MEMOIR 
43 
them at the present day are in use among the natives. When the 
British Association comes out next year I hope to be able to show 
the anthropologists a series of stone implements that will astonish 
them.’ 
Another of Spencer’s main interests lay in art, and notably 
in Australian art. It has been already pointed out that he was 
himself no mean artist, having indeed at one time thought 
of devoting his life to that pursuit. Small wonder, then, that 
he was sympathetically disposed towards such young persons 
as he saw around him struggling to achieve success in that 
most precarious of professions. Though not a wealthy man, 
he devoted all the money that he could spare to the support 
of local talent. His shrewd judgement in regard to the 
quality and promise of their work was amply confirmed by 
the subsequent success of many an Australian painter now 
famous; as also by the fact that when, through sheer lack of 
wall-space, Spencer had to pass on some of his purchases to 
others, his prescience reaped its just reward. It would seem, 
indeed, that before he gave them a lead, Australians in 
general had put but little faith in the efforts of their own 
artists; and if to-day a decisive change in public opinion has 
taken place, Spencer deserves full credit for having been 
forward, as Bacon says of himself, to ring a bell to call the 
other wits together’. 
It is hardly necessary here to catalogue the honours that 
came to Spencer—with little seeking, it need hardly be said, 
on his own part. He was greatly pleased when his old 
College, Exeter, in 1906 elected him Honorary Fellow— 
a status likewise conferred on him a decade or so later by 
Lincoln College, his second Oxford home. That he was in 
no way inclined to over-value his own deserts comes out 
clearly in a letter written in 1913 to Henry Balfour, when the 
latter was about to present an armorial window to the Hall 
of Exeter College to commemorate some of the men of 
