The Inaugural Meeting. 3 



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. 



The Bishop, as President of the Wiltshire Archaeological 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 Archaeological 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 Archaeological and Natural History 

 Society. I am 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 Bichard 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, I 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 



