Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/17

 Akenside, and in more recent days, Latham and Hawkins and Rolleston, had reclaimed their own, I should stand before you like the painted daw in the fable. I sought in the Orations, and especially in the earlier ones, for something that might have enabled me to set the man Harvey before you, ‘in his habit as he lived;’ for while but few are gifted with any measure of his deep insight, or can follow even at a distance the track of his genius, it would profit all of us to learn the lesson of his patriotism, his loyalty, his open-handed bounty, his forgiveness of injury and detraction, his deep religious feeling.

But my search has yielded little fruit, partly, I suppose, from Harvey’s own character. The man who needed the cannon-shot at Edge Hill to arouse him from his studies and to make him remove for the sake of the Princes committed to his care to a safer place, lived too entirely in his own pursuits to take much heed of life beyond them. It was with him much as it has