. And yet the
place 'all unabashed' now boasts its bookless self a city!

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither
he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. Wh