Being the unpublished works of J. A. Lambkin, M.A. sometime Fellow of Burford College
I.
INTRODUCTORY
It is without a trace of compunction or regret that I prepare to edit the few unpublished essays, sermons and speeches of my late dear friend, Mr. Lambkin. On the contrary, I am filled with a sense that my labour is one to which the clearest interests of the whole English people call me, and I have found myself, as the work grew under my hands, fulfilling, if I may say so with due modesty, a high and noble duty. I remember Lambkin himself, in one of the last conversations I had with him, saying with the acuteness that characterised him, “The world knows nothing of its greatest men.” This pregnant commentary upon human affairs was, I admit, produced by an accident in the Oxford Herald which concerned myself. In a description of a Public Function my name had been mis-spelt, and though I was deeply wounded and offended, I was careful (from a feeling which I hope is common to all of us) to make no more than the slightest reference to this insult.
The acute eye of friendship and sympathy, coupled with the instincts of a scholar and a gentleman, perceived my irritation, and in the evening Lambkin uttered the memorable words that I have quoted. I thanked him warmly, but, if long acquaintance had taught him my character, so had it taught me his. I knew the reticence and modesty of my colleague, the almost morbid fear that vanity (a vice which he detested) might be imputed to him on account of the exceptional gifts which he could not entirely ignore or hide; and I was certain that the phrase which he constructed to heal my wound was not without some reference to his own unmerited obscurity.
The world knows nothing of its greatest men! Josiah Lambkin! from whatever Cypress groves of the underworld which environs us when on dark winter evenings in the silence of our own souls which nothing can dissolve though all attunes to that which nature herself perpetually calls us, always, if we choose but to remember, your name shall be known wherever the English language and its various dialects are spoken. The great All-mother has made me the humble instrument, and I shall perform my task as you would have desired it in a style which loses half its evil by losing all its rhetoric; I shall pursue my way and turn neither to the right nor to the left, but go straight on in the fearless old English fashion till it is completed.
Josiah Abraham Lambkin was born of well-to-do and gentlemanly parents in Bayswater[6] on January 19th, 1843. His father, at the time of his birth, entertained objections to the great Public Schools, largely founded upon his religious leanings, which were at that time opposed to the ritual of those institutions. In spite therefore of the vehement protestations of his mother (who was distantly connected on the maternal side with the Cromptons of Cheshire) the boy passed his earlier years under the able tutorship of a Nonconformist divine, and later passed into the academy of Dr. Whortlebury at Highgate.[7]
Of his school-days he always spoke with some bitterness. He appears to have suffered considerably from bullying, and the Headmaster, though a humane, was a blunt man, little fitted to comprehend the delicate nature with which he had to deal. On one occasion the nervous susceptible lad found it necessary to lay before him a description of the treatment to which he had been subjected by a younger and smaller, but much stronger boy; the pedagogue’s only reply was to flog Lambkin heartily with a light cane, “inflicting,” as he himself once told me, “such exquisite agony as would ever linger in his memory.” Doubtless this teacher of the old school thought he was (to use a phrase then common) “making a man of him,” but the object was not easily to be attained by brutal means. Let us be thankful that these punishments have nearly disappeared from our modern seminaries.
When Josiah was fifteen years of age, his father, having prospered in business, removed to Eaton Square and bought an estate in Surrey. The merchant’s mind, which, though rough, was strong and acute, had meanwhile passed through a considerable change in the matter of religion; and as the result of long but silent self-examination he became the ardent supporter of a system which he had formerly abhorred. It was therefore determined to send the lad to one of the two great Universities, and though Mrs. Lambkin’s second cousins, the Crumptons, had all been to Cambridge, Oxford was finally decided upon as presenting the greater social opportunities at the time.[8]
Here, then, is young Lambkin, in his nineteenth year, richly but soberly dressed, and eager for the new life that opens before him. He was entered at Burford College on October the 15th, 1861; a date which is, by a curious coincidence, exactly thirty-six years, four months, and two days from the time in which I pen these lines.