PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: 
THE WRITERS OF ENGLISH FICTION IN THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
By W. C. GULLY, Q.C., M.P. 
(Delivered at the Penrith Annual Meeting.) 
I HAVE never seen a list of the names of those whom the Cum- 
berland and Westmorland Literary and Scientific Association 
has heretofore honoured by electing them to the chair of the 
Presidency, but I have an abiding fear that it has never selected 
for that honourable office one who was quite so unfitted for it as 
Iam. Atleast I am quite sure it has never chosen anyone who 
was more penetrated with the sense of his deficiences. Of Science, 
properly so called, I know nothing except such hastily acquired 
and rapidly forgotten smatterings as I have had occasion to learn 
in the course of my profession; and. of Literature, though I 
profess myself to be a sincere, and in my younger and more 
leisured days, a fairly diligent worshipper, I have no pretensions 
to be a priest. There is, however, one distinction between 
Literature and Science which recalls to my mind some of the 
incursions which I made in my undergraduate days into the 
region of that so-called Science, Moral Philosophy, where I made 
acquaintance with Plato’s doctrine—that of every corporal thing 
and mental conception there is some absolutely true and 
beautiful form which is objectively excellent and perfect. 
Well, so far as Science is concerned, we must all admit, that its 
results, once arrived at, are irrefragable, and independent of the 
