THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
15 
Member of the Eevision Committee. Other names that will 
naturally occur to you are those of Alfred Rooker, Dr. Holmes, 
Dr. Weymouth, and Dr. Scrivener, the last two of whom are still 
honourably connected with our Society, and may yet again favour 
us with a visit and a lecture. These and others, well known by 
our older members, have laid this Institution in past years under 
heavy obligations. I wish that some of our young men could be 
carried back a few years, and be present at some of the lectures 
which these men gave us, and the discussions in which, like feudal 
knights of high renown, they afterwards engaged. Then the 
whole range of literature, ancient and modern, was laid under 
contribution, as Greek met Greek in fierce encounter. Sanskrit, 
Greek, and Latin ; German, French, and Frisian ; Icelandic, 
Welsh, and Dutch, were languages that were then, not rarely, but 
very frequently discussed, whether in respect of their grammar, 
literature, or scientific relations. Nor was our own language 
forgotten. Its earliest stages, as, in uncouth form, it began to lift 
its head after the Norman had in vain tried to trample it under 
foot ; how it improved and expanded as the nation improved and 
expanded; all these, together with those infinite details which 
give such a special charm to language in general, and which are so 
often particularly puzzling in our own, were discussed, I think I 
may say, with an accuracy and depth to which it would be im- 
possible to find a parallel in any non-University town in England. 
And upon whom have their mantles fallen 1 or when shall these 
Nodes Atticae be renewed % Let no one plead the want of leisure ; 
the men whose names I have mentioned were, I believe, none of 
them men of leisure — how rarely do we get much work from men of 
leisure ! — and of two or three of them it might perhaps be affirmed 
that they were among the hardest-working men in Plymouth. 
There is a moral element in the study of Letters, which seems 
to me to give them the advantage over other subjects, not so much 
as a means of intellectual culture, as of purifying the feelings, 
widening the sympathies, and of giving a harmonious completeness 
to the whole character, and so to realize the poet's description — 
" A combination and a form indeed, 
Where every god did seem to set his seal, 
To give the world assurance of a man." 
They help one to fill and adorn every position in life, high or low; 
they are an ornament to the rich, and a refuge to the poor; 
