hich led public opinion to prefer
a stockjobber to a gallant soldier.

Banbury manufactures horse girths and other kinds of webbing, as well as
excellent ale. There are two inns, both good.

The Buckinghamshire Railway has reduced the price of coal to the inhabitants
from 22s. to 15s. per ton, on 150,000 tons per annum.

BICESTER, commonly pronounced Bister, is thirteen miles by the road from
Oxford, a town as ancient as the Heptarchy; famous for a well once sacred and
dedicated to St. Edburgh, for its well attended markets and cattle fairs, and
especially for its excellent ale. It is in the centre of a capital hunting
country. The women make a little bone lace.

OXFORD.

Oxford is one of the great gates through which our rich middle classes send
their sons to be amalgamated with the landed and titled aristocracy, who are
all educated either there or at Cambridge.

To say of any one that he is an "Oxford man," at once implies that he is a
gentleman, and when a well-looking, well-mannered, and even moderately
endowed young gentleman has passed respectably through his curriculum at
Christchurch or Magdalen, Balliol, Oriel, University, or any other of the
correct colleges, it rests with himself whether he runs the race of public
life in England on equal terms with the sons of the oldest of the titled and
untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust
contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl. But money alone
won't do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a
peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes
who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural
resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which any capable man
may cut off his plebeian entail, and start according to the continental term
"noble."

The material beauty of Oxford is great--the situation, in a rich valley
bounded by softly flowing rivers, fine--the domes, and spires, and old grey
towers rising in clusters, prepare the mind of the approaching traveller for
the city where the old colleges and churches, planting out and almost
composing it, afford at every bend of the long streets, at every turn of the
narrow thoroughfares, some grand picture, or charming architectural effect;
even our Quakers are proud of Oxford in England when they travel in America.
Then Oxford is so decorously clean, so spotlessly free from t