hoped that he would live long enough to see the classic stream flow into its new channel.
In the early days of this year (1853) he opened with due ceremony the buildings erected for the College at Benares. His speech[1] on that occasion was one of the latest, if not the very last, of his public utterances. Some passages in it may be quoted as, perhaps, his parting words. Casting his thoughts back to the Cambridge of his youthful recollections, with all her beautiful structures, he says: —
'We feel the necessity of affording, to the ordinary course of daily tuition, every assistance which can be derived to it from extraneous circumstances. Amongst these is the natural effect, upon the mind, of architectural beauty. Those who recollect the influence exercised on the minds of persons in our own country by the buildings in which our Colleges and Schools are placed, will not be disposed to underrate this effect.'
Next, after recounting how to the teaching of Hindu philosophy in Sanskrit had been added 'the correct conclusions of European philosophy,' he proceeds thus: —
'We have not swept over the country like a torrent, destroying all that is found, and leaving nothing but what itself deposited. Our course has rather been that of a gently swelling inundation, which leaves the former surface undisturbed, and spreads over it a richer mould from which the vegetation may derive a new verdure, and the landscape possess a
- ↑ A printed copy of it is extant in the Library of the India Office in London.
