the Chairman has truly said, at the Slade School that I passed a happy time. It was at the Slade School that I discovered that I should never be an artist; it was at the lectures of Professor A. E. Housman that I discovered that I should never be a scholar; and it was at the lectures of Professor W. P. Ker that I discovered that I should never be a literary man. The warning, alas! fell on heedless ears, and I still attempted the practice of writing, which, let me tell you in the name of the whole Slade School, is very much easier than the practice of drawing and painting.
I am not going to say on this occasion anything at all adequate to so great a celebration as that which you are now enjoying. You are celebrating the termination and crown of a very great century, a very great hundred years, which began, not as a mere arbitrary or accidental date, but with the opening, one might say, almost, of the modern world, certainly with the opening of those great hopes which existed a hundred years ago, which it is difficult to define in few words. Perhaps there are none better than those hackneyed words which are said to have been uttered by the great German poet when he was dying. The desire for light and for liberty and for the expansion of the mind which possessed the beginning of the nineteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century created a vast number of institutions that are still of tremendous significance and historic importance, this great College among them.
I suppose that we all know that those Liberal ideals, those ideals of enlightenment, have not in all cases and in all respects satisfied those who consider
