There remains a second question—­How happened it that Cambridge, after admitting Greek, took more than three hundred years to establish a Chair of Latin, and that a Chair of English is, so to speak, a mushroom (call it not toadstool!) of yesterday?  Why simply enough.  Latin continued to be the working language of Science.  In Latin Bacon naturally composed his “Novum Organum” and indeed almost all his scientific and philosophical work, although a central figure of his age among English prose-writers.  In Latin, in the eighteenth century, Newton wrote his “Principia”:  and I suppose that of no two books written by Englishmen before the close of that century, or indeed before Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” can it be less extravagantly said than of the “Novum Organum” and the “Principia” that they shook the world.  Now, without forgetting our Classical Tripos (founded in 1822), as without forgetting the great names of Bentley and Porson, we may observe it as generally true, that whenever and wherever large numbers of scientific men use a particular language as their working instrument, they have a disposition to look askance on its refinements; to be jealous of its literary professors; to accuse these of treating as an end in itself what is properly a means.  Like the Denver editor I quoted to you in a previous lecture, these scientific workers want to ‘get there’ in a hurry, forgetting that (to use another Americanism) the sharper the chisel the more ice it is likely to cut.  You may observe this disposition—­this suspicion of ‘literature,’ this thinly veiled contempt—­in many a scientific man to-day; though because his language has changed from Latin to English, it is English he now chooses to cheapen.  Well, we cannot help it, perhaps.  Perhaps he cannot help it.  It is human nature.  We must go on persuading him, not losing our tempers.

None the less we should not shut our eyes to the fact that while a language is the working instrument of scientific men there will always be a number of them to decry any study of it for its beauty, and even any study of it for the sake of accuracy—­its beauty and its accuracy being indeed scarcely distinguishable.

I fear, Gentlemen, you may go on from this to the dreadful conclusion that the date 1869, when Cambridge at length came to possess a Chair of Latin, marks definitely the hour at which Latin closed its eyes and became a dead language; that you may proceed to a yet more dreadful application of this to the Chair of English founded in 1910:  and that henceforward (to misquote what Mr Max Beerbohm once wickedly said of Walter Pater) you will be apt to regard Professor Housman and me as two widowers engaged, while the undertaker waits, in composing the features of our beloveds.