Of the material sacrileges committed by King Edward’s visitors it is unnecessary here to speak, and without necessity one would not willingly enter on the sorrowful tale. The shell of the universities was left, to be gradually informed with a new spirit, a new learning, a new life; which, as years rolled on, became no longer new, and so gradually grew to be regarded by Englishmen as venerable. Oxford, with her thousand Catholic memories, became in process of time the stronghold of Anglican Church Toryism; a pigmy destiny, indeed, for her who had been founded by the hands of saints, yet one with which, on the whole, she has showed herself amply satisfied. The Royal Supremacy, which had first cut down her fair proportions, clung to her like the poisoned garment of Nessus, but though it sometimes galled her, she made the most (as was fitting) of her solitary dogma, and, in a memorable moment of her history, proclaimed fidelity to it in its extremest form to be “the badge of the Church of England.”

Here, then, we will bid farewell to Oxford; to those venerable walls round which there still hang shadows of the past, out of which alas! too many build up an unsubstantial cloudland, with the gorgeous beauty of which they rest content. The Catholic, while he feels the power which even such phantoms of the old faith exercise over the heart, knows well enough that he does but gaze on

He reads her ancient motto, and can but pray that a beam of the True Light may one day again illuminate her, and that she, over whose beautiful places the fire has passed, may once more sing, according to the days of her youth, “Dominus Illuminatio mea.”