PREFACE
I think it meet, Gentlemen, that before we resume our subject to-day, a word should be said on a loss that has befallen English letters in general and our sister-University in particular, since I last addressed you.
Walter Raleigh was an authentic son of Cambridge: and although he spent the most of his life teaching in other places the better understanding of a literature—our own literature—which in his undergraduate days had not found adequate recognition here, yet Cambridge had been his pasture, and he carried everywhere the mettle of that pasture: yes, and unmistakably, and although by the gay sincerity of his nature he would win men to like him, wherever he went.
Personal affection may count for too much in my faith that he will some day be recognised, not only for a true son of Cambridge, but for a great one in his generation. I put, however, that reckoning on one side. He did, very gaily and manfully and well, all the work that fell to his hand; and his end was in this wise. He had, in the first and second weeks of August, 1914, been eye-witness at Oxford of one of two amazing scenes—the other simultaneously passing here—when in these precincts, in these courts of unconscious preparation, by these two sacred streams, all on a sudden the spirit of youth was a host incorporate.
Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα
ἤνθησ’, ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.
“Then Delos broke in gold, as a mountain spur is canopied in season with the flowering bush.”
“The mettle of your pasture” ... “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision” ... and the host, so suddenly gathered, as suddenly in motion, gone, for their country’s sake challenging the scythe. Raleigh saw that with his eyes, and could not forget.
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The Dean of St. Paul’s returned, the other day, to a rightly respectful Cambridge, to deliver a Rede Lecture to us on The Victorian Age. Now he is a fool who denies or doubts Dean Inge to be a great man of our time—though he may now and then be a little too apt to regard himself as the only widow of another. Dean Inge, at any rate, felt himself strong enough to tell you he had no doubt that, to the historian of the future, the Elizabethan and Victorian Ages will appear as “the twin peaks in which English civilisation culminated.”