surmount. But they will be encouraged by the thought that they are rendering their country a great service—that they are helping to maintain the continuity of its best traditions, and to ensure that a people whose self-respect has its root in centuries of ordered freedom shall be knitted together by ties even stronger and nobler than those which united their fathers.
In conclusion, allow me to thank you for the kind patience with which you have listened to these remarks. I earnestly hope, and fully believe, that this great Society, which has already accomplished so much, will go on prospering more and more. In the field at which we have been looking to-day, it is doing a great work by enlarging the basis of those studies which are of primary importance for all literature and history. This is really to work in the Athenian spirit; and it will bring fresh honour to London—in words which a living poet applies to Athens,—
"While this city's name on earth shall be for earth her mightiest name."
