Sir Samuel Hoare, I think, is as a rule hardly
rated at his full value. As a matter of fact, except for one unhappy episode, for which he paid an immediate penalty, he has been a marked success in every major post he has held, at the India Office, the Foreign Office, and not least, today, at the Home Office. But to me at least the address he gave as Chancellor of Reading University on Tuesday was an unexpected revelation—unex- pected in degree—of his mental range and culture. Taking Montaigne as his chief theme, he quoted with aptness and relevance (so many quotations are obviously dragged in by their tails) from Emile Faguet, William James, Disraeli, Blake, President Masaryk, Walter Pater, to say nothing of Lord Haldane, Lord Baldwin and Lord Balfour, and he added one striking and comprehensive reference to Aeschylus and his pride in bodily prowess, and to " Benvenuto Ceilini shooting pigeons in the Campagna of Rome, Lenin ducks in the Moscow marshes, Mozart practising billiards for hours on end." Having thereby raised sensibly the public estimate of the average of Cabinet culture Sir Samuel went to bed with a cold.
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