[xii] 



time or inclination to write the address it is 

 difficult to imagine. 



Staggered by the loss of his son, an only- 

 child, who had fallen in action near St. Ju- 

 lien during the Passchendaele battles in Sep- 

 tember the year before, his days occupied 

 with a succession of duties in connection 

 with the war, his household filled as always 

 with friends and visitors innumerable, and 

 every young American or Canadian in serv- 

 ice in England gravitating there, eager 

 above all things to further the progress of 

 the elaborate catalogue of his unique and 

 valuable collection of books, he nevertheless 

 set himself to prepare this, one of his most 

 brilliant and what proved to be his last for- 

 mal address. 



The meeting of the Association was to 

 be held in Oxford, the bed-rock of classical 

 learning — the only place, it seems, where 

 the word ' ' humanism ' ' in its narrow sense 

 still survives in modern university termi- 



