Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/13

 style of the barrel-organ. Nor did he ever—like some other distinguished professors that I remember—announce series of lectures on out-of-the-way subjects and at inconvenient hours, to which nobody came, and nobody was intended to come. Many of those who were wont to speak over-lightly of him might have learned a lesson from his conscientious discharge of his duties according to his lights, under circumstances which in his later years were enough to dishearten a much younger man. Many forgot his very considerable literary output: he had published more than a dozen books, small and great, of which several—for example his Life of Lord Hawke—have remained the standard authorities on the subjects with which they deal unto this day. Oxford might be considered happy if all her professors attained to his standard of duty and his level of performance.

If Montagu Burrows never delivered an inaugural address, the custom which made such lectures permissible, and then practically obligatory, came in not many years after his preferment to the Chichele chair. I have read that which Dr. Stubbs delivered in 1867, and I have heard with my own ears those of his four successors. Burrows, you will note, in his forty-three years of office, saw no less than six Regius professors in occupation of the other historical chair which this University maintains, and all six of them men of mark. Dr. Stubbs's inaugural lecture started with a eulogy on King George I—rather an unpromising subject for panegyric, though that prosaic monarch deserved a moment's praise as the founder of the Regius chair. But the main thesis of his address was the praise of history for its own sake: it is curious to note that in 1867 it would seem to have been necessary to defend the study as a thing on its trial as an