Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/342

 development of those qualities which go to constitute human greatness. If I were called upon to name the greatest man who has lived and died in this nineteenth century, I should select, not a great Statesman, not a great Orator, not a great General, not a great Lawyer, not a great Poet; not Pitt, not Canning, not Wellington, not Peel, not Wordsworth, not Metcalfe, not even our own Munro, though in him were embodied more than in most of those I have named, the true elements of greatness;—I should select none of these—my choice would fall on one who labored long and nobly in the profession which I am now urging upon your attention, on one who in the piety and purity of his life, in the earnestness and simplicity of his character, in the largeness and liberality of his views, in the solidity of his learning, in his reverence for all that was great and good, in his abhorrence of all that was mean and petty, combined in himself more of the real characteristics of greatness than are to be found in any other man of his time. I pray that among the graduates of this University there may yet be some who will strive to follow the example of him, with whose name I close this address, the great and good Dr. Arnold.

 TWELFTH CONVOCATION.

Gentlemen,—If I had the honor to address an assembly of this character in England, there is no doubt that a large portion of my remarks would have a retrospective turn. The audience would be, like you, an audience of youth and hope, but the place would be a place of age and memory. The thoughts of my hearers might naturally be pointed not only to the recent years of sport and study, of companionship and rivalry, of meditation, of aspiration, of trials surmounted, and of triumphs won; but the imagination would be directed far beyond the limits of personal recollection and individual life to the long tradition of a time-hallowed institution. First, the ancient founders would be invoked, grave and pious figures of a vanished faith, then the early benefactors, kings and men of fame in camp, or cloister, or court, or school, such forms as we find in painted chronicles or on alabaster tombs; then, as the darkness of the middle ages fades away, would be cited the authors of free thought, the revivers of classic taste, the legislators of knowledge, the parents of modern speculation, observation, and discovery. Then patriots, politicians, artists, prosecutors of useful science, of industrial inventions, of 