irst understand the English
Language! Some of you on leaving Cambridge will go out--a company of
Christian folk dispersed throughout the world--to tell English children
of English Literature. Such are the pedagogic fetters you will have to
knock off their young minds before they can stand and walk.

Gentlemen, on a day early in this term I sought the mound which is the
old Castle of Cambridge. Access to it, as perhaps you know, lies through
the precincts of the County Prison. An iron railing encloses the mound,
having a small gate, for the key of which a notice-board advised me to
ring the prison bell. I rang. A very courteous gaoler answered the bell
and opened the gate, which stands just against his wicket. I thanked him,
but could not forbear asking 'Why do they keep this gate closed?' 'I
don't know, sir,' he answered, 'but I suppose if they didn't the children
might get in and play.'

So with his answer I went up the hill and from the top saw Cambridge
spread at my feet; Magdalene below me, and the bridge which--poor product
as it is of the municipal taste--has given its name to so many bridges
all over the world; the river on its long ambit to Chesterton; the tower
of St John's, and beyond it the unpretentious but more beautiful tower of
Jesus College. To my right the magnificent chine of King's College Chapel
made its own horizon above the yellowing elms. I looked down on the
streets--the narrow streets--the very streets which, a fortnight ago, I
tried to people for you with that mediaeval throng which has passed as we
shall pass. Still in my ear the gaoler's answer repeated itself--_'I
suppose, if they didn't keep it locked, the children might get in and
play'_: and a broken echo seemed to take it up, in words that for a while
had no more coherence than the scattered jangle of bells in the town
below. But as I turned to leave, they chimed into an articulate sentence
and the voice was the voice of Francis Bacon--_Regnum Scientiae ut regnum
Coeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur.--Into the Kingdom of
Knowledge, as into the Kingdom of Heaven, whoso would enter must become
as a little child._

[Footnote 1: "Cambridge History of English Literature", vol. iii, p. 213.]

LECTURE XII.

ON STYLE

Wednesday, January 28, 1914

Should Providence, Gentlemen, destine any one of you to write books for
his living, he will find experimentally true what I here promise him,
that few pleasures sooner cloy tha