The young barbarians of Christ Church have tardily and 'reluctantly
given up their names to the College authorities, so that a criminal prosecution has been avoided. They have been quite severely enough dealt with, three expelled, and the rest rusticated for various terms. For it seems that the intention -even of those who lighted the bonfire was not to destroy the statues and busts, but only enjoy the " lark " of smoking their faces, and they had not scientific knowledge enough to know that the heat would reduce the marble to lime. We confess that this seems to us very much to mitigate the character of the offence,—at least as regards its intention. Undergraduates do much worse things than this without getting expelled for it, though not more .dangerous to discipline. If they only meant, first to expose the busts and statues in a grotesque situation, and then to black their -faces with smoke, they have chiefly to thank their deficient educa- tion for a very rude sense of the ludicrous. No fun is vulgarer than that which consists in putting things where they are out of place. If these young gentlemen could only have had eyes to see 'it so,—in which case, however, it would not have been true,— there was something much more laughable in their own daily -disguise as members of a learned body, than in a grimy statue of Venus or a smoky bust of Dean Gaisford standing desolately in the middle of an Oxford quadrangle.
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