botanist, who has to deal with the problem of living matter even in its most rudimentary forms. In like manner the facile and attractive simplicity of many of the theories which had crystallised almost into dogmas as to Greek origins, Greek religion, the order and development of Greek poetry, and as to a hundred other points, has had to yield to the sapping operations of the comparative method, and is found in the new setting of a larger scheme of knowledge to be hopelessly out of perspective. There is nothing more irksome to the natural man than to have the presuppositions on which he has lived rooted up and cast upon the rubbish heap. But this is the often unwelcome service which Science is always rendering to the world. Aristotle said long ago that the being that could live in isolation was either below or above humanity. There is no form of study-least of all the study of language and literature, which are the vesture of men's thoughts and emotions-that can afford to isolate itself without incurring the risks of pedantry and sterility. Here is a work which is worthy of the cooperative efforts of this association of scholars. For the literature of the two great European races of the ancient world can never lose its supreme attraction, its incommunicable splendour; and of them it is true, in the famous words of Roger Bacon, notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae. VI THE ENGLISH BAR1 MR. ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND GENTLEMEN OF THE BAR-You do not need to be assured that no compliment could be more grateful to me, or to any man who, like myself, has been for more than thirty years a member of the English Bar, than such a welcome as has been given to me to-night by the members of the great profession, among whom the laborious days of my life have been so largely spent. It enhances to me the value of that compliment that you should have selected as your mouthpiece my learned friend, Sir Edward Clarke. It has been my misfortune both in political and in professional life to be more often against than with Sir Edward Clarke; but whether with him or against him I have always felt and which of us has not ?-that there is no one among our contemporaries whom I should more heartily advise a young man entering the professional arena to look to as model, whether of temper, of method, of style, or of the 1 Delivered at the Inner Temple Hall, July 10, 1908. whole art of advocacy. Courage which, though always undaunted, never blusters; persuasiveness which seems rather to win than to capture assent; eloquence which never sacrifices light to heat, those are qualities of which no man at the Bar in my time has been a more perfect and consummate exponent. Mr. Attorney, this is a gathering of the Bar, and of the Bar alone; and almost for the first time (for it does not happen frequently in our lives) we are able to talk without turning our eyes, or directing our attention, either to the Bench above or to the Well below. To me I must confess that to speak anywhere in the region of the Temple without a tribunal, without a client, without a brief, and, I must add, without a fee, is an unfamiliar and in some ways a nerveshaking experience. I can only wish that I were imbued for the moment with some portion of the magnificent sang-froid of that accomplished advocate Sir Richard Bethell, who is said -I daresay some of you know the legend-in the midst of a super-subtle argument, when harassed by the interlocutory irrelevance of a Chancery Judge, to have turned round to his unhappy junior, and to have exclaimed in an audible aside, "The damned fool has taken your point." Well, gentlemen, as I am among old friends and brethren, I may, perhaps, be allowed for a moment-and only for a moment-to be egotistic and autobiographical. Let me, then, seize the |