liv CHARLES CARDALE BABINGTON. 



"The admission of associates was for a time a very valuable 

 addition to the Club, and to be elected as such was an object of 

 ambition to many deserving and diligent students ; but for many 

 years the meetings have not proved interesting to them, and there- 

 fore very few of them attend. . . . 



"I have now . . . been, I venture to say, the most regular 

 attendant at its meetings for the long period of fifty years ; and 

 hence seen its great usefulness in its earlier period, and its more 

 recent decline. . . . But whatever befalls our Club, let us beware 

 lest luxury and self-indulgence take the place of the learning, 

 science, and abnegation of self, which were so remarkably present 

 in the great men of the recently departed generation of the Univer- 

 sity." 



These lessons are enforced by lists, with biographical notes, of 

 former and present members and associates. Let us cull a few 

 names. Among original members — C. C. Babington, Sir G. E. Paget, 

 John Ball ; of later recruits — Adam Sedgwick, Sir G. G. Stokes, J. C. 

 Adams, Alfred Newton, William Clark, James Cumming, W. H. 

 Miller, F. J. A. Hort, G. D. Liveing, Sir G. M. Humphry, 

 r. M. Balfour, Churchill Babington, T. M. Hughes, J. C. Maxwell, 

 Sir A. W. Franks, R. B. Clifton, G. R. Crotch. Of these, next to 

 his cousin, Sedgwick and Adams perhaps were most akin to Cardale 

 Babington ; their engraved portraits adorning his dining room, with 

 those of Bishops Lightfoot and Westcott. 



The functions of these Cambridge societies, it is pleaded, are 

 now swallowed up by London. Babington would retort : Pleasure 

 tracks students to their rooms ; surely our duty is to follow the 

 bane with the antidote ; to dog idleness to its haunts, and fight it 

 there. 



His love of letters was genuine, his taste sound and manly. Of 

 poets he affected, as one might surmise, Wordsworth and Cowper, 

 spokesmen of Nature. ' God made the country, and man made the 

 town.' Crabbe he prized for plain dealing. Sober-suited hymns — 

 Thomas Ken's and George Herbert's — were more to his mind than 

 raptures. Did you mention Ken, he was apt to ask, ' Do you know 

 his Midnight Hymn ? Most folk neglect that.' 



If ever there were a Bible Christian, it was he. The book he 

 judged, as he judged men, by its fruits. These he gathered, not 

 from critics, or word-painters, but from the voice of Missions. 

 •There,' he would say, 'you have the romance of real life.' In 

 the last few years I saw him often ; for I bore messages from the 

 Spanish and Italian Reforms, from Campello and Cabrera. In faith 

 and hope he greeted for Southern Europe the dawning of a brighter 

 day. Countrymen of Savonarola and Father Paul, of Enzinas and 

 Cyprian de Valera, must at last awaken from millennial slumber 

 and challenge a place in ' the parliament of man.' 



Stedfast he was, some whispered strait-laced, in the resolve 

 never to worship God and the world together. No bribe, no threat, 



