Be thou not all unthankful—nor forget
As thou exultest in Imperial might
The benefits of the Electric Light.
III.
Some Remarks on Lambkin’s Prose Style
No achievement of my dear friend’s produced a greater effect than the English Essay which he presented at his examination. That so young a man, and a man trained in such an environment as his, should have written an essay at all was sufficiently remarkable, but that his work should have shown such mastery in the handling, such delicate balance of idea, and so much know-ledge (in the truest sense of the word), coupled with such an astounding insight into human character and contemporary psychology, was enough to warrant the remark of the then Warden of Burford: “If these things” (said the aged but eminent divine), “if these things” (it was said in all reverence and with a full sense of the responsibility of his position), “If these things are done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?”
Truly it may be said that the Green Wood of Lambkin’s early years as an Undergraduate was worthily followed by the Dry Wood of his later life as a fellow and even tutor, nay, as a Bursar of his college.
It is not my purpose to add much to the reader’s own impressions of this tour de force, or to insist too strongly upon the skill and breadth of treatment which will at once make their mark upon any intelligent man, and even upon the great mass of the public. But I may be forgiven if I give some slight personal memories in interpretation of a work which is necessarily presented in the cold medium of type.
Lambkin’s hand-writing was flowing and determined, but was often difficult to read, a quality which led in the later years of his life to the famous retort made by the Rural Dean of Henchthorp to the Chaplain of Bower’s Hall.[16] His manuscript was, like Lord Byron’s (and unlike the famous Codex V in the Vatican), remarkable for its erasures, of which as many as three may be seen in some places super-imposed, ladderwise, en échelle, the one above the other, perpendicularly to the line of writing.
This excessive fastidiousness in the use of words was the cause of his comparatively small production of written work; and thus the essay printed below was the labour of nearly three hours. His ideas in this matter were best represented by his little epigram on the appearance of Liddell and Scott’s larger Greek Lexicon. “Quality not quantity” was the witty phrase which he was heard to mutter when he received his first copy of that work.