Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/396

 which I still hold: henceforth the Regius Professor will, under the Commissioners' Statutes, be a Professor Fellow. Whilst I look back with pride and gratitude on the honour which the College conferred on me so early in my career as professor, and with a lifelong pleasure on the friendships that my connexion with Oriel enabled me to form, I fear that I have been a very unprofitable member of governing body and educational staff: I console myself with the reflexion that there are some minds, which, in some situations, acquit themselves of their responsibilities most satisfactorily by never getting in the way. Non-obstructiveness is not the highest degree of efficiency, but there are worse faults. Anyhow my successor will have a chance in this line of work of approving his superiority to what has gone before.

The fact that two of my predecessors are alive and well is a matter of congratulation: Mr. Halford Vaughan and Mr. Goldwin Smith have both conferred on the Professorship an honour which I am glad to recognise. Both, eminent as scholars and political thinkers, lectured during the sixteen years of my absence from Oxford; there are some, however, left who remember Mr. Vaughan's lectures under the old system, the soundness and learning displayed in them and the stimulus which they supplied to the study of Modern History at the moment that it was taking its place among the recognised subjects of the Schools. It was whilst Mr. Vaughan was Professor that the School of Law and History was organised; Mr. Goldwin Smith, as I said, lectured under the new arrangements of 1859 and was examiner in 1862. I rejoice to know that on neither of these gentlemen has the study of the subject, that I have lived and worked for, produced any exhausting or debilitating effects; and, when I consider the case of my successor designate, 'the Regius Professor elect,' and think how many books he has written, and in how many fields he has shown his prowess, and how now, some few years my senior in standing, he is preparing to take my work on his shoulders, to go on writing, to give public statutory lectures, ordinary lectures, informal instruction, and to face the Board of Faculty and the Visitatorial Board, I