The best known route from London is by the Great Western Railway, which,
according to the original plan, would have passed close to the city. But all
the University and ecclesiastical dignitaries were up in arms; they saw, in
their mind's eye, the tender, innocent undergraduates flying from the
proctor-guarded precincts, where modesty, virtue, and sobriety ever reign, to
the vice-haunted purlieus of London, at all hours of the night and day. The
proctors and professors triumphed; the railway was obliged to leave a gap of
ten miles of common road between its invading, unhallowed course, and the
sacred city; and great was the rejoicing in the Convocation Chamber, and many
the toasts in the Senior Common Rooms to the health of the faithful sons of
Oxon, who in Parliament had saved the city from this commercial desecration.

But as even Grosvenor-square was at length glad to admit gas after abiding
longest of all in the genteel gloom of oil lamps, so was Oxford in the end
glad to be put on a branch, as it could not be put on a main line; and now,
beside the rail on which we are travelling, Worcester, Banbury, and
Wolverhampton, and two roads to London and Birmingham are open to the
wandering tastes of the callow youth of the University; as may be ascertained
by a statistical return from the railway stations whenever a steeple-chase or
Jenny Lind concert takes place in or near any of the towns enumerated.

The entrance from Bletchley is, perhaps, the finer, as rolling round a
semicircle, we sweep into sight of the dome of Radcliffe Library and the
spire of St. Mary's Church, descend, enter the city by the Cheltenham-road,
and passing through an inferior suburb, reach the head of High-street, of
which a great German art critic declared, "that it had not its equal in the
whole world." Wide, long, and gently curving, approached from either end, it
presents in succession the colleges of Lincoln, Brasenose, University, All
Souls, Queen's, St. Mary's Church, with peeps of gardens with private houses,