RES OO er 
7 a ee 
The Inaugural Meeting. 8 
the hope that their visit might be pleasant, enjoyable, and in- 
structive, and that they might be blessed with good health and with 
fine weather, which was such a necessary factor for the proper en- 
joyment of the many and varied excursions arranged for by the 
Committee. 
Tue Bisnop, as President of the Wiltshire Archeological and 
Natural History Society, read the following address :—* It gives me 
the greatest pleasure to receive your Lordship the President and the 
other Members of the Archeological Institute in a double capacity. 
I welcome you to this city as sixty-eighth Bishop of Salisbury, and 
as sixty-second Bishop of New Sarum. I welcome you also as 
President of the Wiltshire Archeological and Natural History 
Society. Iam glad that your visit has come at a time when I have 
been long enough in residence here to appreciate to some extent the 
wealth of interest in the land and the city over which it is my lot 
to preside. It is impossible for a Bishop of Salisbury, whether he 
looks down upon the Cathedral and city from the heights of Old 
Sarum—a city founded as one orderly peaceful whole by the master 
mind of Richard Poor—or looks up to the spire from that house in 
which his predecessors have lived in almost uninterrupted succession 
since the year 1220, or perceives the needle point of that same 
spire from the plain on which still reposes the isolated sanctuary of 
Stonehenge, or drives along the green wooded valleys, in which the 
little villages, with ancient Churches and manor houses, cluster 
along the sparkling streams like jewels upon a silver thread. It is 
impossible for him, [ say, whether at home or on his journeys, to 
forget the debt that he owes to the past and to those who, like 
yourselves, have linked the present and past together, and made 
them a living whole. The cultured home-like aspect of our English 
scenery, which strikes visitors from across the Atlantic as making 
it like a garden in comparison to their own harder-featured soil, is 
due greatly to the spirit of reverence and of sympathetic treatment 
of our old buildings and their associations, which is a fruit of the 
good work done by your society and its kindred brotherhoods. The 
quick kindling interest, the pride, the emulation which makes parish 
vie with parish, rich and poor alike joining, especially in the interior 
B 2 
