Oxford Pros and Cons

I almost forgot to mention the following flashes of delight and dismay:

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  passing by the Catholic chaplaincy, once the site of the episcopal palace of the one and only Catholic Bishop of Oxford, in the reign of good Queen Mary;
  
  
  
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  kissing that great second-class relic of Newman, the famed pulpit at the church of St Mary the Virgin from which he preached;
  
  
  
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  noting at Christ Church Cathedral the memorials to Pusey and Berkeley;
  
  
  
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  within that building beholding the now-rebuilt shrine of St Frideswide, patroness of Oxford (whose sacred relics, alas, were thrown away by revolting Protestant heretics, damn them, and lost);
  
  
  
• 
  
  delighting to see notice made in sundry points round the city of the most just and deserved trial and execution of those evil men, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, instruments of Satan: would to God a few more had been condignly punished before their contagion infested England - I'd certainly have carried a faggot to the fire;
  
  
  
• 
  
  recalling the days when King Charles kept court and Parliament in Oxford, ere he lost his head;
  
  
  
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  hearing from Andrew of the nearby site where suffered the five Oxford martyrs for the true faith, holy saints who are the exact opposites of those three pseudomartyrs of the sectaries;
  
  
  
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  grinding my teeth at the tale of the way relics were scattered in the seventies...