OUR ENGLISH COUSINS.

We have become so accustomed to hearing criticisms on the conduct of the students at our American colleges, that it is somewhat of a relief to learn that our English cousins are not entirely above reproach in that respect. Of course we should no more judge the great body of English students by the few cases of disorder which occur, than we ourselves ought to be condemned because of the misconduct of a few. An editorial in the current number of the "London Graphic," in commenting on undergraduate life at Oxford, says : The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford has had to inflict a fine of ten pounds on some undergraduates who had been guilty of an offence which used once to be described as "dusting a bobby," but which in these days is no longer spoken of in jocular terms. A spiteful assault committed by several young men upon a solitary policeman is, in fact, not a funny thing at all, but it is a comfort to observe that such unmanly freaks have grown comparatively rare of late years.

It is a wonder how anybody could have been found to accept the office of watchman in those times, not so very remote, when beating the watch was part of a gay young gentleman's evening's amusement. Canning, writing a dutiful, though stilted, letter to his uncle from Oxford, memtioned quite casually that, returning from a political debate at the coffee-house, he and six friends had fallen in with two watchmen who, as the result of this encounter, turpe solum tetigere mento. Even the decorous Charles Greville tells us how, after dinning at White's, he had a spar with some bobbies in the Haymarket, and scampered home, leaving his hat in their possession, when they had sprung their rattle and got reinforcements. These were discreditable traits in English manners. They were always incomprehensible to foreigners, though foreigners generally had, and still have, much more cause to hate their police than we ours. The undergraduates who were fined ten pounds may congratulate themselves that they were not Parisian students in the Latin Quarter, or German students at Heid-lberg. In any country but England, their piece of sportiveness would have been atoned for in that kind of seclusion which is the nearest modern approach to the old monastic life.