8
Introductory Address
the vague and vaporous æsthetic paganism which was all that Pater could extract from the spiritual sustenance offered him by Oxford! Professor Murray, as we know, occupies one of the greatest positions in English scholarship; but while he is eminently a scholar among scholars, he is pre-eminently a man among men. His imagination and insight, working upon a solid basis of knowledge, give him an extraordinary power—as no doubt he will show you to-night—of revivifying Greek thought and experience, and making it human and real to us. Ancient Greece is not, to him, a picturesque phenomenon to be contemplated under a glass case, but an absorbing chapter in the story of humanity, full of vital meanings for the present and for the
