Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/397

 flatter myself that the energy with which he will go to work will not be damped with the reflexion that his predecessors ever broke down. I am very glad to welcome him back to Oxford, to the home and the studies that he has loved so well, as the great champion and representative of that branch of historic literature on which I believe the success of the study here to depend. Not that he is eminent in this alone. But I am now flattering myself and not him.

And so I come to my parting words. I am going to leave Oxford, not for a place of rest, but for a post of work. I frankly confess that I have always worked towards an ideal of rest; my own anticipations have been, after a few years more here, during which I might see some of my boys started in the world, I might have retired, we will say to the Parks, and have given no more lectures. But I have always believed, in the case of other people, that the reward of good work is to have more work given you; and I do trust that it may be so with myself. If the gifts that I have done my best to make useful here are such as can for a little time be made useful elsewhere, I am grateful and hopeful in the change, although it is so very different from anything that I thought I was working for.

I am going to leave with Oxford many, very many friends; to leave but not I trust to lose them. I hope that I have made no enemies, I have more dread of making enemies than is at all consistent with a properly constituted moral courage. I hope that I have succeeded. At all events I have never reviewed the books of ally or opponent, or any one else, I have never given pain or incurred hostility in that way. I have abstained from controversy, religious, political or historical, for I have tried to live up to my own ideal of a strong position, that it consists far more in proved confidence in your own cause, in the vigilant maintenance of your own defences, in the thorough realisation of your sources of strength and weakness, than in the most adroit use of weapons or the most energetic tactics of aggression. I have never scrupled to correct my own mistakes, and I have never made a captious use of the mistakes of other men. I trust