In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this passage worth your pondering.—­He is telling how, while giving the last touches to his Perseus in the great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhabited a shed built around the statue.  He goes on:—­

The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of the door....I believe that, on the day when I opened it for a few hours to the public, more than twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with the highest panegyrics.  Afterwards, when I once more shut it off from view, everyone brought sonnets, with Latin and Greek verses:  for the University of Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and scholars kept vying with each other who could produce the best.

I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of this University thus employing the Long Vacation; as perhaps we shall wait some time for another Perseus to excite them to it.  But I do ask you to consider that the Perseus was not entirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; that the age when men are eager about great work is the age when great work gets itself done; nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were, likely enough, very bad ones—­in Charles Lamb’s phrase, very like what Petrarch might have written if Petrarch had been born a fool.  It is the impetus that I ask of you:  the will to try.

Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one who girds at your preoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold ‘gymnastic’ to be necessary as ‘music’ (using both words in the Greek sense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth from Cambridge.  But I plead that they should be balanced, as they were in the perfect young knight with whose words I will conclude to-day:—­

     Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
     Guided so well that I obtained the prize,
     Both by the judgment of the English eyes
     And of some sent by that sweet enemy France;
     Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
     Town-folk my strength, a daintier judge applies
     His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
     Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
     Others, because of both sides I do take
     My blood from them who did excel in this,
     Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make. 
     How far they shot awry! the true cause is,
     Stella looked on; and from her heavenly face
     Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.

‘Untrue,’ you say?  Well, there is truth of emotion as well as of fact; and who is there among you but would fain be able not only to win such a guerdon but to lay it in such wise at your lady’s feet?

That then was Philip Sidney, called the peerless one of his age; and perhaps no Englishman ever lived more graciously or, having used life, made a better end.  But you have seen this morning’s newspaper:  you have read of Captain Scott and his comrades, and in particular of the death of Captain Oates; and you know that the breed of Sidney is not extinct.  Gentlemen, let us keep our language noble:  for we still have heroes to commemorate![1]