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 Intellectual Enthusiasm. 
 
 AN 
 
 DELIVERED FOR THE SESSION, 1898-9, 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES, 
 
 ABERYSTWYTH, 
 OCTOBER 26th, 1898, 
 
 BY 
 
 H. MONTAGU BUTLER, D.D., 
 
 Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 Jlberjjsttogth : 
 
 PRINTED BY J. & J. GIBSON, "CAMBRIAN NEWS" OFFICE, 
 TERRACE ROAD.
 
 Stek 
 Annex 
 5 
 
 TO THE 
 EIGHT HONOURABLE LORD RENDEL, 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH, 
 
 AND TO 
 ALL THE OFFICERS AND STUDENTS OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 THIS ADDRESS IS 
 
 RESPECTFULLY AND GRATEFULLY 
 
 DEDICATED. 
 
 2097419
 
 INTELLECTUAL ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, 
 
 My subject this evening is " Intellectual Enthusiasm." 
 " I can't make you geologists, but I can fire your imagina- 
 tions," was the once famous and still well-remembered saying of 
 the best-loved man in Cambridge through many decades of this 
 century. I mean, of course, old Adam Sedgwick, for fifty-five 
 years our Professor of Geology and the life-long friend of your 
 famous Cambrian rocks which he visited so often and loved so 
 dearly. We young men used to talk of him among ourselves 
 as the " Grand Old Man," and I believe he retained this title 
 till a younger rival, destined to surpass him in age as well as in 
 fame, seized upon it by a kind of plebiscite and annexed it for 
 ever. 
 
 The saying of Sedgwick is one which smaller men may be allowed 
 to quote, if, by some fatal conjuncture, not of their own choosing, 
 they find themselves one day in the Professor's chair. There are 
 but few of us who can "make " our hearers anything that they 
 either are or are not already, whether geologists, or bards, or 
 harpists ; but we may not be wholly useless if, in some direction, 
 by some spell, moral or intellectual, we can ''fire their imagi- 
 nations " and kindle or re-kindle their enthusiasm. 
 
 I have the honour, the high honour, this evening of addressing 
 those who belong to a society dedicated to learning, and not only
 
 so, but dedicated by a yet recent consecration. The fresh dew of 
 that unction is not yet dry. You are still proud of it. Well, my 
 friends, there are many points of view from which you may 
 regard this much-prized home. It is the place where you are 
 framing the ideals of your career. It is the place where you 
 are forming delightful friendships. It is the place where you are 
 fashioning, sharpening, polishing the tools which are to cut 
 out for you the outward good things of life, comfort, indepen- 
 dence, influence, perhaps even fame, power, ascendency. It is 
 the place also where, either as a conqueror at the head of an 
 army, or as simply an intrepid, but not very richly-furnished 
 explorer, you are pushing your advance through that special 
 region of learning in which you have chosen to hoist your flag. 
 
 What I urge is the importance of the spirit, the real, true, 
 innermost spirit, with which you throw yourself into this high 
 quest. Is it with the prudential calculation of self-interest, or 
 with the lover-like transport of affection ? Do you love it 
 for what it gives, or for what it is ? 
 
 As to this, let me refresh your ears for a moment with 
 the echoes of a voice once kingly and Olympian, and 
 now resting from its thunders at the foot of the romantic 
 " Old Man" of Coniston. You will see that I speak of Mr. 
 Ruskin, the unseen Honorary Fellow of every home of culture. 
 This is what he said some years ago to some young students of 
 Art : " Ask yourselves what is the leading motive which actuates 
 you while you are at work. I do not ask you what your leading 
 motive is for working ; that is a different thing. You may have 
 families to support, parents to help, brides to win. But when 
 you are fairly at the work, what is the motive then which tells 
 upon every touch of it ? If it is the love of that which your 
 work represents ; if, being a landscape painter, it is love of hills 
 and trees that moves you ; if, being a figure painter, it is love 
 of human beauty and human soul that moves you, then the 
 Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours and the fulness thereof. 
 But if, on the other hand, it is petty self-complacency in your 
 own skill, trust in precepts and laws, hope for academical or 
 popular approbation, or avarice of wealth, it is quite possible 
 that by steady industry, or even by fortunate chance, you may 
 win the applause, the position, the fortune that you desire ; but 
 one touch of true art you will never lay on canvas or on 
 stone as long as you live."* 
 
 My friends, I am pleased with my quotation, so much so, 
 that, if you will allow me, I will. stand aside for a few minutes 
 longer and place you in direct touch with a few more of the 
 
 * " The Two Paths," end of Lecture I.
 
 Immortals, for they are the real lecturers on that " pearl of great 
 price," intellectual enthusiasm. 
 
 Listen, first, to our great poet Wordsworth, as he re-creates 
 the happy days when his mind was in the making. " Many," he 
 says in the Prelude, 
 
 Many are our joys 
 
 In youth, but, oh ! what happiness to live 
 When every hour brings palpable access 
 Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, 
 And sorrow is not there. 
 
 And again when, exactly a hundred years ago, he stood beside 
 the Wye, almost your own river, the river which so clearly defines 
 and is so indisputably contained in your legitimate " sphere of 
 influence :" 
 
 I cannot paint 
 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite ; a feeling and a love 
 That had no need of a remoter charm, 
 By thought supplied, nor any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. 
 
 Listen, again, to the great Goethe, when his mind is settling 
 down from its first tumultuous fermentations, and the path of 
 peaceful devotion to Nature and her teaching lies clear and level 
 before his view : " How legible the book of Nature becomes to 
 me, I cannot express to thee. My long lessons in spelling have 
 helped me, and now my quiet joy is inexpressible. Much as I 
 find that is new, I find nothing unexpected. Everything fits in, 
 because I have no system, and desire nothing but the pure 
 truth." 
 
 Or listen to yet another voice from Germany, a voice 
 which recalls the early student days of that lifelong friend of 
 England, the warm-hearted Bunsen, and of the eager intellectual 
 brotherhood of which he was the acknowledged centre. 
 The scene is the University of Gbttingen. If Canning has 
 wickedly tempted us to laugh at it, let the good Bunsen rather 
 lead us to revere. " On looking back," says his friend Brandis, 
 " upon our society, I consider it remarkable for the reality of 
 individual regard which made perfect sincerity possible. Truth 
 was to be the object held in honour by everyone, and strong con- 
 cussion and repulsion among minds would often take place with- 
 out causing bitterness or any cooling of friendship." 
 
 Another member of this German brotherhood records an inci- 
 dent which has become better known. " A spirit," he says, "of 
 zealous but friendly emulation arose amongst us ; and on a certain
 
 8 
 
 cheerful evening, at my suggestion, we made a vow, each to each 
 other and to all, that we would effect something great in our 
 lives."* 
 
 Some bad persons, not I am sure sitting here to-day, are 
 capable of smiling at such an outburst, but it will not be my 
 younger hearers. No man, no woman, was ever the worse for 
 saying, in days of youth, whether with the lips or in the heart, 
 whether in conversation or on the knees, " I vow to do some- 
 thing great before I die." 
 
 And now for something of a contrast "intellectual enthusiasm," 
 but in a different key. A contrast is not always or 
 necessarily a discord. I have given you a souvenir of the 
 eager, ardent German scholar and statesman. Let me now 
 supplement it by some few incisive words of a hardly less 
 able Englishman, a scholar and historian, the late admirable 
 Dean Merivale. It is only within the last few weeks that the 
 veil which covered his inner life has been partially lifted, and 
 that by pious hands. He is sketching his early days and his 
 early years at Cambridge, when he came up seventy-two years ago, 
 fresh from Haileybury and from Harrow. He began, as you will 
 see, well. His "first evening," he tells us, " was spent with the 
 Wordsworths at the Master's Lodge at Trinity. They had got 
 together half-a-dozen freshmen, and we passed together one of 
 those hours of fabulous felicity when young men meet together, 
 perhaps for the first time, with some common friend as a centre 
 of interest, and the common aspiration of a new career before 
 them Every fresh acquaintance seemed a revelation to me, and 
 I met with no new friend at the time who did not seem to show 
 me the narrow bounds of my own knowledge and acquirements. 
 My first day or two at Cambridge taught me as many lessons of 
 self-knowledge and humility as some of the years that had gone 
 before." 
 
 I think I may say in passing that Cambridge still persists in 
 grimly teaching, by much the same methods, that great science 
 'Know thyself." 
 
 Dean Merivale, a year or two later, opens out another window 
 into these hours of " fabulous felicity," hours that come once in 
 a lifetime. He is still owning his various debts to his various 
 associates, almost in the spirit of the noble Marcus Aurelius, of 
 whom he was destined, more than thirty years after, to write the 
 history and the eulogy. " Most happily for myself," he says, " I 
 fell just at that time into the society of able and studious youths 
 of my own standing. We have all ever felt and still feel a certain 
 freemasonry of sympathy which binds us implicitly to one another 
 as brethren of one family. Our common bond has been a common 
 
 *See Baron Bunsen's " Memoirs," Vol. I., pp. 56 and 46.
 
 9 
 
 intellectual taste, common studies, common literary aspirations ; 
 and we have all felt, I suppose, the support of mutual regard and 
 perhaps some mutual flattery. We soon grew " I should like to 
 have omitted this clause, " we soon grew, as such youthful coteries 
 generally do, into immense self-conceit. We began to think that 
 we had a mission to enlighten the world upon things intellectual 
 and spiritual. The style of our discussions may be illustrated by 
 
 a saying of one of our profound philosophers, Jack : ' The 
 
 world is one great thought and I am thinking it.' " 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, you are well aware that since these grave 
 charges were made, more than two generations back, the worn-out 
 Universities of your powerful Hinterland have renewed their 
 youth and cast off their slough. But perhaps nothing can show 
 you more plainly how far we have travelled and how complete 
 has been our change of skin, than my assurance that those who 
 took their degrees at Cambridge only a few years later, like Sir 
 William Harcourt and myself, fail to recognise in that brilliant but 
 too self-confident coterie any kind of resemblance to our Cambridge 
 selves and our then surroundings. My right hon. friend will, I 
 am sure, agree with me in attesting that in our time the besom of 
 moral reform had swept away every cobweb of self-conceit. We 
 knew our limits. We claimed, as we claim now, no mission to en- 
 lighten the world, either from the pulpit, or in Parliament, or in 
 the Press, " upon things intellectual and spiritual." And yet we, 
 too, had our " intellectual enthusiasm." 
 
 And now, my friends, that we have come, I hope, to know 
 something of each other through ambassadors selected impartially 
 from England and from Germany, let us come to close quarters 
 and look one another in the face. This " intellectual enthusiasm," 
 of which glorious things have been spoken by many tongues in 
 many lands is it one of the natural products of a University ? 
 Still more, is it ours ? Have we reached it, and taken it, and 
 do we mean to keep it? 
 
 The answer to the first question can hardly be doubtful. 
 There are few pages more delightful than those which describe 
 the passion for learning which kindled and ennobled some periods 
 of history. " Tollite, legite." Take up and read. Read Sir 
 James Stephen's " Power of the Pen in France," or Mr. J. R. 
 Green's " History of the English People," or Mr. Hastings 
 Rashdall's recent work on " The Universities of Europe in the 
 Middle Ages." Read there the account of the intellectual life 
 at Paris in the eleventh century, when Abelard was fascinating 
 his thousands and Bernard his ten thousands ; and again the 
 intellectual life at Oxford in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries, when the Snowdons and Cader Idrises of thought were 
 represented by such men as Edmund Rich, afterwards Archbishop 
 of Canterbury, and Robert Grossetete, afterwards Bishop of Lin-
 
 10 
 
 coin ; and, later on, by the " Invincible Doctor," William of 
 Ockham, and that dauntless " valiant-for-Truth," John Wyclifie. 
 No man can doubt the reality of "intellectual enthusiasm " at a 
 University who has even glanced at Mr. Rashdall's fascinating 
 pages. 
 
 I do not like to make even a passing reference to this great 
 work of an Oxford scholar without one word of personal ac- 
 knowledgment. It has been usual for grateful pupils to record 
 with pious pleasure and sometimes, perhaps, with laudable 
 exaggeration the debt which they conceived themselves to owe to 
 some former teacher, and there are few more graceful lines than 
 those of Tennyson in which this generous instinct finds worthy 
 utterance : 
 
 And what delights can equal those 
 That stir the spirit's inner deeps, 
 When one that loves but knows not reaps 
 
 A truth from one that loves and knows ? 
 
 But there is a corresponding privilege which it is sometimes a 
 duty and always a pleasure to proclaim, when the reaper is not 
 the pupil but the teacher, the teacher who, having taught but 
 too little in the years of his prime, rejoices in his declining years 
 to watch the independent achievement and the growing fame of 
 a distinguished pupil. And that is my happy relation now to 
 Mr. Hastings Rashdall, whose monumental work on the early 
 Universities is one of the classics of our time. He speaks on 
 this subject as from a Professor's chair. He cannot, indeed, 
 make us all Oxonians, but, like Sedgwick, how he fires our 
 imagination ! What a picture he paints of the " intellectual en- 
 thusiasm " of the time of Roger Bacon ! The students in those 
 days were very young, very unruly, very pugnacious, very far 
 from being members of any Temperance Society, and, worse still, 
 they were all of one sex. But what an ardour there was 
 among them ! What fulness of faith in the things of the 
 mind ! What a thirst after knowledge ! What a hero- 
 worship of great teachers ! What a readiness to endure almost 
 any physical hardship cold, hunger, wretched accommodation 
 if only they could "get learning" and listen to lectures which lasted 
 sometimes, if only they came before breakfast, for three heroic hours ! 
 As to accommodation, if such a word is not a pitiable anachronism, 
 we are told by Sir James Stephen that when, two centuries before, 
 Abelard of the honeyed tongue set up his school in France " first 
 at Melun and then at Corbeil, such was the throng and such the 
 curiosity of his pupils that they were content, during the season 
 of his lectures, to dwell in huts rudely composed of reeds and 
 mud."* And in a like spirit, so we learn from Mr. Rashdall, in at 
 least one Cambridge College, " the cheerless picture presented by 
 
 * " Lectures on the History of France," Vol II, 78.
 
 11 
 
 the fireless studies is completed by the wooden window-shutters, 
 the clay or tiled floors either bare or strewn with straw, and the 
 unplastered ceilings." 
 
 Or take a yet more testing physical privation, the absence 
 of all amusements. I again quote the historian of the Uni- 
 versities. "A very striking feature of medieval university life, at 
 least in English eyes " Mr. Rashdall, I ought perhaps to say, 
 passed some happy years at Lampeter and knows that we must 
 not measure Welsh gravity by English frivolity but in English 
 eyes " one striking feature of medieval university life is the 
 almost total absence of authorised or respectable amusements." 
 Even playing with a ball or a bat, the nearest approach to 
 athletics which we encounter, is at times forbidden among other 
 " insolent " games. Even chess innocent, respectable, strictly 
 sedentary chess was, it seems, treated as an academic heresy. 
 At New College the stern Bishop of Winchester includes chess 
 among the " noxious, inordinate, and unhonest games which are 
 forbidden to his scholars." 
 
 Nature, of course, shrieked at this episcopal tyranny, and 
 planned her revenge. If lawful amusements were banished, 
 unlawful amusements were sure to mount the vacant throne. 
 We read of excesses which I almost hesitate to mention in this 
 decorous assembly and in the presence of a distinguished States- 
 man, who long years since, before even the incorporation of 
 your University, held the seals of the Home Office in the 
 adjacent peninsula. We read of hawking, and poaching, and 
 turning highwaymen, and even stone-throwing, and worse 
 even than this wandering at night " with horrible shout- 
 ings and noisy and unwonted songs," and actually " beating the 
 watch," the Dogberrys and Vergeses of that physically lawless 
 but intellectually enthusiastic age. 
 
 Do we shudder, my friends, at this photograph, this almost 
 phonograph, of medieval life 1 Do any of us draw the 
 conclusion that, if we are to rival those young students in 
 intellectual enthusiasm, we must rival them also in their 
 feats of recreation ? No, my friends, 1 have not come all the 
 way from time-honoured Cambridge to press this extreme of a 
 pitiless logic on a young and ingenuous society. But this I 
 venture to submit to you. Is intellectual enthusiasm in our days 
 quite safe in this part of the field ? Are you quite satisfied that it 
 has nothing to fear from what we call " amusements ?" Students 
 in history and politics are familiar with the phrase "the balance of 
 power." As applied to rival nations, it has long been recogni/ed 
 as a symbol of the unstable and the precarious. But "the balance 
 of power " among rival enthusiasms whose is the " mailed fist," 
 where is the Bismarckian or the Imperial hand, that may have 
 strength and steadiness to hold it ?
 
 12 
 
 And surely there are signs of a struggle. There are 
 those who, as they study the lives of their contemporaries, old 
 and young, not in the cloister, or from the blue-book, but in 
 the newspaper, and on the river, and on the cricket-ground, have 
 half persuaded themselves that the English parent's enthusiasm 
 for study is at least balanced by his, or even her, enthusiasm for 
 athletics ; and, further, that the proud English schoolboy, in this 
 if in no other branch of ethics, vouchsafes to pay a profound and 
 filial deference to the wisdom of his ancestors. Nay, there is 
 some reason to fear that even grave pastors and masters are not 
 always able to hold the two enthusiasms in perfect equipoise. 
 In the charming memoir of Dean Merivale, to which I have 
 already referred in which by-the-bye he forgets to tell his 
 favourite story that some Harrow Eleven during his stay in the 
 school contained two future archbishops, three bishops, and one 
 dean, viz., Archbishop Trench and Archbishop Manning, Bishop 
 Charles Wordsworth, Bishop Perry, Bishop Oxenden, and him- 
 self, in this delightful outpouring of the memories of the old 
 student and historian, I find him saying that some fifteen years ago 
 he had a visit at Ely from the then headmaster of one of our 
 leading English public schools. " It is amusing," he writes, " to 
 hear the master talking of his boys and evidently putting 
 athletics at least on a par with learning. "We shall have fellow- 
 ships given for the high-pole jump by and by, I expect." 
 
 It is a far cry from the intellectual enthusiasm of the Middle 
 Ages, sobered by few amusements save those of the poacher and the 
 highwayman, to the frivolity exhibited by this modern idolater 
 of athletics. 
 
 Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep if some one here were he ? 
 
 Would you not all scout him as either a turncoat or a hypocrite if 
 he had the front to stand up before you on an evening such as this 
 and pose for the best part of " one crowded hour " as the 
 champion, not of athletic sobriety, but of "intellectual enthusiasm?" 
 It is, I hope, never too late to mend ; and the question I would 
 now put to you, speaking as a reformed character, is this whether 
 you do not recognize, not of course in yourselves, but in some 
 great schools and colleges in a neighbouring country, some real 
 danger from the competition of enthusiasms ? Are you quite sure 
 that, in the great match which is always being played between 
 them, intellect is on the whole wihning ? Is it the favourite with 
 the onlookers ? Are its exploits the most cheered 1 I can well 
 understand that in this favoured retreat, " on the shore," 
 as Lord Beaconsfield might have phrased it, " on the shore 
 of a melancholy ocean," the time may not have come 
 when your enthusiasm for amusements has even threatened
 
 13 
 
 to compete with your enthusiasm for knowledge. Your instincts 
 are still sound and healthy. You prefer the pale heroes and 
 heroines of the library and the laboratory to the rude but ruddy 
 champions of the bat and the football. You do not, at the f-nd of a 
 busy summer season, expect " to read your average in a nation's 
 eyes," or to be talked of or betted on in clubs and pavilions as 
 having approached or beaten the record. This, too, is fame, and 
 no one wishes to laugh at it ; but I do yet again venture to 
 remind you that the great glory of a University is, after all, rever- 
 ence for knowledge, and " the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number " of students is, after all, Intellectual Enthusiasm. 
 
 We have named one bold rival of this high passion, one which 
 just now is at the height of its popularity and can hardly perhaps 
 soar much higher. Let us now venture to suggest a second, not 
 so much a rival as a suppressor, a kind of extincteur, quenching not 
 only the conflagrations of the intellect but even its purest and 
 most delicate tires. I refer to the spirit of criticism carried to 
 excess. In every great seat of learning the "balance of power" 
 should include in happy poise and proportion the reverence for 
 imagination and the reverence for criticism. I fear it must be ad- 
 mitted that, as a rule, it is the latter which is the "preponderating 
 partner ;" and we shall most of us agree that enthusiasm is the 
 child of imagination rather than of criticism. Experience seems 
 to show that, where the critical spirit becomes paramount for 
 long together, imagination somewhat dwindles. Learned people 
 get rather afraid of each other. They are sometimes less afraid 
 of being ignorant than of being caught in a blunder. They 
 count it a less reproach to be silent and unproductive than to be 
 fertile and fallible. Where such nervousness prevails, farewell 
 to much " intellectual enthusiasm !" It is a delicate sensitive 
 plant. It needs the sunshine of outspoken sympathy and not too 
 niggardly praise. Woe to any professor or teacher or 
 companion who, by carrying criticism too far, forces enthusiasm to 
 shut up its petals and wither away. We are all, I suppose, at 
 times cynical. Let us all be warned in time, and be very merciful! 
 
 We have hinted at two of the foes or rivals of intellectual 
 enthusiasm. I will name but one more, and it is a sad one 
 even to name. Other enemies may come from without, 
 this is from within. A man's foe is himself. I refer to what I 
 call intellectual infidelity, the gradual loss of faith in the 
 higher things of the mind. There are four lines of S. T. Coleridge 
 which seem to spring from some deep Marah of bitterness, and 
 rank high in the natural elegiacs of the human heart. 
 
 In vain we supplicate the Powers above : 
 There is uo resurrection for the Love 
 That, nurst in tenderest care, yet fades away 
 In the chilled heart by gradual self -decay.
 
 14 
 
 " Gradual self-decay !" There is the one dread rival, the one arch- 
 foe, to all true love the love of the mind as well as the love of 
 the heart. We never admit, we rarely are even aware of, the 
 approach of either, but each is ever watching for its leap. " Only 
 despise reason and knowledge " so says the mocking spirit in 
 Faust, in one of the basest yet most powerful of all soliloquies 
 " Only despise reason and knowledge, the highest strength of 
 humanity, only permit thyself to be confirmed in delusion and 
 sorcery-work by the spirit of lies and I have thee uncon- 
 ditionally." <f So hab' ich dich schon unbedingt."* Yes, one 
 dare not speak of so sacred a thing as intellectual enthusiasm, 
 either to a large kindly audience like this or even in 
 private to a few dear friends or pupils, without recognizing 
 that it has in it not only what is infinitely precious but 
 also what is frail and precarious. One might almost say of 
 it, as we say of man himself, " He cometh up and is cut down 
 like a flower ; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth 
 in one stay." 
 
 The temple of my youth 
 
 Was strong in moral purpose ; once I felt 
 
 The glory of Philosophy, and knelt 
 
 In the pure shrine of Truth. 
 
 Those were the words of a brilliant man, the pride of 
 Eton and of Trinity, who died too early for his fame 
 some sixty years ago. I mean Winthrop Mackworth Praedf- I 
 name the date and the man, for there have been other like losses 
 since. It seems to me that Praed here speaks for many, both in 
 the early ardour which he claims and the later chill which he 
 implies. 
 
 My friends, do not think me unseasonably serious or 
 pedantically impertinent if, though a stranger in your presence, 
 I avail myself of the sombre privilege of accumulating years, and 
 ask you to entrust to me for the moment not your ears only, but, 
 if it might be, some fragment of your conscience. There is not one 
 among you who does not know and feel that the capacity for this 
 " intellectual enthusiasm " is well nigh the noblest gift that he has 
 received. You admire it in teachers ; you love it among your 
 comrades ; you revere it, you cannot help revering it, in your- 
 selves. You feel that you are rarely more yourselves, rarely 
 I will dare to say it more truly " in the image of God," 
 than when heart and mind in perfect union beat high 
 to the wonders, the beauties, the sublimities, the old stored-up 
 treasures, the fresh opening discoveries of the intellectual 
 world. It is because this place ministers to these things, and 
 
 * Mephistopheles. Scene with the Student. 
 \The Retrospect, Vol. I., 264.
 
 15 
 
 takes its name from them, and owns their greatness, that 
 you love it and are proud of it. It is your hope, and almost 
 your happy belief, that, whatever be your career when you leave 
 these walls whether to take part in public or domestic life, or to 
 become the guide and teacher of others this flame of intellectual 
 enthusiasm may burn as bright as it burns to-day. To teach 
 without enthusiasm, to teach coldly, dryly, languidly, unwillingly, 
 with the sense of being bored to teach because you must, 
 because, in the phrase so agreeable to a great commercial nation, 
 because you are "paid for it," this, in your present state of feeling, 
 you would regard as not so much a disgrace as a profanation. 
 And yet, my friends, in a few years this profanation will surely 
 come to you, as it has come to many, unless you confront it by 
 manful preparation. " The wise keep oil in their vessels with 
 their lamps." So it is in spiritual things, and so it is in 
 intellectual things. If the high places of the intellect are invaded 
 by vanity, or love of display, or the spirit of the gladiator, or the 
 duellist, or the advocate, or the trafficker if once the love of 
 knowledge for her own sake is marred by any lower love, such as 
 that of shining, or attracting, or governing, or influencing, or 
 makingf riends,or making money then the profanation has begun, 
 and the house of worship has become the '' house of merchandise." 
 But, my friends, on this auspicious day of assembly we will close 
 with words not of misgiving, but of high congratulation and 
 almost of blessing. This is a day of opportunities. All seems 
 possible for you. As Lord Brougham said, just seventy years 
 ago, of another great prospect, at the end of a speech* not of 
 minutes, but of hours yes of six crowded hours " The 
 course is clear before you ; the race is glorious to 
 run." You see wide open the gates of each fair city 
 and each steep fortress of knowledge. This very day one 
 new gate has been, as it were, unlocked by the massive hand of 
 a Scholar and a Statesman, the only Leader of the House of 
 Commons who has ever yet been a Professor in an English 
 University. t You have before you, each bespeaking your atten- 
 tions, the old learning and the new ; the old learning, literature 
 and mathematics, with its deep rich mines that are not yet, and 
 never will be, fully explored ; the new learning, physical 
 science, which carries visibly on its brow the halo both of recent 
 and of coming discoveries. Happy surely are they who live in 
 an age when the Alexanders of Science have still new worlds to 
 conquer ; nay, when each such explorer is hour by hour on the 
 verge of a fresh conquest, his ear listening for the first whisper of 
 one more secret of the Creator ! 
 
 * Peroration of Speech on Law Reform, February 7th, 1328. 
 
 t A new block of buildings was opened by the Right Hon. Sir William Harcourt, 
 M.P., from 1869 to 1887 Whewell Professor of International Law in the 
 University of Cambridge.
 
 16 
 
 It happens sometimes that we see a man, not indeed himself a 
 discoverer but a student of discoveries, standing, as it were, 
 on the very scene of the new-born treasure, as Speke 
 stood by the waters of Nyanza, or as Schliemann stood by 
 the tombs of Mycenae. Let me give you one instance of how 
 a young man could feel, and almost prophesy, when, just a century 
 ago, he first saw the promised land of a new science which is not 
 always regarded as the most fascinating I mean the science of 
 Political Economy, the science which Pitt embodied in his 
 Budgets and of which Fox, if I remember, said that to read a 
 page of it gave him a headache. 
 
 This is how a young Cambridge man, when twenty- 
 three years of age, wrote to his father in 1797, 
 the year of Rivoli and of the death of Burke. t( I have just 
 finished Smith's ' Wealth of Nations.' Das ist ein Buck, as we 
 say in German. I'll tell you what, Sir, it is the fashion to run 
 down the age' in which we live, but the preceding sixteen 
 centuries do not seem to have advanced literature and science so 
 much, cot put all together. Here are now politics reduced to 
 science, the study which of all others seemed the least capable 
 of being subjected to close reasoning. I should like to sleep thirty 
 years, or much rather to look forward with the ken of prophesy 
 thirty years into the page of Time, and predict the discoveries 
 we shall then have made. Perhaps trade will ere then be free 
 all over the world ; nation shall traffic with nation upon as free 
 a footing as at this time village with village, and commerce 
 shall have shaken off her shackles into the sea, those hateful 
 shackles which the unbrotherly jealousies of rival states have 
 forged, forcing themselves to a scanty and dear sustenance rather 
 than that a neighbouring country should be enriched by affording 
 them plenty at less cost, But I must stop here, or my Adam- 
 Smithian/wrore will bear me away. It is one of the finest books 
 of the age."* 
 
 And, I too, ladies and gentlemen, must also "stop here," 
 even as my dear father stopped in his letter to his 
 father a hundred and one years ago. I know that I have 
 kept you too long. My object has been clear and yet not 
 pretentious. I knew that I had nothing to teach ; I hoped I 
 had something to suggest, to remind, to rekindle. I knew that 
 I could not make you geologists, or philologists, or mechanicians, 
 or politicians. I did venture to hope that, partly through the 
 genius loci, and yet more by the kindness and freshness of your 
 own hearts in this happy haunt of youth I did venture to hope I 
 might "fire your imaginations." 
 
 * Unpublished letter of George Butler, January 7th, 1797, afterwards Headmaster 
 of Harrow School and Dean of Peterborough.
 
 17 
 
 And now, as I take my final leave of you, let me pre- 
 sume to offer you my most respectfi*! felicitation on the 
 proud position which you already hold among the great educa- 
 tional fortresses of our common country. It must have been an 
 impressive and memorable day when your first foundation stone 
 was laid, and when all that was best in your city and in your 
 neighbourhood bade your youthful College God-speed. A very 
 learned historian,* my own greatest living benefactor, in 
 fact, my wife's father, has lately called my attention to some 
 of the details of the Coronation Service of the Kings of England 
 as they were celebrated long centuries back in the Abbey of 
 Westminster. Some are still preserved, and long may it be 
 before they are again witnessed ! Others have become obsolete. 
 Let me name just a few, as they appeared to the eyes of Harold, 
 and the lion-hearted Richard, and the heroic father of the first 
 Prince of Wales. The new King, after the reverent anointing of 
 head and breast and elbows and shoulders, stood up before the 
 nobles and prelates of his realm to receive from the hands of the 
 Primate the various symbols of power and of function. " Take 
 thou this sword. Take thou these bracelets. Take thou this 
 mantle. Let this crown, which I have blessed, encircle thy brow. 
 Take thou this ring. Take in thy right hand this sceptre, 
 crowned with the cross and rising from an orb of gold, and in thy 
 left hand this rod, with the dove seated on its top." Then, after 
 the solemn benediction and the chanting of the ancient hymn 
 Te Deum Laudamus, " We praise Thee, O God," was heard 
 once more the voice of the Archbishop, Sta et Retine, " Stand 
 firm and Hold fast."t 
 
 Such sacred words, such august forms, are in part history, in 
 part allegory. You too, my friends, have had but a few years 
 since your ceremony of dedication I might almost call it your 
 coronation when the fair diadem of learning was placed upon 
 your brow, and when gift after gift of gracious power and glorious 
 responsibility was committed to your keeping for the good of your 
 country. These gifts, each an emblem and an instrument of 
 blessing, you have kept and will keep. You need no word of 
 farewell exhortation from a stranger, and yet you shall hear it 
 from him, and some perchance may remember it in years to come. 
 Sta et Retine. Stand fast and Hold fast. "Hold fast that which 
 thou hast, that no man take thy crown ! "J 
 
 * Sir James Ramsay of Bamff, Bart., author of Lancaster and York and The Founda- 
 tions of England. 
 
 t For these details see Maskell's Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Vol. iii.; 
 Taylor's Glory of Regality; and E. A. Freeman's description of the Coronation 
 of Harold, The Norman Conquest, Vol. iii., page 42, and Appendix, page 626. 
 
 J Rev. iii., 11.
 
 
 
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