Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/79

 73 to be devoted to study. Whatever else of Aubrey's tales of Harvey I may disbelieve, I can believe that the words addressed to Charles Scarborough, ' Prithee leave off thy gunning and stay here,' are his. If, however, we wish to have a real and truthful picture and image of Harvey before us, we must do by him as we have to do by Shakespeare, by Aristotle, by Butler, and several other great writers : we must lay our minds alongside of his, as it is revealed to us in his works. It is only the writings of great men which will bear or repay such treatment: no commentary nor any bio- graphy can give us the real and vivid sensa- tion of having the men before us which we get from a perusal and reperusal of their books. Having used for this purpose what Mr. Tom Taylor has recently spoken of as ' the invaluable three hours before breakfast/ I have come to persuade myself that I have obtained something like a trustworthy idea of what Harvey really was. Previously, how- ever, to doing this, I gave Christian burial to See speech at Eighty-fourth Anniversary Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, 'Times/ Thursday, May 29, p. 12.