GIA CASCENS TO OXFORD: BY T. COMBE, M.A., E. B. GARDNER, E. P. HALL, AND H. LATHAM, M.A., PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. PREFACE. IN giving these Lectures to the world, I believe I am only taking a usual step, and one that is expected of Oxford Professors, more or less, by that University. I need only then ask my readers to bear in mind that they are lectures, to be heard, as ancient Pistol says, ' with ears'-not subtle disquisitions to be meditated upon in a quiet study. They have therefore been thrown into a key more rhetorical and familiar than I should otherwise have adopted, and are rather, to use Aristotle's phrase, epideictic orations than argumentative essays. I must add. that for five-and-twenty years and more, I have done nothing as an orator, except to mumble now and then a few words, against my will, at a wedding breakfast. It follows that these compositions must be, in point of tone and style, necessarily tentative. Indeed, one reason for not putting off publication till a greater number of them had heaped themselves up, is, that the sooner any corrigible defects and mistakes are pointed out to me (and |